Josh VanDeraa

AI: Local Models Memory

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I thought running multiple AI agents locally meant loading the model into memory once per agent. Turns out model weights are shared - only the KV-cache scales per request. Here’s what I learned and how consolidating to a single model improved everything.

AI: The Quick RSS Feed Fix

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My RSS feeds broke during the Hugo migration. Instead of re-learning the details myself, I handed it to Harry. Here’s how it got fixed.

AI: The Service Department Translator

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the dealership service rep couldn’t explain what was wrong with our vehicle, I sent the repair notes to my AI assistant. What came back was more useful than anything the service center told me.

AI: Initializing

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I went from calling AI a 50/50 bet to burning through API credits in days. Here’s what changed, from the Ralph Loop to OpenClaw to AI agent skills, and why I think we’re at a pivotal point.

AI: My Welcome

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are diving into just one of the time savings samples of what the AI world is able to accomplish these days. This post is going to dig into a simple one that I have been trying to solve for a while and just couldn’t get right - Cloud Init virtual machines. I now am spinning up virtual machines in a few seconds, all with the help of Claude.

Creating Your Own Validation

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently was presented with a request to look at where there was a request to validate that a Rack would be unique at a Location in Nautobot. I took a look at the data validation engine and wasn’t able to determine a method to make this work there. So here is the solution.

Cleaning Up Python Environment

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I updated my Python development environments to use Python UV for managing Python versions and tools on the system. In this post I take you on the journey that I went on to replace pyenv and Pipx.

2025 The ReSwitch

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m back over to Hugo for my blog content using the Congo theme. Why? Come take a look.

Services First - A Reminder of Strong Growth

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post explores why the “Amazon API Mandate” remains relevant for modern network automation. It highlights how adopting a “Services First” strategy (using APIs and Pub/Sub systems like Nautobot) can transform CLI-based workflows into scalable, robust services.

Using Siri Shortcuts to Set Microphone

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Managing audio settings on Mac devices can be repetitive, especially when switching between different microphones for calls, recordings, or meetings. Siri Shortcuts provides a powerful way to automate this process.

Autocon4 Viewpoint

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AutoCon4 and NautoCon@AutoCon are in the books. It was quite the day, and I have to say that it ranks among my best days of the year in Network Automation, right up there with being able to meet up with the Network to Code team earlier in the year. It was great to see many friends from across the community. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the conversation going in Slack and maintain the momentum.

Network Design with NTP

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post, life and work have both been full. Today, I’m diving into one of the most quietly critical aspects of network design: time synchronization. Specifically, how to design NTP within an enterprise network and how to think about time zones when correlating logs.

We’ll look at two main topics in this post: designing NTP (Network Time Protocol) and managing time zone display in logs.

Fueling Network AI: The Critical Role of Source of Truth Data

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As the AI movement continues to expand its reach into the networking space, the need for an appropriate source of truth for network data becomes more critical than ever. What I have been seeing so far in the industry for networking and AI has been a lot of working on the individual devices one by one. But when looking at leveraging AI for the network, I believe it is best to look at the network as a whole. And that is where the Source of Truth data being stored in Nautobot is going to provide the right information about the network and the relationships between pieces of information - AI thrives on context, and relationships provide that context for more accurate insights and actions.

Containerlab - Popularity Exploding

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Linux Port Binding

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Showing Listening Ports #

In Linux you can view all ports that are being listened on by using the netstat or ss commands. This is useful for identifying active ports and their associated services. My preference in 2024 is to use the ss command, which, according to Linux.com, is a more modern version of the netstat.

Code Completion in VS Code with Ollama

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Modern Network Observability

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Modern Network Observability #

I’m proud to be one of the three authors to put together the book on Modern Network Observability. It’s been a great joy to write and contribute to the Networking community with this book on setting up a modern network observability platform using open source tools. The book aims to help you:

Define a composable network observability stack with numerous practical implementations
Utilize the network observability stack to address real network operation challenges
Learn about obtaining various data types programmatically and how to utilize them to enhance a network automation strategy

In the book we dive into an observability pipeline that starts with the metrics collection, how to enhance and transform the data using a source of truth, storing the data for long term retrieval, visualizing the data, and how to leverage the data driving business success.

