[AusNOG] (Semi/Somewhat/Paritially)-automated network configuration management

[Christopher Pollock]

Hi Paul,

Fancy seeing you here :)

I think most of us have spent at least some time doing enterprise/campus
type work, and to a certain extent I've seen people want a lot of
information but yeah I think there was some confusion about what was trying
to be performed.

There are any number of programs that will walk your network and pull out
information using various methods, but yeah what you do with that then is
another kettle of fish entirely.  As Mark and a few others mention,
scripting is part of our job and I think the right answer is modifying an
existing tool to pull out the data you want.

Taking a moment to pimp Andrew Fort again, he suggested a while back that
there's value in writing your own NMS that can do exactly what you want to
it to, and had a bunch of time-saving tips that he'd picked up along the
way.  Depending on the size of the network and how much you want to
visualise, there's merit in at least considering some of them!  Like adding
an understanding of how to figure out what VLANs are on what port depending
on the type of device, and making sure they marry up.  Easy on some
devices, not so easy on others.

I suppose network configuration is such a wide and varied thing that it's
difficult to model all useful configuration so it's really up to us to
decide what we need to capture and model it ourselves.

--
Christopher Pollock,
io Networks Pty Ltd.
e. chris at ionetworks.com.au
p. 1300 1 2 4 8 16
d. 07 3188 7588
m. 0410 747 765
skype: christopherpollock
twitter.com/chrisionetworks
http://www.ionetworks.com.au
In-house, Outsourced.



On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Paul Gear <ausnog at libertysys.com.au> wrote:

>  On 27/07/12 12:32, Christopher Pollock wrote:
>
> I suppose the short answer is that this is a fairly bespoke requirement.
>  I can't think of a time I've ever thought to try to do this.
>
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> Really?  I can understand it being fairly unimportant in the service
> provider world, but would have thought it's what every enterprise, campus,
> or data centre network engineer would want to know (in many cases, would *
> have* to know) about his or her network.
>
> Perhaps i muddied the waters by talking about producing a script to
> perform the VLAN manipulations.  If the data were provided in an
> appropriate form, producing a script would be a trivial exercise, so let's
> assume that i don't care about that for the moment.
>
> Is there possibly a better place to ask - a list more
> enterprise/campus-oriented?  I find it really hard to believe that no one
> else wants to know this.
>
> Regards,
> Paul
>
> P.S. Looking forward to talking more about this in person next week... :-)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> AusNOG mailing list
> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20120727/8375a360/attachment.html>