I got great feedback about the first part of Data Center Interconnects webinar from one of ipSpace.net subscribers:

I had no specific expectation when I started watching the material and I must have watched it 6 times by now.

Your webinar covered just the right level of detail to educate myself or refresh my knowledge on the technologies and relevant options for today’s market choices

The information provided is powerful and avoids useless discussions which vendors and PowerPoint pitches. Once you ask the right question it’s easy to get an idea of the vendor readiness

The first time I encountered screen scraping was in mid-1990. All business applications were running on IBM mainframes those days, and IBM used proprietary terminal system (remember 3270) that was almost impossible to interact with, so some people got the “bright” idea of emulating that screen, scraping information off the emulated screen and copying it into HTML pages… thus webifying their ancient apps.

Guess what – we’re still doing the very same thing in network automation as Andrea Dainese succinctly explained in the latest addition to his Automation for Cisco NetDevOps article.

A European networking engineer sent me this question:

I'd like to know where other fellow engineers meet up especially in Europe and discuss Enterprise datacenter and regular networking. There are the Cisco Live stuff things to go to but are there any vendor neutral meetups?

Gabi Gerber is organizing networking-focused workshops in Switzerland every quarter (search under SIGS Workshops), and you’re most welcome to join us ;) It’s always a boutique event, but that gives us the ability to chat long into the evening.

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Here’s a question I got from one of the attendees of my network automation online course:

We had a situation where HSRP was configured on two devices and then a second change was made to use a different group ID. The HRSP mac address got "corrupted" into one of devices and according to the vendor FIB was in an inconsistent state. I know this may be vendor specific but was wondering if there is any toolkit available with validation procedures to check if FIB is consistent after implementing L3 changes.

The problem is so specific (after all, he’s fighting a specific bug) that I wouldn’t expect to find a generic tool out there that would solve it.

The Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions course continued with an awesome presentation by David Gee. He started with what you should do before writing a single line of code (identify processes and document them in workflows and sequence diagrams) and covered tons of boring stuff nobody ever wants to talk about.

On Thursday Rachel Traylor continued exploring graphs and their relevance in networking, this time focusing on trees and spanning trees.

The Network Connectivity, Graph Theory, and Reliable Network Design webinar is part of standard ipSpace.net subscription You can access David’s presentation and all other materials of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course with Expert Subscription (assuming you choose this course as part of your subscription).

Wherever you look you find three kinds of people: those that build tools they need, those that find the tools they need, and those that yammer about the lack of tools without ever doing anything to solve the problem.

Daniel Teycheney is clearly in the first category. When faced with “collect some data and create a simple report” hands-on assignment during the Building Network Automation Solutions course he started creating a toolbox of playbooks that can be used in initial network auditing. I’m positive you’ll find tons of useful tidbits in his code ;)

In the first blog post of this series I described how you could start building the prerequisite for any network automation solution: the device inventory.

Having done that, you should know what is in your network, but you still don’t know how your network is supposed to work and what services it is supposed to provide. Welcome to the morass known as building your source-of-truth.

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the latest batch of Data Center Fabrics videos:

You haven’t mentioned Intel's Omni-Path at all. Should I be surprised?

While Omni-Path looks like a cool technology (at least at the whitepaper level), nobody ever mentioned it (or Intel) in any data center switching discussion I was involved in.

A month ago Josef Fuchs described the process he uses to merge existing Cisco IOS device configuration with configuration snippets generated by his network automation solution.

In the second part of his article he dived deep into implementation details, described Ansible playbook and Jinja2 templates he’s using, how he optimized the solution with a custom Jinja2 filter, and the caveats he encountered.

We’re starting the Spring 2019 workshop season in March with open-enrollment workshops in Zurich (Switzerland). It was always hard to decide which workshop to do (there are so many interesting topics), so we’ll do two of them in the same week:

• Network and Security Automation with Ansible on March 12^th and
• Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds on March 13^th.

Rachel Traylor will continue her Graph Theory webinar on March 7^th with a topic most relevant to networking engineers: trees, spanning trees and shortest-path trees, and I’ll continue with two topics I started earlier this year: