Safari Live Training - Network DevOps

Source code for the training course. Please contact me with any questions. Before beginning, be sure you know how to use git at a basic level on your computer. I teach git in the course so if you don't know how to clone this repository yet, do not worry. For this course, only Linux platforms should be used for the Ansible control/development machine.

Contact information:
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @nickrusso42518

• Download Instructions
• Lab Setup
• Usage

Download Instructions

The easiest way to consume this code is to clone it using SSH or HTTPS.

SSH: git clone [email protected]:nickrusso42518/slt-netdevops

or

HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/nickrusso42518/slt-netdevops

After cloning, you should see the following file system structure:

$ tree --charset=ascii
.
|-- ansible.cfg
|-- hosts.yml
|-- LICENSE
|-- ntp_config.yml
|-- README.md
|-- requirements.txt
|-- requirements.yml
`-- test.yml

Ensure you have Python 3.10 or newer installed along with pip. Feel free to use Python virtualenv if you'd like to test multiple versions.

Visit https://www.python.org/downloads/ to download Python.

sudo python -m ensurepip

or

sudo easy_install pip

You can install the required packages (really just Ansible and a YAML linter) using the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should have access to the ansible command on the correct version.

$ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.16.0]
  config file = /home/ubuntu/slt-netdevops/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path =
    ['/home/ubuntu/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/ubuntu/environments/dec1a/lib/python3.10/site-packages/ansible
  ansible collection location = /home/ubuntu/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
  executable location = /home/ubuntu/environments/dec1a/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.10.12 (main, Nov 20 2023, 15:14:05) [GCC 11.4.0]
    (/home/ubuntu/environments/dec1a/bin/python)
  jinja version = 3.1.2
  libyaml = True

Lab Setup

If you decide to actively follow along during the course, I recommend that you deploy (2) Virtual Cisco IOS or IOS-XE devices. You can use CSR1000v/Cat8000k virtual routers in the cloud, CSR1000v VMware virtual machines via .ova files, simulated environments via EVE-NG, GNS3, or CML, or perhaps even a real hardware. The only prior configuration that these devices require is a privilege 15 username and SSH access. So long as your Ansible control machine can SSH into these devices, you can follow along with course. For continuous integration to work, these network devices need to be accessible over the Internet. For that reason, I recommend using public clouds such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Usage

This repository is kept minimal since the main point of this course is teaching the fundamentals of Network DevOps, not Ansible as a specific tool.

• To edit NTP server variables, open hosts.yml and update the ntp_server variables using valid IPv4 addresses.
• To run the playbook, run ansible-playbook ntp_config.yml from the shell.
• To test the playbook, run ansible-playbook test.yml from the shell. This mimics what Travis CI does each time code is committed to Github.

If you are connecting to devices that that only support legacy SSH options, try adding this configuration to ~/.ssh/config:

Host *
        KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1
        HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss,ssh-rsa
        PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa