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.
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.
During this post I will relate the Ansible data structures/formats to that of Python. So the terms will be dictionary (hashes) and lists (lists).
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.
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.
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.
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.
With this, I decided to bring my blog over to a static site generator. I'm not doing anything significantly crazy with a blog site, other than hopefully creating some useful content. So static site generation brought me over to Github.
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:
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.