Redux: Wireless Conversion

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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+.

Nautobot Book

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nautobot Book #

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I’m proud to have been an author in the Network Automation with Nautobot found on Amazon book that has recently been released. The book covers:

Learn how documenting your network in Nautobot can accelerate your network automation journey
Apply NetDevOps to your network by leveraging Nautobot as a network source of truth
Minimize tool sprawl by extending, using, or building Nautobot Apps

Nautobot enables network teams to build a scalable and extensible network source of truth that provides a foundation to power any network automation stack.

Redux: Stadium Automation

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Migration to MkDocs Material Blog Theme!

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Nautobot: Custom Links

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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 App Baking Cookies

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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. But I had some reason to think that there would be success. The three options that I tried (only the last/third one worked):

Nautobot Environment File

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Upgrade Nautobot Python Version in Virtual Machine

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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. See the note below for the reasoning. This will start off with a Nautobot install from the Nautobot docs. I won’t dive into all of that, assume that is the starting point with a fresh Nautobot application.

Using Google Earth for Golf

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Workstation Troubleshooting 2023

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post I wrote about a workstation that I was working on building. It took an incredibly long time to get up and into a stable environment. But I have finally accomplished stability (hoping to not jinx it here with the post). I went through a fair bit of troubleshooting to get to this point.

Symptom #

The symptom that was having instability was that the system would freeze randomly. There was not a particular application or otherwise that would be point me to an application that was causing the failures. The system would just freeze overnight or at the start of getting into the desktop UI.

Desktop Build 2023

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Here I’m going to dive into what I’m planning to build out for my next desktop here in 2023. Prime Day is nearly upon us, and I’m anticipating (but do not know for sure) that prices on some of the gear that I’m looking for will be available at a good price. I’m also looking to build out a bigger system in order to run some intense VMs up coming.

Nautobot: Get IP Addresses From Nautobot

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of Nautobot’s primary functions is to serve as an IPAM solution. Within that realm, the application needs to provide a method to get at IP address data for a device, quickly and easily. In this post I will review three prominent methods to get an IP address from Nautobot. It will demonstrate getting the address via:

Nautobot REST API
- curl
- Python Requests
- GoLang HTTP
- pynautobot
- Ansible Lookup
Nautobot GraphQL API
- curl
- Python Requests
- GoLang HTTP
- pynautobot
- Ansible Lookup

Each method I will demonstrate how to get the IP address for Loopback0 on the device bre01-edge-01 within the demo instance of Nautobot. This device has 62 interfaces, so being able to filter down to which interface IP address we are looking for makes sense.

Nautobot Remote Validation

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to dive into a bit more on the Nautobot custom validators. This is a powerful validation tool that will allow for you to write your own validation capability, including in this demonstration on how to complete a validation against a remote API endpoint. The custom validators are a part of the Nautobot App extension capability. This allows for custom code to be written to validate data upon the clean() method being called, which is used in the majority of API calls and form inputs of Nautobot.

Slack Canvas

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hot Take:

Newly released (at some point anyway) is Slack Canvas, what looks to be a little bit of on demand wiki, collaboration space, and possibly (based on marketing materials) workflow organizer. This came to light as a “pop up” when I went into a Slack window on my mobile. Being a curious person and someone that is willing to try out new things I jumped right in.

Poetry Fix

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Python Poetry is our go to package management system thus far, you can see that in all of the Python projects that Network to Code open sources, such as Nautobot, pyntc, network-importer, and NTC-Templates. Lately though, I’ve been having some challenges when my HomeBrew updates happen and my system Python gets updated. I’ve been able to recover with the help of the same few pages I land on from my Google searches. But since I’ve done this twice now, I’m using this post to document the fix as much as for myself, but for anyone else that may come across Poetry issues.

