Tagged: automation
31 posts · browse all tags
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Arista SD-Branch Part 10: Day-Two Operations, Upgrades and Automation
Running the Arista branch after go-live: Smart System Upgrade, observability and endpoint troubleshooting in CloudVision, compliance checks, and the APIs and AVD options for automation.
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Host-Based Detection Part 8: Active Response, or When Wazuh Hits Back
Every other module in this series watches and tells you. Active response acts on its own. What the mechanism actually looks like, and a real lockout story from elsewhere on this site that explains why the timeout matters.
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Metasploit Deep Dive Part 11: RPC and msgrpc Automation
msfrpcd, MessagePack vs JSON-RPC, virtual consoles, and how the framework exposes itself to outside code, real source, the same layer AI Part 7 and Part 12's MCP server both build on top of.
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Enrichment Has to Come First: Adding IOC Lookups to the n8n Alert Router
Extending the Wazuh-to-chat n8n pipeline with an AbuseIPDB enrichment step ahead of the threshold decision — plus a real, source-level dig into why n8n's workflow static data silently stopped persisting inside the Code node's newer isolated-vm sandbox.
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Alert Fatigue Is a Routing Problem: A Wazuh-to-Chat Pipeline in n8n
A noisy SIEM is its own security problem — the fix isn't more alerts, it's better routing. Building and testing a Wazuh-to-chat pipeline in n8n, and two real bugs the build itself turned up.
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From Dropbox to Daily Driver Part 8: An Ansible Control Node, a Second Pi, and What changed=0 Actually Proves
Turning seven parts of manual hardening into something a machine can run: a dedicated Ansible control node, a second Pi built specifically to prove reproducibility, a real gotcha in check mode explained honestly, and a second playbook run that changed nothing at all.
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Text Processing for Network Engineers Part 9: find, xargs, and Safe Bulk Operations Across a Config Tree
Turning "run this check against every config backup from the last 24 hours" from a manual loop into a single composable pipeline, and the null-byte-delimited habit that stops a filename with a space in it from quietly breaking your script.
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Text Processing for Network Engineers Part 4: awk and Turning Command Output Into Reports
Fields, records, BEGIN/END blocks, and associative arrays: turning raw show-command and syslog output into bandwidth totals, error-rate tables, and per-source counts without a single line of Python.
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Text Processing for Network Engineers Part 3: sed and Editing Configs Without Opening a Single File
Substitution, address ranges, in-place edits with a safety net, and the one command that turns "change this IP across 200 saved configs" from an afternoon of find-and-replace into a single line.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 12: Users, Permissions, and the API
Realms, roles, and ACLs underneath the GUI, scoped API tokens for automation, and where Terraform and Ansible actually fit against the same API surface the web GUI itself uses.
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Sn1per Deep Dive Part 4: Workspaces, Reporting, and the Professional 2026 Architecture
What Sn1per Professional 2026 adds over the free Community Edition, documented from the vendor's own release notes since the Pro engine isn't in the public source tree.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 1: What Ansible Is, and Why Agentless Still Wins
Kicking off a thirteen-part Ansible series. Part 1 covers what Ansible actually is, the push-based agentless model and why it still matters against Chef/Puppet/Salt, the control node/managed node mental model, installing Ansible, and your first ad-hoc command against a real inventory.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 10 Lab: Automating a Cisco and FortiGate Fleet With Ansible
Part 10, the second lab: network-specific Ansible modules against a mixed Cisco IOS and FortiGate fleet — cisco.ios facts and config, fortinet.fortios firewall policy objects, connection: network_cli vs httpapi, and a config-drift check playbook.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 11: Error Handling in Anger — Blocks, Rescue, and Partial Failures
Part 11: block/rescue/always for structured error handling, ignore_errors vs failed_when vs ignore_unreachable, max_fail_percentage and any_errors_fatal, and retries/until for polling a service until it's actually ready.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 12: Best Practices — the Style Guide I Actually Follow
Part 12: the Ansible conventions worth treating as non-negotiable — naming, idempotency discipline, directory layout, secrets, tagging restraint, testing gates, and the failure modes that show up once a project outlives its author's memory of writing it.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 13: Does Ansible Still Matter in an MCP/AI World?
