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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.