Building the network automation lab environment seems to be one of the early showstoppers on everyone’s network automation journey. These resources might help you get started:

• I wrote an installation script that installs the myriad dependencies needed by Ansible and NAPALM in just the right order on a Ubuntu VM (step-by-step instructions for ipSpace.net subscribers).
• Carl Buchmann open-sourced a full-blown infrastructure-as-code development environment he uses for his automation projects.
• Jaap de Vos described how he creates a Docker image containing Ansible, NAPALM and Nornir.

Hint: after setting up your environment, you might want to enroll into the Spring 2019 network automation course ;)

It all started with an interesting weird MLAG bugs discussion during our last Building Next-Generation Data Center online course. The discussion almost devolved into “when in doubt reload” yammering when Mark Horsfield stepped in saying “while that may be true, make sure to check and collect these things before reloading”.

I loved what he wrote so much that I asked him to turn it into a blog post… and he made it even better by expanding it into generic network troubleshooting guidelines. Enjoy!

A while ago I had the dubious “privilege” of observing how my “beloved” airline Adria Airways deals with exceptions. A third-party incoming flight was 2.5 hours late and in their infinite wisdom (most probably to avoid financial impact) they decided to delay a half-dozen outgoing flights for 20-30 minutes while waiting for the transfer passengers.

Not surprisingly, when that weird thingy landed and they started boarding the outgoing flights (now all at the same time), the result was a total mess with busses blocking each other (this same airline loves to avoid jet bridges).

Did you know that many networking engineers use ipSpace.net webinars (and subscription) to prepare for the job interviews?

Here’s one of their success stories (name changed for obvious reasons):

As I explained in a previous blog post, most leaf-and-spine best-practices (as in: what to do if you have no clue) use BGP as the IGP routing protocol (regardless of whether it’s needed) with the same AS number shared across all spine switches to implement valley-free routing.

This design has an interesting consequence: when a link between a leaf and a spine switch fails, they can no longer communicate.

This is the fourth blog post in “thinking out loud while preparing Network Infrastructure as Code presentation for the network automation course” series. Previous posts: Network-Infrastructure-as-Code Is Nothing New, Adjusting System State and NETCONF versus REST API.

Dmitri Kalintsev sent me a nice description on how some popular Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools solve the challenges I described in The CRUD Hell section of Infrastructure-as-Code, NETCONF and REST API blog post:

The fast pace of webinars continues in October 2018:

• Rachel Traylor will talk about graph theory and its relevance to reliable network design on October 8^th;
• The Amazon Web Services Networking webinar will start on October 11^th. The second session is planned for October 25^th;
• On October 16^th we’ll have the third session of VMware NSX technical deep dive (unless I manage to finish on time later today… not likely).

There are no on-site events planned until early December:

One of the attendees of my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course tried to figure out whether you can build larger broadcast domains with VXLAN than you could with VLANs. Here’s what he sent me:

I’m trying to understand differences or similarities between VLAN and VXLAN technologies in a view of (*cast) domain limitation.

There’s no difference between the two on the client-facing side. VXLAN is just an encapsulation technology and doesn’t change how bridging works at all (read also part 2 of that story).

Hardware vendors are always making their silicon more complex and feature-rich. Is that a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen? We asked Luke Gorrie, the lead developer of Snabb Switch (an open-source user-land virtual switch written in Lua) about his opinions on the topic.

TL&DL version: Give me a dumb NIC, software can do everything else.

If you want to know more, listen to Episode 93 of Software Gone Wild.

As anyone starting their journey into AWS quickly discovers, cloud is different (or as I wrote in the description of my AWS workshop you feel like Alice in Wonderland). One of the gotchas: when you link multiple routing domains (Virtual Private Clouds – the other VPC) you have to create static routing table entries on both ends. Even worse, there’s no transit VPC – you have to build a full mesh of relationships.

The correct solution to this challenge is automation: