A customer noticed that some SFPs installed in a Cisco Nexus were particularly 🔥hot🔥 and asked for a command to be able to see the temperature of all the transceivers. Sounds like a good opportunity to write some code! One of the things I love most about my job is when customers call me with odd requests. These unique …

Performing a traceroute is a very common task for network operations. In this post I share a simple solution I implemented to make it easier to read the command output. Problem I have noticed many requests to the NetOps team for clarification of traceroute output. The Service Desk team does not understand the …

Cisco ISE is one of my favorite products. Although I cannot call myself an expert on it, I have worked on numerous designs where network security and segmentation are based on ISE with excellent results. More than a few times I have needed to document the inventory of nodes in a cluster, and the certificates in use at …

When two large companies merge, they may be required to merge their respective networks as well, including address spaces. A few years ago I found myself supporting a client in this very situation. The client had started to create a large Excel file with the prefixes in use, to be used for analysis. I proposed to the …

In this post I describe how to use Poetry to build and package a tool to verify the status of Meraki Firewalled Services (ICMP, SNMP and Web). Business case A customer with a large Cisco Meraki network is not using templates for $reasons. Warning If you manage a Meraki network, use templates! This mistake choice makes …

A journey from writing a script to publishing my first Python module. Network automation has been one of my favorite topics for a long time. I've attended seminars, trainings and wrote low-quality code some of which got me an awesome t-shirt 😁 I shared my code and all I got was an awesome #Cisco #DevNet t-shirt 🏆 …

Writing code today often means interacting with API of many products. For me it means the possibility to integrate existing tools or create new functions. Sometimes it is just a matter to create a small utility. The Problem Meraki Dashboard does not include a page that shows the CDP/LLDP neighbors. }Can we do better …

Asset management, documentation and monitoring are important parts of any IT Ops team but at the same time they are } boring, repetitive, error prone. Last summer I spent some time investigating the possibility to integrate open source projects I like to create a Minimum Viable Product for asset management/monitoring …

Lerveraging FMC API and TextFSM to import objects from ASA. Automation and programmability is not a new topic for me. Having studied Information Technology in High School I've always coded somehow, never making it my primary focus but always using it as a tool to make my life easier. I remember a script I did in Pascal …

Quite often cable management is something that starts well when a new IDF is deployed and then gets messier over time. Cable p0rn channel on reddit shows plenty of example of how cabling should look like. I usually don't do cabling and I'm not good at it either so I'll not post my home lab setup ;-) Unpatchable? The …

Summertime usually means a busy period for Network Engineers, customers are on holidays and we have the opportunity to performs all the changes that impact network connectivity. For me this usually means core switch replacement. Today I was moving a configuration from an HP8200 to a Cisco 4500, taking care of all the …

The problem In my last post about Linux at command I talked about notifications on my mobile. In most of my automation scripts I prefer notifications to come to my mobile instead of via email or SMS (really? in 2015?) because: it is always with me I check it thousands times a day (I know you too ;-) ) it is a preferred …

Another post on Linux commands, short and simple but very useful: at. The problem As IT pros we are all comfortable with the change window concept. This window usually opens at night or during the week-end and sometimes the change actually just requires a few commands on a Linux machine. The automation The at command …

SecureCRT is one of my favorite tools. Today I had a chance to use it in a way I didn't expected. The problem A customer called about a problem with a radio link that sometimes loses connection with the remote unit. The workaround was to reload the base unit to restore the link. The process was manual: the customer …

This week I attended a two days training of Cisco DCINX9K. The training is focused on Cisco Nexus 9000 switches in NX-OS mode. NX9K can run two different software images, the full ACI image with all the cool SDN stuff and the traditional NS-OX image with some cool features like Python, Rest API, VX-LAN and more. Now …