Mircea Ulinic
TL;DR latency-monitor measures real application-like latency over TCP and UDP Supports one-way delay (OWD), not just RTT Works over established TCP connections Designed for high-frequency, continuous probing Requires time-synchronised endpoints (NTP/PTP) I needed a way to monitor the behaviour of connections between various endpoints over TCP and UDP. “Just run...
From the very beginning, when I first introduced Salt to the network automation community, one of my dreams was to create a course. Back in 2017, together with my friend Seth House, we managed to publish a small booklet with O’Reilly, which you can still download for free at https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/network-automation-at/9781491992524/...
Salt is currently one of the largely adopted automating frameworks, and perhaps one of the most complete and flexible. But these - including support for several architectures, large cardinal of native capabilities and features, ability to easily extend it in your own environment, and so on - come with a...
Python development for infrastructure management using Salt - Having the privilege to maintain one of the widely used tools for network automation, NAPALM, I am often asked various questions, many of them related to the extensibility of the library. It is a given, and a design choice that NAPALM does not and cannot possibly fulfill all the existing...
In my mind, especially after seeing how automation massively helped one of the largest global networks (Cloudflare - my current employer), I simply cannot conceive that a network can possibly run reliably without a form of automation. However, there still are plenty of examples of networks running (often with major...
Very often I refer to Salt as one of the most suitable tools for managing large scale deployment - either servers or network devices, but not limited to. While on a server one can install the regular Minion directly, and there are already many well known success stories in the...
The easy way - This is going to be a very short blog post, but hopefully it will provide an easier intro for the (network) engineers that want to get started with Salt to leverage its superpowers for network automation. One of the easiest approaches is using Docker - even though you may not...
The beginning of the OpenBSD era - As I have previously attempted several times in the past, I am (finally) very close to switch to OpenBSD, a more stable and reliable operating system that I like. Before starting to make the actual change on both personal and work computer, I started testing some of the tools I’m...
The overlooked side of Salt and some best practices - One of the (many) things I like about Salt is that it doesn’t have an obscure language of its own: as I always like to say, to start automating all you need to know is YAML and Jinja, 3 rules each. For example, when you need a simple iteration you...
Using napalm-logs and Salt - One of the most common misconceptions is that network automation is only about configuration management. While this is indeed a very important milestone, it is not the ultimate achievement you want for your network. We inherit most of the methodologies from the server side, and I can tell that the...
The easy way - In one of my previous posts, I have presented how to install NAPALM and Salt. While Salt can be installed directly from the SaltStack Repo, very easy, using Salt Bootstrap, NAPALM requires more steps and there are a few system dependencies you may need to consider. For Salt users there’s...
Network orchestration with Salt and NAPALM - Part 3 - There are many common misconceptions around Salt, and very often people seem to miss that Salt is more than a configuration management product, while it is a rich orchestrator with configuration management capabilities. Yet another interesting assertion I heard recently was: “In Salt is very hard or impossible to setup...
And how Cisco does not give a damn - The XML API is a proprietary software written by Cisco, that is leveraged only on IOS-XR. Its goal is to facilitate the configuration or retrieval of operational data from the router. Althought NETCONF existed long time before they have introduced the XML agent, and already deployed by few network vendors,...
During the live session of the NANOG tutorial, I have expanded on the installation side. However, among the feedback received from the readers that have been following the slides, people suggested that I should have included more details. This is why today I am going to provide more information for...
Up and running in 60 minutes - Last week I have presented at NANOG a tutorial about Network Automation at scale: up and running in 60 minutes. The slides are available below (PDF version): The video has been published on YouTube. Following the steps presented in this tutorial, one should be able to start from scratch and...
Network orchestration with Salt and NAPALM - Part 2 - In the first post we have been introduced to the very basic command syntax and features. As previously said, Salt is much more than a configuration management system - it is a data-driven software built on a dynamic communication bus. Given the number of possibilities provided (now also for network...
The wait is over, NAPALM is finally fully integrated in an automation framework. Beginning with 2016.11 (Carbon), all the NAPALM features are integrated in the core of Salt - more details in the release notes. That means, when you install Salt you have by default the network automation features included!...
Because rendering templates is simply not enough - Automation is the new buzzword in networking today. By automation many people understand a configuration management system, i.e. keeping the devices’ configuration consistent across the network. Which is perfectly fine if that’s all you want, it is already a big step forward. But there are many use cases when you...