Every now and again you see a snippet of complex CLI syntax that gives you pause for thought. Last week I saw the command below in a change procedure. The command was being used to verify baseline BGP neighbor state and re-verify after a policy change. 1 2 3 show ip bgp peer-template eBGP_Peers | egrep default | sed ‘s/default://’ \ | tr -s ‘ |\n’ | tr -s ‘ ‘ ‘\n’ | sed ‘s/^/show ip bgp nei /’ \…
Imagine you’ve just designed and deployed a data center. It was hell but you are smiling. Your design is homogenous, simple and elegant. A greenfield datacenter full of shiny, identical network devices. Because the design was so consistent and repeatable you scripted the generation of the device configurations without too much hassle. This is a network with an easily ‘provisioned’ network configuration. But day-one provisioning is only one part of the puzzle. The real prize is a centrally ‘controlled’ network configuration, where all config…
We have a network lab? Spirent presented their new lab-management software, called iTest Lab Optimizer, at network field day 4 recently. Their product name isn’t catchy, but it is very descriptive and addresses a market need. The simple fact is that most lab networks don’t get optimised to their full potential for some of the following reasons: Nobody knows what is in the lab (or that one exists) – Inventory Management The availability of the lab devices is unknown – Availability and…