Friday, October 11, 2019

Using Netbox and Ansible to facilitate network changes

My organization is a medium sized University. As with most universities(not all) we are short on funds. Our management has told us that we need a Network Management Solution. So we started looking at Solarwinds and Manage Engine. Liked some things with Manage Engine. Liked some things with Solarwinds. Management then comes down and says.."Oh, you have no money for your NMS." sigh Ok. We're used to this. Now we have to grow our own. We have been using Netbox for over a year now. However, a lot of it has been a manual process. But there are some neat features, like being able to have interfaces associated with a device and all kinds of data associated with the Interface. So, we got the idea of just using Netbox as our Management tool as well as our Source of Truth. So, I sat down 2 days this week and hacked out some python that uses pynetbox(which has almost no documentation) and some Jinja2 templates. I can import and export data out. Ended up using tags for the voice vlan. since Jeremy says that you can do it with Untagged and Tagged VLANs. sigh Not the same...Anyway, that's another discussion. My question to the community, is anyone else doing this? Is anyone using Netbox to actually change your configs? If so, how is it working? Do you have any hiccups? Are you using Ansible to push the configs out? Thanks!



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