Nautobot Secrets - Hashicorp Vault

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With Nautobot, one of the things that came up was how to work with secrets. Nautobot itself is not the place to maintain secrets, as it is not a vault. There may be some good cryptographic libraries out to handle this, but by its nature, that is not the intent. So Nautobot has written methods to be able to retrieve secrets from proper vault sources and be able to leverage them. These can be tricky to get set up however. I had struggled for a while myself. So now that I have it working, I thought it would be a good time to have a quick personal blog about it.

Nautobot Jobs in Jobs Root

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was working to demonstrate how to get started with Nautobot Jobs within the Jobs root of Nautobot. This is not a pattern that I develop often, as I am typically developing Jobs within a plugin as my development standard. More to come on that later. During this case, the ask was to build a Job that would connect to a network device. I had a few troubles that I didn’t want to have to work through on a call that had limited time and that was a screen share. So I am taking to working on this via a blog post to share, and hopefully will be helpful for others as well.

Moving to Hugo

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I dive into more about my migration of the blog site to Hugo static content system. I will dive into primarily the why and how during this post. This also dives into the few changes that I had to make in order to make the change over from a Jekyll site to the Hugo site.

Why Migrate? #

While I do not have a ton of posts, I do have a few that I like to get out into the wild periodically. As I looked around the landscape of the blog pages these days, I was starting to see my page a bit dated. I had previously went with the Jekyll Minimal Mistakes theme. The theme itself was wonderful and quite extensible. However, one of my concerns besides the look was the lack of updates coming out on the theme. Not that I was going to be taking advantage of every new feature, there seems to have been a slow down.

About

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a veteran Network Engineer who has finally caught on how to put together CS teachings with a Networking degree. Working on doing almost all things via automation.

Self re-taught network/automation engineer. I’ve primarily been digging around within Ansible and Python. I’ve been doing Python networking since 2015 when a speaker came in and talked about how he had put together a NOC for a conference heavily leveraging automation capabilities via Python. Since then I have been going deep down the rabbit hole that is Network Automation.

Books

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Books #

For several years I have been providing content in blog posts. This has evolved into writing books as well.

Open Source Network Management #

I have created a book that is all about getting started with open source tools. Open Source Network Management, a book about getting started with using open source tools to manage your network environment. This book guides one along the way of installing, initial configuration, and basic ways to use the tools. All these are done with installing on a single virtual machine or on an Intel NUC system.

Links

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My Content on Other Sites #

Using NetBox as a SoT for Ansible + Diving into Ansible Filters
In the video I go over NetBox as your Source of Truth, and walk one through getting started with using Ansible as that Source of Truth. In the later portion I go through using Ansible Filters to audit NetBox data to the device data.

Nautobot IP Provisioning

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

One of the great things about building an enterprise system, is being able to get systems to work cohesively amongst themselves to bring a complete solution. One of the workflows that is often required in a static IP address environment is the need to provide static IP addresses to hosts on a network segment. When using an IPAM (IP Address Management) solution such as Nautobot, the APIs and SDKs/modules made available for use in automation workflows is paramount to having the cohesion to make a seamless IT system.

GraphQL - Aliasing

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 07:00:00 +0000

One of the features that I find myself using periodically that I think is underrated as far as using GraphQL is its ability to alias return keys in the response. This can be extremely helpful for developers writing applications, as it allows them to have the API response with the keys they are looking for. I have found this feature particularly useful when working on applications like Meraki and Nautobot together. In Nautobot a place is typically defined as the key site. In the Meraki world this is commonly set up as a network. Without GraphQL’s alias feature, the developer would need to translate this data over.

Python Pseudo Code

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite things to do as I get started with writing a piece of automation or code, is to lay out the design with pseudo code in the form of comments. I will do this with both Python and Ansible automations, and is a great way to get started on writing your automation or code. What pseudo code does for you is to layout the process at which you wish to accomplish a particular goal. And from there, you write the code that corresponds to the plain English wording of what is being done. By starting with pseudo code, you are starting with the process first. Then working on getting to the details of the code as you go.

