Decades ago I understood the intricacies of AAA on Cisco IOS. These days I wing it and keep throwing spaghetti at the virtual wall until something sticks and I can log in (after all, it’s all in a lab, and I’m interested in routing protocols not interactions with TACACS+ server).

If you’re experiencing similar challenges you might appreciate AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices by the one and only Daniel Dib.

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

In today’s evolving landscape of whitebox, brightbox, and software routing, a small but incredibly comprehensive routing platform called FreeRTR has quietly been evolving out of a research and education service provider network in Hungary. 

Kevin Myers of IPArchitechs brought this to my attention around March of 2019, at which point I went straight to work with it to see how far it could be pushed.

When I blogged about release 0.2 of my lab-building tool, Kristian Larsson was quick to reply: “now do vrnetlab”. You could guess what my reply was (hint: “submit a pull request”), but I did realize I’d have to add multi-provider support before that would make sense.

Release 0.3 adds support for multiple virtualization providers. You can run six different platforms on vagrant-libvirt (assuming you build the boxes), and I added rudimentary support for Vagrant provider for VirtualBox:

Miha Markočič created sample automation scripts (mostly Terraform configuration files + AWS CLI commands where needed) deploying these features described in AWS Networking webinar:

• IP multicast deployment (video)
• Web Application Firewall deployment (video)
• Network Load Balancer deployment (video)
• Inter-region VPC Peering deployment (video)

To recreate them, clone the GitHub repository and follow the instructions.

In the last weeks I described the challenges you might face when converting XML documents that contain lists with a single element into JSON, be it on device (Nexus OS) or in an Ansible module. Now let’s see how we can fix that.

There’s one more thing I feel needs to be done before I go for that coffee break: a webinar focusing on network automation concepts (as opposed to replacing Excel with YAML and Ansible or Becoming a Python Coder). Here’s a rough list of concepts I think should be in there:

• Data models and data stores
• Data model transformations
• Single source of truth
• Abstraction layers
• Idempotency

Anyone who spent some time reading cloud providers’ documentation instead of watching slide decks or vendor keynotes knows that setting up infrastructure in a public cloud is not much simpler than doing it on-premises. You will outsource hardware management (installations, upgrades, replacements…) and might deal with an orchestration system provisioning services instead of configuring individual devices, but you still have to make the same decisions, and take the same set of responsibilities.

In December 2020 Ed Horley invited me to a chat about IPv6 in the public cloud. While I usually don’t want to think about a protocol that’s old enough to buy its own beer in US, we nonetheless had interesting discussions (including the need for frequent RA messages in AWS VPC).

Corey Quinn mentioned me in a tweet linking to AWS announcement that they are the biggest user of BGP RPKI (by the size of signed address space) worldwide. Good for them – I’m sure it got their marketing excited. It’s also trivial to do once you have the infrastructure in place. Just saying…

On a more serious front: how important is RPKI and what misuses can it stop?

If you’ve never heard of RPKI, the AWS blog post is not too bad, Nick Matthews wrote a “look grandma, this is how it works” version in 280-character installments, and you should definitely spend some time exploring MANRS resources. Here’s a short version for differently-attentive ;))

Last week I wrote about the interesting challenges you might encounter when using data generated by a Junos device in an Ansible playbook. Unfortunately it’s not just Junos – every system built around XML-based data structures might experience the same issues, including Cisco Nexus OS.