Uncategorized – The Networking Steward

Automating vJunOS and vEOS using OOP in Python (Pydantic)

Posted on October 17, 2023 by user

In my last post I scripted automating a standup of a KVM lab w/ vJUNOS, vEOS and some ubuntu containers.

I don’t quite like the code and it’s difficult to maintain so many ‘if’ and ‘for’ statements to reparse an inventory files key/values. There is an easy solution to this and that is using an object.

Using objects shortcuts a lot of the re-parsing of the inventory file and just parses the file once to create an object for a given KVM or container type. The drawbacks of using objects in python is that I must use Pydantic which seems to add a few more seconds of delay and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in Python may not be beginner friendly. From my viewpoint it’s best to write code based on who is going to maintain it. Such that I wouldn’t write Object-Oriented Python and hand it off to a beginner in Python and expect them to maintain it.

vJunOS-Switch and virtual labs

Posted on May 4, 2023October 16, 2023 by user

At the end of 2022 vMX was announced to be End-of-Life. This was met with dissapointment from my end as it was/is one of the better virtual offerings to emulate a router and be relatively assured that bugs would be at a minimum due to it’s commercial support.

Just recently a new offering from Juniper appeared called vJunOS switch which is more in the vein of vEOS-lab in that it’s free but also requires no login to download (vEOS-lab requires a login to download).

vJunOS Switch is a great addition to my virtual home virtual lab and I’ll demonstrate how to stand it up (doing it my own way and not using the documentation of course!)

Python Scripting, Classes, DataClasses and Pydantic

Posted on October 20, 2022October 15, 2023 by user

I’ve begun to focus more on Python as I’ve taken on different projects this past year. I wanted to make a quick post about the different ways to accomplish the same thing. There’s no ‘wrong way or right way’ but it’s more about the given situation that each way to accomplish the same goal fits.

So let’s dive in.

vMX and vEOS RFC 5549 interop, EVPN Layer-2 inter-op, etc.

Posted on March 22, 2022March 24, 2022 by user

I began this lab with the hopes of just showing some simple inter-op use cases but unfortunately so much time lapsed between my last blog post I kept having new ideas before I could publish. So this blog post has these subjects packed in for vMX and vEOS:

Explore a way to make interface creation less of a burden on KVM:
- sub-ints (dot1q tagging) as a method to get around KVM interface creation
- vlans as a method to get around KVM interface creation
An eBGP unnumbered setup for an underlay using RFC 5549 (interop b/t vEOS and vMX)
vMX and vEOS EVPN Layer-2 interop (type-2 routes)
vMX stitch from EVPN to Layer-3 VPN (vpnv4)

Let’s dive in.

Lab Virtualization

Posted on March 21, 2022March 24, 2022 by user

I started with GNS3 and Cisco IOS as my lab virtualization tool nearly 10 years ago. And GNS3 w/ Olive before the days of vMX. These days there are many choices but I still I mainly use KVM/lib-virt for my lab and occasionally containers. Mostly due to my need to test dataplane with Juniper’s vMX. If I had no requirement to use Juniper or vMX then I would likely move to a native container solution.

Hello world!

Posted on January 28, 2022February 15, 2022 by user

I’m starting this blog to document things as I learn them and also different interop scenarios I come across. The intention is to share information and any quirks I find. Especially on topics I can’t seem to find any information about by doing cursory searches on the internet.