Automation Inventory

Sat, 07 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

This is a topic that I’m fairly opinionated on as of late is looking at what should be maintained within an inventory and the strategy of how to set up the inventory.

For the case of this blog post, I am going to use the term playbook to represent the automation being run. This is yes an Ansible term, but also apply this as your automation run that is using Nornir or any other automation framework.

DevNet Expert - Starting Point

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This week Cisco announced the DevNet Expert certification exam. This exam and certification is something that I have been looking forward to for a long while. Dating back to the announcement of the certifications that were being provided. This was announced at Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego. I had started to lose some hope that this would become a reality with how long of a delay from the initial announcement to the announcement of availability. But it is now here. So here we go.

Nautobot Jobs - Your Custom API Endpoint

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

One of the best features of Nautobot as a Network Automation Platform is the ability to create your own custom code. This is executed via a job. What makes Nautobot unique is its ability to integrate with a Git repository to get those jobs and code for use into Nautobot. This provides perhaps the simplest, authenticated, and logged methodology for building your own API endpoints.

Nautobot supplies an API endpoint to start execution of jobs. The big deal about why you would want to do this inside of Nautobot (even if you do not have any other data inside of Nautobot, but you should add data, it is a perk) is that you get an authentication mechanism with the Nautobot token setup and a logging mechanism. With Nautobot user accounts you can create tokens that will handle the API authentication. This is helpful that you do not need to add that into your own Flask, FastAPI, or Django application yourself. This is the same for the logging mechanism. Every job execution provides a log of the execution and the result.

New Book - Open Source Network Management

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month I was able to hit the publish button on a new book - Open Source Network Management. The book dives into getting started with several open source network management tools. It is meant as a guide to help further your experience with using and installing open source tools, all on a single VM/host. The size of the host is meant to have minimal capital investment, in the way of a single NUC or a minimal VM deployed on a hypervisor in your environment.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Devices

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

All of the work through the modules thus far in the series have brought us to what we all want to see. How to get or update device information inside of Nautobot. Adding of sites, device types, device roles are required to get us to this point. Now you can see how to add a device to Nautobot using the networktocode.nautobot.device module.

There are many optional parameters for the module specifically. I encourage you to take a look at the module documentation (linked below) in order to get a good sense of all of the options available. The required parameters for a device that is present are:

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Device Types

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

A device type is the next piece in the Nautobot Device onboarding requirements. The device type corresponds to the model number of the hardware (or virtual machine). This is where you are able to template out devices during their creation. So if you have a console port on a device type, that console port will be created when you create the device. However, there is NOT a relationship built between the device type and the device. If the device type gets updated after the device is created, the device itself is not updated.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Device Roles

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

A device role is aptly named, the role of the device. This is likely to be something that is meaningful to your organization and could change. For example you may have the 3 tier system of Core, Distribution, and Access layer environments. These are just fine. So you would want to have the roles there to reflect this reality. You may have leaf-spine environments, there are two more roles. And in my past I have also had roles that would indicate that there are dedicated DMZ, WAN edge, Internet edge devices. So this is the place to set this.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Platforms

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Platforms are an optional item when adding devices into Nautobot. 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 Nautobot), 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.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Manufacturers

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Adding your manufacturers via code is the easy way to get started with your Nautobot devices. Immediately after adding Sites, the next thing to get going when using Nautobot 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.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Site Module

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

This post dives into the Nautobot Ansible Content Collection sites module to create/update a Site. This series for the beginning will be a clone of what I had done previously with NetBox. So some of the language will be very similar.

When it comes to creating and deleting sites in Nautobot, the question of should I be using Ansible to do this? In my opinion this is a yes it should be. Most likely an IT tool is not the tool that will be the Source of Truth as it comes to physical sites involved in an organization. So this module in particular that should be looked at and put into production use with Ansible.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Installation

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This is the first post as I shift into taking a closer look at the Nautobot Ansible Collection. The collection includes many of the needed modules to effectively manage your Nautobot environment. If 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:

ReadTheDocs: https://nautobot-ansible.readthedocs.io
Galaxy Page: https://galaxy.ansible.com/networktocode/nautobot

This post is going to give information on how to install the collection as it may be applicable to every post in the series (as they get posted).

