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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.

Commenting System

I’ve integrated the commenting system directly with GitHub Discussions using Giscus. This means your comments and likes/dislikes are handled by GitHub, ensuring a secure and familiar environment for engagement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the posts, so feel free to join the discussion!

Blog#

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.

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.