Josh VanDeraa

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.

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):

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.