NetBox Ansible Collection: Devices

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 08:00:00 +0000

All of the work through the modules thus far in the series have brought us to what we all want to see. How to get or update device information inside of NetBox. Adding of sites, device types, device roles are required to get us to this point. Now you can see how to add a device to NetBox using the netbox.netbox.netbox_device module.

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.

There are many optional parameters for the module specifically. I encourage you to take a look at the module documentaation (linked below) in order to get a good sense of all of the options available. The required parameters for a device that is present are:

NetBox Ansible Collection: Device Roles

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 06:00:00 +0000

NetBox Ansible Collection: Device Types

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 06:00:00 +0000

A device type is the next piece in the NetBox Device onboarding requirements. The device type corresponds to the model number of the hardware (or virtual machine). This is where you are able to template out devices during their creation. So if you have a console port on a device type, that console port will be created when you create the device. However, there is NOT a relationship built between the device type and the device. If the device type gets updated after the device is created, the device itself is not updated.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Manufacturers

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 06:00:00 +0000

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

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 06:00:00 +0000

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

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 06:00:00 +0000

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:

NetBox Ansible Collection: Lookup Plugin

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 08:00:00 +0000

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.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Inventory - Starting Out

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 08:00:00 +0000

The documentation can be found on ReadTheDocs. This is going to be starting out with the basics of the plugin and getting some sample output and to show how to form groups to be used.

This particular plugin DOES NOT require pynetbox to be used.

Jekyll - Adding a URL Redirection

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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:

ReadTheDocs: https://netbox-ansible-collection.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Galaxy Page: https://galaxy.ansible.com/netbox/netbox

This post is going to give information on how to install the collection as it may be applicable to every post in the series (as they get posted).

Ansible + NetBox: Getting Next Prefix / IP

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Home Assistant Prometheus Exporting Setup

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

There does not appear to be a complete set of documentation pieces available for setting up Prometheus on the Home Assistant platform. This post will take you along on my journey of setting up the Home Assistant to get metrics from it. The link for the documentation is a good start at getting Prometheus installed. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/prometheus/

Starting Prometheus #

Edit your configuration.yaml file
Add in a key of prometheus:
Add in any parameters you may need, but just they key alone is enough to start the exporter

Once you have started the exporter, I was still getting a 404 not found. So I did restart the Home Assistant.

2020 Blog Update

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Practicing Network Automation with GNS3

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Ansible for Enterprise

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Docker for Automation Environment - Ansible 2.10

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Using Apple Automator to Open Projects

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Problem #

So what is the problem that I’m trying to solve? I am one that generally likes the workspace concept within VS Code, but I don’t like having to maintain workspace files. I have found them a little difficult to maintain and keep organized. To that end I have found that there is an option to install VS Code shortcut into your OS path from the command pallet (cmd-P), and path.

Ansible Cisco IOS User Module

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Ansible Cisco ios_interfaces module

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Disney Plus Streaming Bandwidth

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 07:00:00 +0000

This will be a brief departure from the automation focused attention that I have been giving to this blog over the past year or so. This week in the United States was the launch of Disney+ streaming service. I have subscribed to it at this point and have found some interesting data based on SNMP polling my network.

This post is about the bandwidth that I am seeing used, not about anything about the service, or if another service is better. I don’t have the time for that at this time. This is just about what was an unexpected jump in the bandwidth usage with the new application. But I am very much OK with that as my subscription level is taking care of that.

Ansible differences between ios command and cli command

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 07:00:00 +0000

In an earlier post I covered the differences between ios_config and cli_config. However I did not cover what the difference was between ios_command and cli_command. Most of the items covered there remain the same. So this will be a post that mostly gets straight to it and sees what the difference is.

