Josh VanDeraa

Just recently released at the beginning of 2024 is a project that I am super excited to see in the open source by Network to Code. This is the Nautobot App cookiecutter template. This may already be the biggest thing to become available for Network Automation in 2024. I know, its fresh at this point in the year, but this is something that is going to make getting started with your own Nautobot Application so much quicker.

The year of 2023 I think may have had some of the biggest leaps in the Network Automation capabilities that are being delivered by some of the best in the business. With Nautobot’s Golden Config App adding the ability to complete configuration remediation and Ansible release Event Driven Ansible, there are a couple of powerful tools to help you with your Network Automation. And all with a great new conference addition specific to Network Automation.

Recently Slack started introducing a new UI that is bringing back the importance of knowing keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts within Slack are immensely helpful in my day to day, and it is essential for me being able to keep up with what is going on within my organization and some of the other 20 Slack organizations that I have joined. So much so, I don’t believe that once I am in the Slack UI on my machines, I am ever touching the mouse to get from one place to another.

In my home environment I am leveraging Nautobot as my source of truth. This is for the network, which is probably not all that interesting in my home environment, and my virtual machines. Why am I tracking my virtual machines in Nautobot? Simple, to help automate them. I think that this is a clever methodology to help use tags and to get automation working within the environment. This same type of thing may be applicable to your network environment as well.

One of my hot topics in my past that I haven’t seen written about often is the calculation of WAN availability and what the design is built for. There is often the number of 9’s whether that is 5 9s or 3 9s or otherwise, where do you start? Well, in the past the post by EventHelix.com outlines system reliability. It talks about designing systems in parallel and in serial. What does that mean.

As part of my journey of using my Debian based Dev Workstation, as well as my studies towards completion of the DevNet Expert, I wanted to get up and running with the DevNet Workstation example that would help to become familiar with the environment that would be found at the live exam. There were a few small quirks along the way, so I thought I would go ahead and create a post about how to get started.

As a long time MacBook user and of recent years on the M1 using the TouchID system that allows for fingerprint authentication, this is something that I wanted to get to work pretty quickly for myself. I had tried a couple of different options to get fingerprint reading to work. Through the 3 methods, I finally have one that works, and I figured it would be worth the share. Attempted Routes #Now some of these may seem foolish as I write after the fact.

Within Nautobot there are many ways to be able to get the Nautobot environment running. Environment variables are used quite a bit in the Docker environment following best practice principles set forth in the 12 Factor App. The use of environment variables is helpful for working through the various stages of an application to production. The installation instructions leverage a single environment variable NAUTOBOT_ROOT and that is set in the SystemD files shown below:

One observation lately is that Python is moving along quickly with new versions and new EOLs. Along with needing to make these updates, the applications that Python uses will also need to be moving along. Nautobot is my favorite, and in my opinion the best SOT platform available in the open source ecosystem today. So let’s dive into the updating of the Python version. For this post, I’ve created a new Rocky 8 Virtual Machine to be the host.

I’m going to diverge a small bit from the straight network automation space that I have blogged about primarily and dive a small bit into the world of using Google Earth to help prepare for your golf game. Upcoming, I’m playing in a Minnesota Golf event at two courses in late August. I’m going to put together a green book for myself and figure this would be a great topic to touch on how I’m going about this activity.