On Friday, June 30th, 2023 I gave a talk at NetDevOps Days London on Explaining the business value of network automation - Or why I succeeded the second time around. The YouTube video recording is embedded below:

On Friday, June 30th, 2023 I’ll be giving a talk at NetDevOps Days London. Blurb Explaining the business value of network automation - Or why I succeeded the second time around. Abstract At a previous $dayjob I was brought on board a network engineering team to bring in some expertise in network automation. Along the way, I built a greenfield DC in the UK fully automated, just to watch manual config changes happen on day 2, and the code abandoned.

I have created a simplified version of the Opengear ansible role I’m using in my production DC deployment. See link to the repo below. Opengear’s configuration is a mix of unix and it’s own internal database. To make matters more challenging, the Opengear config format is not really idempotent so you have to watch out when doing tasks like creating new users. So my hack is to essentially overwrite existing users every time I do an ansible playbook run.

I’ve been using 1password as my password manager for many years. They’ve recently released 1password for Linux. I created a quick ansible role to deploy it. It’s not pretty since I couldn’t figure out the cleanest way to deal with gpg, so improvements would be appreciated! ansible_role_1password_linux Requirements Tested on Ubuntu 20.04 Role Variables None

I’ve been keeping an email archive in an SQL database for years, and using MailSteward Pro to make easy work of adding to the archive. I recently had to re-setup my servers, and created an ansible role to make setup of mysql easier. MailSteward wants some non-standard sql password settings, and by default SQL connections are allowed only from localhost, so that needs to be changed. ansible_role_mailsteward_mysql Requirements Tested on Ubuntu 20.

My home router is a Ubiquiti EdgeMAX router running EdgeOS 2.0.6. I chose it because wanted a router that could run sflow for testing purposes. I recently came across someone successfully installing Prometheus node_exporter on EdgeOS, so I gave it a try. Since I’d already ansible-automated the install of node_exporter on a switch running Cumulus Linux, I wrote a new playbook with only minor modifications for EdgeOS and it worked perfectly.