Network Reconnaissance
Explore how to automate network reconnaissance by gathering device facts and executing show commands using Ansible. Understand how to build dynamic network documentation, track topology changes, and prepare your network for automation. Gain skills to efficiently collect up-to-date information and execute tactical network changes using ios_facts, ios_command, and ios_config modules.
We'll cover the following...
Gather information
Network reconnaissance is a massive challenge to tackle on an enterprise network, even with powerful network management systems in place. Many commands must be executed at the CLI to capture the information required to troubleshoot a problem, or to design a new solution.
It can be tedious to hop from device to device and collect
information that may be stale or obsolete by the time the
change is drafted. It especially does not scale well for larger changes.
Now that the inventory file hosts is ready, Ansible can
execute playbooks against the devices.
Some advantages to this approach are as follows:
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Excellent starting point to network automation
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Improves software development skills
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Non-disruptive and non-intrusive, with little chance of anything going wrong
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Simple and easy to get going
To achieve this approach, converts the commands normally run on a device to a simple script Next, dry run the processes. From here, start building a centralized library of customized network utilities available for engineers or operators to run on-demand, or scheduled for execution daily or weekly. One ...