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Thank you for visiting my blog. My goal out of this blog is provide helpfulness around networking, network automation, and perhaps a few personal view points. The majority of the posts are going to be related to tech, and usually networking and network automation.

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Blog#

Containerlab - Popularity Exploding

Coming out of the 2024 AutoCon2 conference held in Denver the week of November 18th, 2024 - there is one thing that is standing out more so than anything else. Containerlab is a HUGE blowout success. In observing through several of the workshops at the conference on Monday and Tuesday, many were using Containerlab in some fashion. Now, Containerlab has been around for a while, so this isn't a press release of it. But it is re-affirming what many already know, that this is a great tool to be in the network engineer and network automator toolset.

  • in linux
  • 3 min read

Linux Port Binding

This post is will provide a brief overview of how port binding works in Linux. This topic that will be required for the small series of using Continue.Dev in your local environment, but before addressing the setup of a machine for remote access in a future post, I thought it would be important to quickly create a post regarding the concept of port binding.

  • in linux, ai
  • 8 min read

Code Completion in VS Code with Ollama

The year 2024 will showcase the remarkable evolution and contributions of AI. One prominent application of AI lies in its ability to streamline the coding process. In this post I demonstrate how to utilize the Continue VS Code plugin as a viable alternative to the GitHub Copilot system. This will allow you to have choice on the AI back end or in this scenario, the capability to self host the AI system using Ollama.

Redux: Wireless Conversion

This may be my favorite post within the realm of what is possible as I write this series. There are many more things that could be done, but we did pretty well considering. Going back over a decade now, I had the fortunate opportunity to work to deploy Guest WiFi for a large number of retail sites, with the heavy lifting of the work being done within a five month period of time. This post is about the conversion of access points from one management system to another.

Nautobot: Atomic Jobs

In the first release of Nautobot all of the Jobs were Atomic by default. This was from the previous focus of the legacy source application that assumed that scripts/reports would only be run on the data locally, so by that nature, the jobs should be atomic. As more and more Jobs started to interact with other systems, it became apparent that there needed to be a control mechanism provided (as I understand). So the introduction of a context manager and decorator was brought to the table to provide the same previous functionality while changing of the default behavior in Nautobot 2.x+.

Redux: Stadium Automation

At a previous position to joining Network to Code I was asked to help to build automation to help with the configuration of switches going into a MLS stadium. The stadium was under construction and the network build out would take place at the same time as the stadium was being built out. It was definitely a first and maybe only opportunity that I would have to build out a new stadium.

Scenario

The task at hand is that each of the ports would need to be configured leveraging a good L2/L3 separation with each of the service providers that provide a service to the stadium their own network segment to work through. A large number of ports were going to need to be configured.

Nornir Transform Function

Nornir includes a function that allows for the transformation of inventory data, a feature integrated within the Nornir platform itself. The documentation for Nornir 3.0 is somewhat sparse regarding the usage of Transform functions, so I often refer to the more comprehensive 2.5 documentation. According to the Nornir documentation:

A transform function is a plugin that manipulates the inventory independently from the inventory plugin used. Useful to extend data using the environment, a secret store or similar.

Redux: WAN Design

In this post, we'll dive into WAN design and address a common question that I was provided with in the 2000s: "My home internet costs only $35 per month. Why do we spend $xxx per month per circuit?"

Bindkey For Autocompletion

I have been looking at migrating over to the Starship shell for a little while. The allure of running a rust shell prompt that gives me a ton of information is what I look for in a shell prompt. Such as the prompt below:

joshv in 🌐 my_device in nautobot on  u/jvanderaa-update_install_home_doc is 📦 v2.2.5b1 via 🐍 v3.11.9 (nautobot-py3.11)

The default installation however did not get the same behavior as my previous Oh My Zsh set up with the zsh-autocompletions and zsh-syntaxhighlighting. Whenever I would hit the up arrow key, the system would cycle through the commands as comes default with zsh/bash. But I was looking for subcommand scrolling. Such as the following command sequence.

  • in blog
  • 4 min read

Migration to MkDocs Material Blog Theme!

So, if you are a returning user you notice something that is a little bit different. I have migrated my blog site to a new site generator and format. I am now using [mkdocs-material] blog them that was introduced in late 2022 to the platform. The migration was not too painful to make, but I'm feeling in a good place about it at this point. The blog has been on a journey so far. It started off with a Jekyll themed site which I liked. Then I decided to move onto something that has a little more development. So I moved into the land of Hugo.

Automation Redux: Firewall Tables

Today I'm going to dive into my getting started with network automation, and perhaps my first successful automation. There are definitely some things that I would re-do and complete differently, and some things that I consider a success.

I'm working on a new series within my blog, about how I would look to have done things differently than I had done before, with the tooling and knowledge that I now have, years later. This is the first in the series.

One of my favorite features of Nautobot that may not be well known is the capability to put a button on pages that take you to other locations. This can be helpful when lining up the source of truth as that first place that you go, the idea of adding custom links will just help to enforce that as the first place to go. When you look at the idea of a source of truth to help feed other systems, you start to see the topology like below.

Nautobot Source of Truth for Other Systems

Nautobot App Baking Cookies

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.

2023 Automation Review: Top 3

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.

Slack Power Keyboard

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. About the only time I may need to use the mouse is to scroll back in the thread, so I'm not even clicking when using the mouse.

Nautobot: How I Use Tags For VMs

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.

Designing WAN Availability

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. Well, I am going to take the system availability and bring it into the Wide Area Network, which really could be brought to any environment that has a system uptime requirement as a way to calculate and validate the dollars that you are requesting. I am hoping that this will help you to be able to answer questions such as "What if we added another service provider?" or "What if we changed out hardware for a smaller/larger hardware choice?".

DevNet Expert Workstation On Debian

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.

Debian Finger Print Login

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.

Nautobot Environment File

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.