Category: Ansible

Here’s a quote from one of my friends who spent years working with Ansible playbooks:

Debugging Ansible is one of the most terrible experiences one can endure…

It’s not THAT bad, particularly if you have a good debugging toolbox. I described mine in the Debugging Ansible Playbooks part of the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course.

Please note that the Building Network Automation Solutions online course includes all material from the Ansible online course.

Every time we finish the Building Network Automation Solutions online course I ask the attendees to share their success stories with me. Stan Strijakov was quick to reply:

I have yet to complete the rest of the course and assignments, but the whole package was a tremendous help for me to get our Ansible running. We now deploy whole WAN sites within an hour.

Of course I wanted to know more and he sent me a detailed description of what they’re doing:

Here’s another idea from the Building Network Automation Solutions online course: Ruben Tripiana decided to implement a latency measurement tool. His playbook takes a list of managed devices from Ansible inventory, generates a set of unique device pairs, measures latency between them, and produces a summary report (see also his description of the project).

Whitespace handling is one of the most confusing aspects of Jinja2, thoroughly frustrating many attendees of my Ansible and Network Automation online courses.

I decided to fix that, ran a few well-controlled experiments, and documented the findings and common caveats in Whitespace Handling in Jinja2 video.

Got this feedback on my Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar:

This webinar is very comprehensive compared to any other Ansible webinars available out there. Ivan does great job of mapping and using real life example which is directly related to daily tasks.

The Ansible online course is even better: it includes support, additional hands-on exercises, sample playbooks, case studies, and lab instructions.

However, Ansible is just a tool that shouldn’t be missing from your toolbox. If you need a bigger picture, consider the Building Network Automation Solutions online course (and register ASAP to save $700 with the Enthusiast ticket).

One of the undergraduate students attending my Ansible for Networking Engineers online course got to the point where he wanted to start hands-on work and sent me a list of questions:

Do I have to buy a VIRL license to use your Ansible course materials? Or is VIRL in any Github repository? Is there a way to use your files in a free Tool like GNS3?

Let’s go through them one by one:

One of the sample Ansible playbooks I published to help the attendees of my Building Network Automation Solutions course get started collects LLDP neighbor information on all managed devices and converts that information into a network diagram.

Here’s the graph I got from it when I ran it on my 6-node OSPF network (the Inter-AS VIRL topology from this repository). Please note I spent zero time tweaking the graph description (it shows).

In one of the previous blog posts I described the playbook I use to collect SSH keys from network devices. As I use it quite often, it became tedious to write ansible-playbook path-to-playbook every time I wanted to run the collection process.

Ansible playbooks are YAML documents, and YAML documents use # to start comments, so I thought “what if I’d use a YAML comment to add shebang and turn my YAML document into a script”

TL&DR: It works. Now for the longer story…

Here’s a common scenario I’m encountering on Ansible-related forums:

Q: I cannot connect to network devices with my Ansible network modules. I keep getting these weird error messages…

Me: Are you sure you have the device SSH keys in known_hosts file?

Q: How did you know?

Long story short: I’m offering a few free seats in my Ansible for Networking Engineers online course to undergraduate or master’s students.

Interested? Check out the details, and apply before October 1^st.

Too old? Please spread the word ;)