My collection of Ansible posts is steadily rising, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a post on how you can connect an Ansible VM into GNS3 so that you can practice your automation skills in a non-production environment. While I am using VMware Wrokstation for this post, the process is very similar for VMWare Player and VirtualBox. ...
In my previous post I covered how to to download, install and test TextFSM. In this post I’ll demonstrate how to write your own template files so that you can create (and hopefully contribute!) them if a suitable one does not already exist. It is worth mention that the examples in this post are extremely basic. I’ve done it this way on purpose ...
As I mentioned in my previous post, NTC-Ansible uses TextFSM templates to allow you to convert your CLI outputs to JSON and then access the data in an API-like fashion. In this post I’ll cover how to run TextFSM templates against CLI outputs. Downloading TextFSM To get started, download the latest version of TextFSM using the ‘git clone’ comm...
In this series of posts I will cover how you can create your own API-like functionality for devices which do not have APIs built into them. Before I get started though, for those of you who don’t know what an API is, here’s Wikipedia’s description: “Just as a graphical user interface makes it easier for people to use programs, application progr...
In my previous post, Getting started with Network Automation, I discussed why I chose Ansible as my configuration management and orchestration tool over the other options. In this post I’m going to discuss the the hurdles I encountered after making this decision, and of course the solutions too. Which technique should I use? The internet is a...