As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

The last time, I talked about using pynetbox to make queries to Netbox. This was a very simple example, and one of the things that bugged me the most about it was the API token. In that post, we used a statically-assigned API token where I went into the Netbox GUI and generated one for myself. I think I may have even noted that this was definitely not the best way to handle those things. A possibly-better way to do it is to use your username and password on Netbox to generate a token for yourself. This would a token that you then delete when you’re done.

You should be using Netbox or something equivalent. I’m serious. Stop documenting your network with Word docs and Wiki pages and use something where the information can be queried. I’ve been using Netbox for a couple years, and it’s where I keep all that important information about my network. I use it to store hardware inventory, circuit inventory, contact information, site information…all sorts of stuff. Since all this information is already recorded there, I can just query it for the information I need. That includes any time I need to write some Python code to do something on the gear. I use the pynetbox module to do that.

I’ve been using Netbox for a while now, and, frankly, I can’t live without it. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a Source of Truth for your network automation tasks started by Jeremy Stretch. I use it to document my networks (hardware inventory, subnets, physical connections, etc.), which provides my automation tasks a place to pull and push all sorts of information like management IPs, rack locations, power connections, network drops…the list goes on. In better words, your automation tools can ask Netbox what the state of your network is, and send it an update if that tool discovers something different. There are plenty of better places to discuss the benefits of a Souce of Truth, so just do the Googles for it.

I’ve never done a post on Forti-anything, but I’m really appreciating the products Fortinet is putting out lately. They’re transitioning from “run your SMB off of our stuff” to “actually, we’re pretty good for larger companies”, so their GUI lacks features to keep the SMB from blowing stuff up, The advanced features are there in the CLI, and I wanted to use it to show that difference between the GUI and the real config.

I was lucky enough to have been invited to attend Network Field Day 29 this past September in San Jose, CA. This event brings independent thought leaders together with a number of IT product vendors to share information and opinions. We saw presentations from a pretty full range of vendors – from the chips to observability. It was a great event and worth a few hours to check out the videos. Thanks to Gestalt IT for getting me involved.

Disclaimer : I was lucky enough to have been invited to attend Network Field Day 18 this past July in Silicon Valley. This event brings independent thought leaders to a number of IT product vendors to share information and opinions. I was not paid to attend any of these presentations, but Tech Field Day did provide travel, room, and meals for the event. There is no expectation of providing any blog content, and any posts that come from the event are from my own interest. I’m writing about Nyansa strictly from demonstrations of the product.  I’ve not installed it on my own network and have no experience running it.

I’ve told this story 984828934 time in the past year, but bear with me.  We got a new director-type last year, and he has challenged all of us to do things differently.  As in everything.  Anything that we’re doing today should be done differently by next year.  This isn’t saying that we’re doing things wrong.  This is just a challenge mix things up, integrate new tools, and get rid of the noise.  Our group has responded big-time, and we’re now doing most of our day-to-day tasks with a tool of some kind.  A couple weeks ago, I realized that I did a whole day’s work without logging directly into any gear – everything was through a tool.  It was a proud moment for me and the group.

It’s been a very busy month or so. June is always like that, it seems. There’s ARRL Field Day, which is always the last rainy weekend in June. This year, Cisco Live was in June, and that typically includes Tech Field Day activities. Right before that, we had the whole family in town for a family reunion. There was all sorts of stuff going on. Now that most of that has blown over, I’ve collected my thoughts and wanted to talk about Cisco Live this year.

I feel like a teenage girl with a fashion blog who hasn’t posted in 6 months and comes back with “I know I haven’t posted in a while…”  Sigh.  It’s been right at a year since I actually published a post, so I figured I would give everyone an update.

I’ve had some personal things going on lately, and those have taken all of my energy.  We’ve made it through those rough times, so my energy is coming back.  I’m feeling better every day, and I hope I can get back to producing some content.  And, let me tell you…I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

For the last couple years, on the Saturday before Cisco Live US kicks off, we like to go and do something in the host city.  Nothing big.  Nothing fancy.  Just something we aren’t going to be able to do once the conference gets going.  In San Diego, we went to the zoo.  Last year, we went to the National Atomic Testing Museum.  This year, we’re going to the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement…aka, the Mob Museum.