Part 13, the closing piece: if an AI agent can SSH in and fix things itself, do playbooks, idempotency, and config management still matter? A case for yes — argued through the same MCP server that writes this very site.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 2: Inventory — Static, Dynamic, and Everything In Between
Part 2 of the Ansible series: INI vs YAML inventory, groups and nested groups, host_vars/group_vars, patterns and limits, and moving to dynamic inventory plugins (AWS, and a network-specific example) once static files stop scaling.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 3: Playbooks, Tasks, and the Idempotency Contract
Part 3: plays and tasks, modules vs shell/command, the idempotency contract that makes Ansible safe to re-run, handlers and notify, check mode and diff mode, and tags for selectively running part of a playbook.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 4: Variables, Facts, and Jinja2 Templating
Part 4: where variables come from, gathering and using facts, the Jinja2 syntax underneath when/template/filters, common filters worth knowing, and building real config templates for both servers and network devices.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 5: Roles and Ansible Galaxy — Structuring Projects That Scale
Part 5: the standard role directory layout, defaults vs vars, role dependencies, ansible-galaxy for installing community roles and collections, and requirements.yml for pinning what a project depends on.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 6: Variable Precedence and Ansible Vault — Secrets Done Right
Part 6: the full variable precedence ladder from role defaults to extra-vars, then Ansible Vault end to end — encrypting whole files and single strings, vault IDs for multiple secret tiers, and keeping vault passwords out of the repo entirely.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 7: ansible.cfg, Performance, and Scaling to Hundreds of Hosts
Part 7: the ansible.cfg precedence and the settings that actually matter, forks and the linear/free strategies, SSH pipelining and ControlPersist, fact caching, and Mitogen as the option to know about even if you don't reach for it.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 8: Testing Ansible — Molecule, ansible-lint, and CI Pipelines
Part 8: ansible-lint and its rule categories, Molecule for spinning up disposable Docker/VM targets and asserting real state with Testinfra, idempotency testing (running a role twice and asserting nothing changed the second time), and wiring it all into GitHub Actions.
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Ansible Deep Dive Part 9 Lab: Zero to Production — a Three-Tier Web App From Bare Metal
Part 9, the first lab: a role-based playbook standing up a load balancer, two app servers, and PostgreSQL from bare Ubuntu boxes — vault-protected credentials, templated HAProxy/env config, notify chains, and a rolling deploy with serial.
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Adding Vendor Route-Table Parsers to route-compare, and Why the Work Lives on a Branch
A follow-up on the route-compare tool: I taught it to read raw show ip route, get router info routing-table all, show route, and show routing route output directly — no Excel cleanup step. The work lives on a branch rather than on main, and this is why.
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Comparing Route Tables Between Two Sources: A Small Python Tool for Audits and Migrations
A self-contained Python utility that takes two Excel route lists, normalises every prefix through ipaddress, finds exact matches and overlaps, preserves invalid entries for audit, and writes a colour-coded Excel report plus CSVs. Includes install guide and full source.
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Building a Polished CLI Tool with Click and Rich: Packaging Network Automation for Other Humans
Turn a working network-automation script into a tool your colleagues will use — moving from argparse to Click, formatted output with Rich, environment-loaded secrets, and pip-installable packaging.
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NAPALM vs Netmiko: Vendor-Agnostic Config vs Raw CLI, and When You Want Both
A practical comparison of NAPALM and Netmiko for network automation — where Netmiko's raw CLI access is the right answer, where NAPALM's compare/replace/rollback abstraction earns its keep, and the hybrid pattern that most production tooling actually settles on.
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Netmiko in Practice: From a Show-Command Script to a Repeatable Audit Tool
A working network engineer's guide to Netmiko — starting from a small repo of mine that runs show commands across a JSON inventory, and extending it into something you can use as a real audit tool with structured output, concurrency, secure credentials, and a sane dry-run for config changes.
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Nornir for Network Engineers: Running Automation Across an Inventory at Scale
A practical introduction to Nornir for engineers whose Netmiko script has grown too big — inventory plugins, structured tasks, parallelism, filtering by site or role, and integrating Netmiko, NAPALM, and pyATS as connection plugins. The framework you reach for once one box has become a hundred.
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Parsing show Command Output: TextFSM, Genie, and TTP for Structured Data
A practical comparison of the three main ways to turn Cisco show output into structured Python data — TextFSM with NTC Templates, Genie/pyATS, and TTP — with worked examples and rules of thumb for picking the right one.