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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.

Upgrade Nautobot Python Version in Virtual Machine

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

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

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.

Desktop Build 2023

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.

My goals: - Build a system that will last for 3-4 years at a minimum - Max out the RAM, that is my most limiting factor in my environments - Give Linux a try as the desktop OS, still a bit of debate in this, considering options: - Debian 12 - POP OS - Linux Mint