WE HAVE WINNERS!! Big Congratulations to:
John Swanson
&
Hoping to get them both on the blog in the near future. Thanks to everyone who participated. Sign up for ACL, The StaticNAT Newsletter for future offers and to see what we are doing here at StaticNAT!
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.
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.
In this session of A Few Easy Steps, we will be doing the initial setup for automation on a Cisco IOS Device. In General this will work on any Cisco IOS Device. Session Prerequisites:
Session Assumptions:
Our goals of this session are:
So far so good. In Part 1 we connected to a Cisco switch and and performed basic Authentication with Expect. Part 2 we expanded on that and added configuration to our code that added a VLAN and configured an interface. But as I have already stated we are writing quite a bit of code just to configure a single switch. So the next step is to add multiple devices and flat files. I mean yeah we could setup a static list in our code and add our devices to that but why? Our real goal here is to create functional code that we can use to do real things in real networks. So that means pulling a list of devices from NMS, IPAM or even our nasty old excel files. Plus this helps us address the idea of adding authentication files and other flat file resource pools. Eventually we will transition the use of flat files into databases so we can do even more cool stuff but we will hold off on that for now.