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2020#

NetBox Ansible Collection: Manufacturers

Adding your manufacturers via code is the easy way to get started with your NetBox devices. Immediately after adding Sites, the next thing to get going when using NetBox as your Source of Truth is to add in Manufacturers. These are just that, who makes the gear that you use. For this demonstration you will see adding just a few manufacturers. I'm not necessarily picking on any vendors and who should or shouldn't be here. It is just what my background brings.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Platforms

Platforms are an optional item when adding devices into NetBox. The platform is the OS that you are going to be using. Most often this is used to help identify which driver your automation platform is going to be using. Specifically the slug of the platform is what needs to match. So in the terms of Ansible (since we are using Ansible to populate NetBox), you will want to set Cisco IOS devices to ios. By having the slug match the automation platform name you have that information in your inventory. For these reasons I strongly recommend setting the Platform for devices.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Site Module

This post dives into the NetBox Ansible Content Collection module to create/update a Site. As I start into this series on looking at the modules that create/update/delete data from NetBox, the question that I keep asking myself is should I be looking at the modules that are creating/updating/deleting items? The reason that I ask this to myself is because I am a firm believer that automation should be coming from NetBox as its Source of Truth (SoT). You can hear/read plenty more about these thoughts on posts and videos here:

Note

This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further. You may want to take a look at it yourself.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Lookup Plugin

The NetBox lookup plugin is to get information out of NetBox for use within Ansible. This uses pynetbox to query the NetBox API for the information requested. On top of being helpful in gathering data from NetBox (when it is not your inventory source), but it is extremely helpful in larger NetBox deployments when compared to using the URI module as well. If you wish to use NetBox as your inventory source, you should definitely read my previous post on getting started with the NetBox Inventory Plugin.

  • 3 min read

Jekyll - Adding a URL Redirection

Recently I had some discussions with Nick Russo on some URL redirection changes he was making for his content. I'm not going to take any of his thunder of what he is doing, and that is quite awesome. I decided that I wanted to take a look at that as well within my domain/blog using the Jekyll approach. This is going to be my short post regarding the steps I took to add the URL redirection setup to my personal blog page - josh-v.com.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Installation

This is the first post as I start to look at the NetBox Ansible Collection. This is an impressive collection with modules for several of the NetBox applications, a query plugin, and an inventory plugin. This will take a deeper dive into several of the components of the inventory plugin, but not all of the options. The documentation for all of the collection can be found at:

Ansible + NetBox: Getting Next Prefix / IP

This originates from a conversation had on Twitter about how to get the IP Prefix information from an IPAM tool, specifically NetBox using Ansible. There are a couple of methodologies to go through, and I had originally started down the path of using the URI module. Which could be done. The more elegant solution is to use the NetBox Ansible Collections to handle the logic for you! Let’s take a look.

Thank you to @ttl255 for the inspiration to the journey with the Collection!

Note

This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further. You may want to take a look at it yourself.

  • 5 min read

2020 Blog Update

I've changed a few things on the site. Sorry about that! URLs have changed. Over the past week or so I have been working through making some what originally were small updates to the blog, that turned into a little too much effort. I was hoping to add a little bit of polish to the site while keeping the content in place. Earlier in 2020, maybe even back in 2019 I had become aware of Hashnode from the posts of David Flores - aka NetPanda who is on the Hashnode side at https://davidban77.hashnode.dev/. I liked many things that the blogging site has to offer. From a very quick up and running, to having a strong start of a community.

  • 3 min read

Practicing Network Automation with GNS3

In an earlier post I took a look at how to setup EVE-NG to get access to virtualized network devices and topologies. This post is going to take a look at how to setup GNS3 systems to allow access.

In the overall topology that is a "home" network sits a device that supports a routing protocol, usually either OSPF or BGP. What is known to work at an inexpensive price point is the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.

  • 4 min read

Ansible for Enterprise

One of the appealing features that I have towards working with Ansible is that it is able to automate components across the entire Enterprise IT stacks. Rather than having to stitch together your network, server, and desktop automation tools, there is at least one automation tool that will work with just about your entire IT stack. In this I will take a high level overview of some of the features that are there for you to explore.

  • 8 min read

Docker for Automation Environment - Ansible 2.10

Docker is a terrific solution for making a consistent working environment. It's been about a year or so since I built my very first own Docker container. I had always known why you use a container, but was always intimidated too much so to even get started. I am glad that I did get started and am off on my journey of using Docker containers. Let me jump into the problem and why? Couple the recent experiences with Docker, and the upcoming move to slim down Ansible and install Collections for most Network Automation modules, I thought it would be a good thing to get a write up done.

  • 4 min read

Using Apple Automator to Open Projects

Today I'm going to walk through the newest part of my personal workflow for working with projects. Straight to the point, this is going to be using Apple Automator to quickly open your project that you wish to work on within VS Code, and presumably PyCharm as well.

  • 8 min read

Ansible Cisco IOS User Module

In this post I will be taking a look at some of the usability setup of managing Cisco IOS devices with the Ansible Cisco IOS User Module. This can be very helpful for setting up managed user accounts on systems, or the backup user accounts when you have TACACS or RADIUS setup.

The module documentation overall looks complete from what I have done for user account management on devices in the past. There are a couple of interesting parameters available, that I may not get to completely on this post. There is support for aggregate, meaning that you can generate the configuration for multiple user accounts and pass it in as one. You can set a password in clear text that gets encrypted when on the device, or you can set a hashed_password with the type of hash and its corresponding value. And as expected with a module for setting user accounts you can also set the privilege level for which the user account uses.

  • 8 min read

Ansible Cisco ios_interfaces module

This has become a post about the ios_interfaces module with documentation that can be found Ansible ios_interfaces doc. Originally I was going to write about the deprecations for just the Cisco IOS modules. Then as I investigated further, I had found that there are many more modules that are being deprecated. In this post I will take a closer look at the differences between the ios_interface and ios_vlan modules that I had written posts on last year and what their new counter parts look like. And in the end the post had quite a bit of good detail about the module. I think you will like what is here.