A reminder that I am also putting playbooks used here out on Github. You can find this at: https://github.com/jvanderaa/ansible-using_ios

Differences #

First, for the cli_commands module, you must be using a connection method of network_cli. You should not use connection: local for this module. Note that the cli_command can also be used with multiple device types, including multiple vendors. Take a look at the cli_command documentation page that there is a link at the bottom of the post.

EVE-NG for Automation Practice and Testing

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

As I restarted looking at how I’m continuing my education on the Network Automation and certification realm I asked the question “How are you simulating your network environment?” At the same time there has been thought on the idea of leveraging cloud resources to gain experience there.

First requirement for me is that whatever tool/simulation set that I use it has to work. That being said, I need to be able to generate configurations, connect devices to each other, and have packets flow through the simulated network, just like any other network.

Ansible IOS BGP Module

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 07:00:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to be taking a deeper dive into the new in Ansible 2.8 IOS BGP module. This may be one of the more complex modules to date and I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

For a reminder about the BGP protocol is that this is the predominate protocol that runs the Internet. It is used to peer up with other companies and is what helps to make the Internet great. This is a very powerful protocol, and has been expanded to support many things. This is also a protocol that is heavily used in modern data centers.

Ansible ASA OG Module

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Today we are taking a look at the newest module out for Cisco ASA Ansible module - asa_og. This one is particularly exciting for the configurations that are being managed heavily with Object Groups on firewalls. I’m particularly excited to review the asa_og module, time to dig in.

New in this post is the finished playbooks being added to Github. I’m hoping that this may be helpful and I am uploading the contents to Github for more to be able to see and get access to if necessary. This will improve as I continue.

Ansible ASA Command Module

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Today will be a touch shorter post, but it is good to be back at it. In this post I will be taking a quick look around at the asa_command module, as we start down the path with looking at the ASA modules in Ansible. This is spurned on a little bit by Ansible 2.8 coming out with an Object Group specific module. I will be looking into that further in a future post.

Ansible Saving Cisco Configs to NVRAM with Cisco Specific Modules

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to take a look at a method to be able to save the configuration of a Cisco device to NVRAM (copy run start). I will be taking a look at multiple Cisco platforms to save changes done during an Ansible Playbook to NVRAM. There are options to save the configuration on every change within the modules such as ios_config or cli_config, however, this can slow down the execution of your playbook.

Ansible Cisco IOS Interface Module

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Update: ios_interface is to be deprecated as of Ansible 2.13

In this post I will be taking a deeper look at the ios_interface module. This module is used to configure individual interfaces on a Cisco IOS device. The documentation for the module is located here. In this module I did have to dig into the actual Python file, and that is located here.

Edit: Had to update the link due to the change in Ansible coming in 2.10. I have hard linked to the IOS Interfaces module.

Ansible IOS VLAN

Sat, 09 Mar 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Back to it finally. Going to take a look at the Ansible module ios_vlan. The purpose of this is to provide a declarative module for managing VLANs on IOS devices. In this I will be using IOSv-L2 images. There are a few interesting quirks (as I will call it) within the parameters for the module.

Module Documentation #

First, the module documentation page is here.

Ansible IOS Banner

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Today’s post is going to be a short and sweet one (unless I get to writing two). I’m going to take a look at ios_banner module. This one is pretty much straight to the point, what it states, modifying the banner on an IOS device. There are multiple reasons to want to manipulate the banner on a Cisco device. We will leave those reasons to you and the organization that you are a part of for that. For now, we will take a real quick look at the module.

Ansible Network Engine and NTC Templates

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 07:00:00 +0000

In this post we will talk about primarily three components that will work together to get structured data out of the command line of a Cisco device. The three pieces are:

Why this Post? #

I’m writing this post because I was initially hesitant to start using the Ansible role originally when I was doing everything pretty well with the generic modules that come available with Ansible. I was challenged to migrate a Python script that was using TextFSM and Netmiko to be in Ansible. So I was originally aware of Ansible Network Engine, but had not done anything with it. So what better time than to put it to practice than when it is needed.

