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  • 9 min read

Nokia YANG tree and Path Browser

Automation Is as Good as the Data Models is a chapter's name in the great book titled "Network Programmability With YANG". These days you won't bedazzle anyone by just providing the set of YANG models for the flagship network products. The models alone, albeit a great step forward, do not guarantee that programmability will start flourish.
The automation tools leveraging YANG is often a missing link and in this post I am talking about the Nokia YANG tree and Path Browser tools which help both our internal automation squad and our customers to be more effective working with our YANG models.

  • 6 min read

Easily exposing your local resources with ngrok and fwd

I bet every one of you was in a situation when you bloody needed to expose some local resource over internet. Letting a remote colleague to look at your work, delivering a demo being off-VPN, or any other reason to have your service be reachable over Internet.

And it was never easy; corporate firewalls stand on-guard ensuring you can't be agile and productive 😉

In this post I'll share with you how I glue ngrok and fwd tools together to make my routers management interfaces exposed over Internet in a few clicks for free.

  • 6 min read

Getting XML data sample for a given leaf in a YANG model

We can praise YANG as long as we want, but for an end user YANG is useful as the tooling around it and the applications leveraging it. Ask yourself, as a user of any kind of NETCONF/YANG application what was the last time you looked at a *.yang file content and found something that was needed to consume that application?
In a user role I personally never look at a YANG source, though, I look at the tree or HTML representation of YANG all the time; Thats is the YANG human interface for me.

And even in these human friendly formats you can't find all the answers; for example, looking at the YANG tree, how do you get the XML data sample of a given leaf? Thats what we will discover in this post.

  • 4 min read

NETCONF console in a docker container

Its an engineers core ability to decompose a complex task in a set of a smaller, easy to understand and perform sub-tasks. Be it a feature-rich program that is decomposed to classes, functions and APIs or a huge business operation captured in steps in a Methods Of Procedure document.

In a network automation field where the configuration protocols such as NETCONF or gRPC are emerging, it is always needed to have a quick way to validate an RPC or Notification feature before implementing this in a code or a workflow.

This blog post is about a handy tool called netconf-console which allows you to interface with your network device using NETCONF quick and easy. And, of course, I packed it in a smallish container so you can enjoy it hassle-free on every docker-enabled host.

  • 12 min read

Creating a Bootstrap based front-end for your simple REST service

Not a single day goes by without me regretting I haven't mastered any front-end technology like React/Angular or the likes. Why would a network engineer want to step into the game that seems orthogonal to its main area of expertise, one might ask?

Truth be told, I wasn't born with an urge to learn anything that has javascript under the hood, but over the years, working within the network/backend silos, I realized, that being able to create a simple front-end service is a jewel that fits every crown, no matter what title you wear.

This tutorial is based on the task real task of building up a web interface (pycatjify.netdevops.me) for the pycatjify REST API service deployed as a serverless function. The end result is a simple, completely free and reusable Bootstrap based front-end boilerplate which can be used as a foundation for a similar task.

  • 5 min read

How to download an M3U/M3U8 playlist (stream) without a special software

I love the tech conferences that share the recordings of the sessions without hiding behind the registration or a pay wall. Luckily the trend to share the knowledge with a community openly is growing, yet you still can find a nice talk hidden behind the above mentioned walls.

Sometimes an easy registration is all it takes, but then, how do you watch it offline? For example, I do love to catch up with with the recent trends and experiences while being on a plane, meaning that I just cant afford to be hooked up to the Internet.

If a talk is published on the YouTube, you are good to go and download it with any web service that pops up in the google search by the term "Youtube download". But what do we do when the video is hosted somewhere in the CDN and is served as a dynamic playlist of *.ts files?

Here I share with you an easy way to download the videos from an m3u/m3u8 playlist.

  • 3 min read

Saturating the network with FTP

While working on the Ipanema Wan Opt VNF integration with Nuage Networks I stumbled upon an interesting case which required to max out the network with FTP traffic. The tricky point there was to create the FTP connection which won't be limited by the disk IO performance. Especially, considering that the disks were kind of slow in the setup I had.

It turns out, you can use the in-memory devices in the FTP communication path /dev/zero -> /dev/null, ruling out the slowliness that could have been added by the disks. Lets figure out how to do that!

  • 6 min read

Prepping up for and passing the Certified Openstack Administrator Exam

Shortly after I passed AWS CSA exam I went on a hunt for the next certification to claim. Decided to tackle the Openstack COA certification first saving the Docker/Kubernetes certification for a later occasion.

There is a common joke floating around: "Oh, is Openstack still a thing?" - yes, its pretty much still a thing, especially in the Telecom area where VMs are the only viable option for the most of the cases (think VNFs).
Openstack also powers our teams public SDN lab that allows to provision a fully functional Nuage environment in a matter of minutes. So I wanted to get a better operational knowledge of Openstack to be able to support and tune the platform if necessary.

Disclaimer: I took the recently updated COA exam which is based on the Openstack Pike release, although I did not face any Pike-specific questions during the exam. This does not mean that the exam content will stay the same throughout the course evolution, so watch out for the updates.

  • 10 min read

Prepping up for and passing the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate

On May 11th I passed the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate exam which was harder then I expected. In this memo I will outline how I prepared to this exam, what topics you better pay more attention to and some tips and hints I could give to anyone going for AWS CSA exam.

Disclaimer: I took the original AWS CSA exam, not the one that was launched in Feb 2018; this older version is only available to schedule till August 2018. After that date the newer version of this exam will be the only one available. Watch out, it has a new set of objectives.