I spent a few Twitch sessions speaking about the automation of Palo Alto Networks firewalls. We used different approaches than the one used with Cisco devices. Initially, we developed a few simple Ansible playbooks.
I spent a few Twitch sessions speaking about the automation of Cisco devices with Ansible. I don’t think Ansible is the best tool and the best way to automate tasks on Cisco devices, but a well-designed and well-documented Ansible playbook can be maintained by non NetDevOps guys too.
A few weeks ago a customer asked me to patch NTC Templates because it has a very old HP Procurve switch. I’m used to patching NTC Templates, it’s an important tool for my automation tasks.
The following scripts allow cleaning a Docker host, and stopping and deleting containers and images. Stop all containers: #!/bin/bash CONTAINERS=$(docker ps -a | tail -n+2 | cut -d" " -f1) if [ "$CONTAINERS" == "" ]; then exit fi docker stop $CONTAINERS Stop and delete all containers:
To debug a container or to access it, sometimes I need to override the entry point for a specific image: docker run -it --entrypoint /bin/sh [docker_image]
Sometimes we realize we committed something that should remain confidential. Or maybe we are ready to publish our open source project and we don’t want to publish the entire history too.
On some Ansible designs, I need to use a bastion host to log in to remote servers. We can configure it in the following way: on ansible.cfg file: [defaults] timeout = 25 gathering = smart # utile ma non essenziale [ssh_connection] #ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=600s ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=600s -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=nocontrol_path = %(directory)s/%%h-%%r pipelining = True on the inventory file:
On large Linux Debian installations, I usually configure an APT proxy to optimize upgrades. I’m used to configuring APT-Cached NG in the following way: on /etc/apt-cacher-ng/acng.conf file: CacheDir: /proxydata/cache/apt-cacher-ng LogDir: /var/log/apt-cacher-ng SupportDir: /usr/lib/apt-cacher-ng Port:3142 Remap-debrep: file:deb_mirror*.
A few months ago I prepared a short introduction to automation for a small group of colleagues. Now I would like to summarize in a few posts what I explained to them just to share an overview.
A question comes up to my mind few weeks ago: can enterprises operate on networks like they are doing with software today? In other words: can enterprise start to automate things without buying additional solutions?
