Re: Templating/automating configuration

[Job Snijders <job () ntt net>]

Hi,

Here are some extra pointers:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C7pkab8n7ys

https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/dosdontsnetworkautomation.pdf

https://github.com/coloclue/kees

Kind regards,

Job


On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 at 13:49, Brian Knight <ml () knight-networks com> wrote:

> Because we had different sources of truth which were written in-house, we
> wound up rolling our own template engine in Python. It took about 3 weeks
> to write the engine and adapt existing templates.  Given a circuit ID, it
> generates the full config for copy and paste into a terminal session.  It
> also hooks into a configuration parser tool, written in-house, that tracks
> configured interfaces, so it is easy to see whether the template would
> overwrite an existing interface.
>
>
>
> I used the Jinja2 template engine, along with pyodbc/unixODBC/FreeTDS for
> access to a Microsoft SQL backend.
>
>
>
> The keys for us are:
>
>
>
> * extracting information from a source of truth
>
> * validating the information for correctness
>
> * making sure you don't overwrite existing config
>
> * outputting the right templates for the circuit features
>
>
>
> It made more sense to write a tool than it did to try to adapt something
> for our environment.
>
>
>
> If I had a free hand and unlimited budget, I would find a single app that
> functions as a source of truth for all circuits and products, which
> includes a templating engine that hooks in easily.
>
>
>
> -Brian
>
>
>
>
>
> ---- On Tue, 06 Jun 2017 08:22:59 -0500 Graham Johnston &
> lt;johnstong () westmancom com&gt; wrote ----
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Short of complete SDN, for those of you that have some degree of
> configuration templating and/or automation tools what is it that you run?
> I'm envisioning some sort of tool that let's me define template snippets of
> configuration and aids in their deployment to devices. I'm okay doing the
> heaving lifting in defining everything, I'm just looking for the tool that
> stitches it together and hopefully makes things a little less error prone
> for those who aren't as adept.
>
>
>
> Graham Johnston
>
> Network Planner
>
> Westman Communications Group
>
> 204.717.2829
>
> johnstong () westmancom com&lt;mailto:johnstong () westmancom com&gt;