In Part I of the Ansible series, we looked at how to backup the configuration of network devices like cisco, juniper, arista, etc to the local disk of the ansible control node. However, in this post, we will see how we can take the backup of the configuration directly to the TFTP server using Ansible. There are 2 possible ways of achieving this. 1. Take backup directly from within the devices over to TFTP Like in the case of cisco, you can execute, and copy running-config tftp://<ip_address> to backup the configuration directly from the cisco device over to TFTP. We can tell Ansible to d ..read more

In Part I of the Ansible series, we looked at how to backup the configuration of network devices like cisco, juniper, arista, etc to the local disk of the ansible control node. However, in this post, we will see how we can take the backup of the configuration directly to the TFTP server using Ansible. There are 2 possible ways of achieving this. 1. Take backup directly from within the devices over to TFTP Like in the case of cisco, you can execute, and copy running-config tftp://<ip_address> to backup the configuration directly from the cisco device over to TFTP. We can tell Ansible to d ..read more

This post is going to talk about the ways you could use to access the end devices through the jump server or a proxy server. I am going to use Netmiko which is my all-time favorite tool whenever I need to programmatically interact with network devices. Let’s see how we can leverage Netmiko SSH proxy support to access remote network devices via a jumpserver. https://pynet.twb-tech.com/blog/automation/netmiko-proxy.html Above is the URL where it all started. Step1:- Setup SSH key-based authentication between the source machine and the intermediate jumpserver. How do you do that? There are a bunc ..read more

SASE is the new approach towards Network and Security Architecture for today’s Enterprises. Basically SASE is the acronym for Secure Access Service Edge. As the pandemic has changed how we work, almost every organization now has it’s employees working from the cozy corners of their homes, workforce is remote and much distributed now. Employees connecting to their office networks using VPNs over home broadband connections are much prone to malicious attackers as compare to working from an office network in the office building. It’s not only about the security but the quality of service as well ..read more

What is Ansible? Ansible is a tool developed by our beloved Red Hat to automate lots of stuff around infrastructure. There’s lot of magic that has been put into in the form of code which enables ansible do stuff quite seamlessly. However, mostly Ansible is being used for configuration management of devices in cloud and network infrastructure. So it’s in a neck to neck competition with Terraform. Both tools has similar properties like being agentless, which means you don’t need to install a piece of software called an agent on the devices you want to manage using Ansible/Terraform. There’s a lo ..read more

Let’s do a short exercise wherein we will define a VPC and spin up an EC2 instance in the AWS cloud. We can use the AWS free tier account to do it. Understanding Terraform For Cloud Automation For Beginners https://networkautomationlane.in/understanding-terraform-for-cloud-automation/  First, the following is the prep work that we need to do which would hardly take 10 minutes. Create AWS Free tier account. Visit this link Install AWS CLI. Refer this link Configure AWS CLI with access key using “aws configure” command. Refer the link Install Terraform if you don’t have it already. Click ..read more

Defining infrastructure as code(IaC) is one of the easiest ways to manage the whole infrastructure and you’ll probably like it more if you are not a fan of using GUI to manage stuff. In this beginner’s guide to understanding terraform for cloud automation, let’s see what this buzzword really is all about Terraform is a simple and easy-to-understand declarative language to define objects or resources and make changes as you want in that defined infra. It’s multi-platform, can be installed in Linux, Mac, and Windows too. Being Agentless like Ansible is also one of the other qualities of Terrafor ..read more

What is Ansible? Ansible is a tool developed by our beloved Red Hat to automate lots of stuff around infrastructure. There’s lot of magic that has been put into in the form of code which enables ansible do stuff quite seamlessly. However, mostly Ansible is being used for configuration management of devices in cloud and network infrastructure. So it’s in a neck to neck competition with Terraform. Both tools has similar properties like being agentless, which means you don’t need to install a piece of software called an agent on the devices you want to manage using Ansible/Terraform. There’s a lo ..read more

Off late I have been required to access the network devices through a JumpHost. One of the easiest methods to do this was using python’s netmiko module. My setup looks like this Windows Machine ——- SSH tunnel ——- Linux JumpHost ——-SSH to ——- Network Devices Here are the basic steps that I followed to get this working. Create public private key pair on windows machine. There are 2 ways to go about this. I did it using putty but either of the two methods are perfectly fine. OpenSSH Client on windows Using Putty PUTTY METHOD Launch PuTTYgen and click on generate. Move your mouse in the whit ..read more

This post is going to talk about the ways you could use to access the end devices through the jump server or a proxy server. I am going to use Netmiko which is my all-time favorite tool whenever I need to programmatically interact with network devices. Let’s see how we can leverage Netmiko SSH proxy support to access remote network devices via a jumpserver. https://pynet.twb-tech.com/blog/automation/netmiko-proxy.html Above is the URL where it all started. Step1:- Setup SSH key-based authentication between the source machine and the intermediate jumpserver. How do you do that? There are a bunc ..read more