A Few Easy Steps: Cisco Switch, Setup IP Device Tracking

In this session of A Few Easy Steps, we will be setting up IP Device Tracking on a Cisco IOS Switch. In General this will work on any Cisco IOS switch.  Session Prerequisites:

  • You have terminal or console access to your Cisco device.

Session Assumptions:

  • You have host devices connected to your switch

Our goals of this session are:

  • Globally enable IP Device Tracking
  • Setup all ports for IP Device Tracking
  • Show output of IP Device Tracking All Command

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What did you Expect? Part 5, Basic Error Handling.

In the first four parts of What did you Expect, we covered the basics of getting started with automating interactions for network equipment.  In the first few posts it was important have a networking environment that  was 100% stable.  The last thing I needed when I was trying to learn to use python to automate network devices that were randomly unresponsive and would crash my code.  In order to accomplish that I built a test network you can read about here in GNS3, created a basic configuration to enable a IOS device to be remotely managed.  I also wrote a quick multi-device ping tool to verify that all the devices are responsive before we run remote code against them.  I made my life easy.  But as all operators know our lives are not that cut and dry.  So I started to break things…and my code did not like me. Read more

Get Coding!

So lets start off with I am an old dog and I am learning new tricks.  My entire career I have avoided the dreaded programing.  In college I slid by my degree requirement for a coding class by taking Visual Basic for Industrial applications.  I hated it.  Debugging drove me nuts and there is still a hole in my bedroom wall at my parents where that brick of a VB found itself one night around 2am.  From there I was just gun shy and honestly had plenty of other things going on that could afford to ignore learning anything outside of the basics of HTML and CSS.

Cut to today,  I am in my late 30’s and going through a career transition of sorts.  My timing for the transition is decent because the network industry is also going through a bit of a transition.  For awhile now all the cool kids have been doing automation and Dev/Ops in the Server, OS and application space.  But networks are trickier.  I will leave out all the discussion of why because that horse has been beat dead a few times online.  In this transition over the past six months or so I have found myself doing things I would never have guessed even a year ago.

So what types of things you ask.  Ok for one I am now doing dev work.  Mind you it is not great dev work and I will never be a professional developer but I have been writing code.  In one case even some minor code for a library that is now in production with clients…scary huh.  But mostly I am coding to learn and help move other people along the Path to Automated Networking including myself.

automated networking

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Back to the basics. Installing Ubuntu Server 14.04

Back in 1996 when I started this game there were lots of things I had not done.  Now days it seems like everyone I meet is 18, running service provider networks and writing code in all the hip new languages.  That is not the reality of the world.  The reality is that we all start someplace.  So I am going to create some content with the assumption you have never done some of the basics.  This first one is a video showing a basic Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS install.  Enjoy.