W17BS

Using Containerlabs with CI/CD

More CD than CI but its still cool

Posted on December 3, 2023

I’ve been using containerlab for quite some time now, I’ve had ups and downs with this project and running into some issues during its development but I always go back to it purely because of the native docker support to run container based network operating systems, especially studying for my... [Read More]

Modelling NETCONF/YANG in Pydantic

I love models and I hope models love me

Posted on August 3, 2023

There is nothing better than a good data model in the network automation world. Now this typically refers to building deployable services which are high level and don't get into the depths of the specific YANG model for configuring a specific protocol. There are many good (no... GREAT) tools out... [Read More]

Building a NetFlow collector

Collecting flow logs and storing them efficiently

Posted on June 10, 2023

I apologize in advance for the amount of images and config snippets, I prefer images over text… :-) [Read More]

Pretending you are an IX - NOT FINISHED

Pretending is fun, here we pretend we are an IX providing a peering LAN and need to expose network insights to our customers

Posted on February 16, 2023

How would I expose network insights to customers on my peering LAN? I'd simply build some multi-tenancy framework that allows people to log in and view their port based services and give them all the information (or a subset of information) from the network devices using something like SNMP or... [Read More]

EVPN Distributed Anycast Gateway for VM/MAC mobility

VM mobility makes life easy

Posted on September 15, 2022

VM mobility (or MAC mobility, you’ll find different names around from various vendors) essentially allows us to move a device connected to a PE to another PE within the network without having to perform configuration changes on the device itself, for example take the below topology where we have virtual... [Read More]

Auto DDoS mitigation using BGP Flowspec and Netflow

Another idea that has been implemented by people who know what they are doing...

Posted on August 20, 2022

NOTE: This post is part 1 of 2. Part 2 will be released within the next week of this post. [Read More]

Python for Network Engineers

Best way to learn Python is to reinvent the wheel

Posted on August 2, 2022

There are many tools out there that automatically create python classes based on Yang models (eg. Cisco YDK/YDK-gen, pyyangbind, etc…) but these tools can be so painful due to not being updated, not supporting a specific yang model or just generating the python classes in a mental structure to the... [Read More]

BNG Wholesale Lab - Part 2

Layer 2 and Layer 3 Wholesale for multiple retail ISPs

Posted on July 17, 2022

This post is a multi-part post, the 1st part covers the 2 different models that are widely deployed, initial configuration for the BNG with dynamic templates/service policy maps. The 2nd part will cover the database setup and authorizing a customer onto the network to reach the relevant retail ISP services... [Read More]

BNG Wholesale Lab - Part 1

Layer 2 and Layer 3 Wholesale for multiple retail ISPs

Posted on July 10, 2022

This post is a multi-part post, the 1st part covers the 2 different models that are widely deployed, initial configuration for the BNG with dynamic templates/service policy maps and the 2nd part will cover the shared radius infrastructure and retail ISP#1 own DHCP server instead of using the wholesale BNG... [Read More]

SR-ODN with L3VPN

Segment Routing Traffic Engineering with BGP On Demand Nexthop

Posted on July 9, 2022

Short blog post diving straight into the technical parts. The base topology here is just a flat level-2 IS-IS IGP with Segment Routing enabled, prefix-sid configured on all loopbacks (Node SID) and 10.0.xy.x/24 & 2001:db8:xy::x/64 configured on p2p where x = lowest router # on the segment, y = highest... [Read More]