RE: Templating/automating configuration

[Graham Johnston <johnstong () westmancom com>]

Job,

Would you be able to provide any further insight into your Don’t #5 – “Don’t agree to change management. Managers are 
rarely engineers and should not be making technical decisions. (nor should sales)“.

Thanks,
Graham

From: Job Snijders [mailto:job () ntt net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 6, 2017 4:03 PM
To: Brian Knight <ml () knight-networks com>; Graham Johnston <johnstong () westmancom com>
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Templating/automating configuration

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<mailto: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<mailto:lt%3Bjohnstong () 
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<mailto:johnstong () westmancom com>&lt;mailto:johnstong () westmancom com<mailto:johnstong 
() westmancom com>&gt;