Ansible differences between ios config and cli config

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 07:00:00 +0000

This is a post that I’m going to review some of the differences between the ios_config module and the new cli_config module within Ansible networking. I became interested in the module after a recent discussion between the two. I have decided to take a look at the differences between the two.

This is not an under the hood look at the modules. This has already been covered very well (and with better graphics than I can produce) here at the Ansible Blog look for “cli_command and cli_config” with your browser find function.

Ansible - Working with command output

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 07:00:00 +0000

You have decided to move forward with using/trying Ansible. You can now connect to a device and get a green success that you get a hello world like command such as show hostname or show inventory and get the GREEN success on Ansible. Now what. You may want to see the output of the command that you sent and got information back. This is your post on getting started.

This is the process that I typically go through when developing a playbook for use. Let’s say this is a playbook that you wish to just get show information out of the device, say investigating if there are any configurations that are applied that would be part of a CVE bug, or just operational status.

Discontiguous Masks

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Discontiguous masks are something that is going to be somewhat historic within the network design toolbox. It is basically a methodology of looking at particular bits of a network/host definition. The big thing to recall is that as a packet crosses a network device it does so within a packet. The packet is nothing more than a stream of bits. Within the packet header there are bits that define the source network address and the destination network address. This is where discontiguous masks come into play. With a system that can leverage discontiguous masks, you can access information about any part of the network bits, not just starting reading and then stopping (or vice versa) when you look at a bit boundry masking only.

Micro Segmentation vs Segmentation

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 07:00:00 +0000

In a recent podcast there was some discussion that it sounded like the term Micro Segmentation was being used where it was really traditional segmentation. So I thought I would put out a few thoughts on this front.

What is Segmnentation in Networking #

Segmentation is a methodology to create separatet zones of sorts of various traffic types. Various places you may want to do this is within a campus environment to separate students from faculty, or engineering from finance. The list of examples goes on and on. Go to a basic reading of VLANs and you will get the idea of what segmentation is. Once you have VLANs, really segmentation then builds upon this and allows policy to be applied. This policy can be whether or not hosts should be able to talk to each other, or various traffic treatments (QoS). This is something that is well covered already and I do not wish to cover more.

Keeping Up on Tech

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Life always gets busy. That is one thing that you always hear about. I am definitely in that boat as well that things are getting busy. With this in mind, I have never felt better about my ability to learn new things in the field. I do a few things that I feel are probably unique that I should share.

The first opportunity that has never been more capable of doing is to listen to podcasts. The commuting time to/from work is a tremendous opportunity. I leverage three podcasts as my primary learning mechanism these days.

Getting Started with the Blog

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Why this post? Because I decided to change the style of how I was hosting my blog. Before I had decided to just host the blog on something that was easy to get to and update. I could have kept on blogging there, but I found making blog posts a little bit more difficult than what I wanted to. I also wanted to learn some of the new ways of doing things within networking technologies.

Network CI/CD - work in progress (Links to other videos/pages)

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 07:00:00 +0000

At DevNet Create 2018 there is a video that was put together related to CI/CD in the NetDevOps world. This is something that is very exciting to see that there has been time put in to putting that together. The video can be seen here:

DevNet Create Video
Pete Lumbis CI/CD Info

With tools such as VIRL, EveNG, and GNS3, there should be a methodology to be able to put a network together to do testing. I have not yet put together the full pipeline, but is something that I’m very interested in getting built some day.

Ansible Blocks

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 07:00:00 +0000

One of the more interesting features that I have just come across within the Ansible automation world is that of the block. I find this very helpful for both error handling, and also grouping tasks into logical separation.

Ansible Official Link #

Ansible Docs: Block

Blocks allow for logical grouping of tasks and in play error handling. Most of what you can apply to a single task can be applied at the block level, which also makes it much easier to set data or directives common to the tasks. This does not mean the directive affects the block itself, but is inherited by the tasks enclosed by a block. i.e. a when will be applied to the tasks, not the block itself.