My Network Talks To Me – Literally!
This next post may seem like science fiction. I woke up this morning and checked that my output files – MP3 files – really did exist and that I actually made my Cisco network “talk” to me! This post is right out of Star Trek so strap yourse
Creating Your Own Network Automation ChatBot with Discord, Ansible, and Genie/pyATS!
As you may know I love to play with new toys. I especially love connecting new toys with my old toys. What you may not know is that I am also an avid World of Warcraft fan and player! In order to run what are known as “raids”, group content
Is Your Network At Risk – Automating the Cisco PSIRT with Genie and Ansible
The security of my network keeps me up at night. Honestly it does. We live in a world where enterprise networks are defending themselves against state-sponsored attacks. But what do attackers look for? Typically, open, well-known, vulnerabi
By Popular Demand – Automating the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) External RESTful Services (ERS) API Suite
My last post, which has turned into one of my more popular posts, covered automating the Cisco ISE MnT Nodes REST API with Postman and Ansible. We also discovered there is an XML limitation with the MnT REST API. I’ve been asked by several
Automating the Cisco Identity Services Engine Monitoring and Troubleshooting Node (ISE MnT) REST API
In my opinion Network Access Control (NAC) using a mix of 802.1x and MAC Address Bypass (MAB) with dynamic Access Control Lists (dACL) is not just an extremely important foundation of a modern, high secure, enterprise network. It is actuall
Cisco Facts – A Collection of Ansible IOS / NXOS Facts and Genie Parsing Playbooks
Cisco DevNet Code Exchange has published my repository ! Here you can easily start capturing Ansible Facts for IOS and NXOS and transform the JSON into CSV and Markdown ! Also included are a bunch of valuable Genie parsed show commands whic
Cisco Services APIs Ansible Playbooks – Version 2.0
I am very pleased to release the Cisco Services API Ansible Playbooks Version 2.0 which has been approved and released on Cisco DevNet Code Exchange ! You can find the code here and here This major revision basically shifts away from linein
A Recipe For Success – Using Ansible to Transform Cisco Data Centre Facts into Business-Ready Documentation
One of my favourite recipes is the Hakuna Frittata both because not only am I a big fan of puns, I also enjoy this hearty vegetarian meal that even I can handle putting together. Inspired by this simple recipe I have decided to try and docu
Collaboration is the key to automation success – A Genie Success Story
I’ve been on about a three year journey with network automation and while I have had great personal and technical success – my organization and most of those outside my immediate day-to-day circle are still shackled to the ‘old’ way of doin
It’s always DNS – but it doesn’t have to be!
DDI Automation – A collaborative live demonstration with BlueCat I had the pleasure of collaborating with my friends Dana Iskoldski and Chris Meyer over at BlueCat exploring and automating DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management (IPAM) (DDI) w
Prevent an Intrusion – Run the Recommended Version!
In the wake of some very high profile IT security breaches and state sponsored attacks using compromised software today I wrote some infrastructure as code Ansible playbooks to create some business-ready documentation to help us understand
Sign on the Dotted Line
Layer 9 issues – finance – are often some of the most challenging a network engineer faces. Contract management can be particularly difficult in any scale organization especially if you are not “sole source” purchasing. Serial numbers and c
Ansible Performance – Moving to Jinja2 for Automated Documentation
When Ivan Pepelnjak has advice for you – take it! I wrote a post about untangling dynamic nested loops in Ansible. In another recent post about trying to improve Ansible performance I didn’t get very far – but this could be the silver bulle
Dynamic Loops in Ansible
I’ve done many great things with Ansible but occasionally I come across a logical problem that may stretch the tool past it’s limitations. If you have been following the site I am on a big facts discovery and automated documentation movemen
Can we make Ansible go faster?
When I describe Ansible to people I tend to use many positive adjectives. Amazing, incredible, easy, revolutionary, powerful, and a few others. One adjective I never use, however, is fast. I would not describe Ansible as a high performance
Excitement
And he’s right! I can’t stop making new GitHub repositories with Genie parsed show commands to documentation! Like show ip interface brief as seen above!
Letting the Genie out of the bottle
Using Genie Cisco show commands can be transformed into REST API-like requests with structured JSON responses.
My current toolkit
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”― Marshall McLuhan My first attempt at network automation I used the tools that I had used to manage infrastructure with for the past 20+ years. A file editor
Just the facts ma’am
Infrastructure as Code and Network Automation – Where to Start Learning any new skill takes time, patience, a willingness to try and fail, and ideally continuously learn and grow from our mistakes until we grow more and more proficient. The
AnsibleFest 2020
Wow! I was actually invited to present a 30-minute break-out session at AnsibleFest! Incredible! You can still watch the session by registering for free and searching for my name or “Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to