Posts

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. Getting Started with the module #VLANs pre-module work #Starting out the switch is pretty bare as it relates to the number of VLANs.

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.

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: Ansible Network Engine Google’s TextFSM Network to Code Templates 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.