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In my previous life as a firewall admin, I found that there were two key things to maintaining a healthy firewall ACL. First, ensure it passes the necessary traffic! Secondly, ensure that the ACL was cluttered with any unnecessary ACL entries. By making sure our ACL's were clutter-free

When I first started in network automation, I took to Vim, vigorously writing out code. Was it clean code, easy to support and extend? Hell no! I have to admit it was damn ugly code. At the end of the day, I had just started out and was enjoying my

Previously I shared how you can scan your Python code for security issues. However, with the increased use of containers in network automation, I wanted to also share with you a way to locally scan your Docker images for security issues/vulnerabilities using the Docker Scan feature. Docker Scan (Docker

I'm sure, by now that it's no surprise that I`m a huge fan of Batfish! More details on why here. Today I wanted to share with you one of the features that Batfish provides - route analysis. In short, Batfish allows you to model your

I want to share a recent addition to my network automation toolbox - Dq (Dictionary query). Dq is a Cisco Genie library that provides various helper functions to ease the parsing of nested Python dictionaries. For example, let's say we have the following Python dictionary. >>>

After a coffee-fuelled coding session the other day, I suddenly released that I had forgotten to commit. Therefore I had multiple changes in a single file that I needed to place into different commits. After a short bit of Googling, I found this useful little feature within VSCode called Stage

When it comes to network automation we are spoilt with the plethora of tools available to us. One tool that deserves its space within any network automation toolbox is Netmiko. Netmiko is a multi-vendor Python SSH library that simplifies the process of configuring and obtaining data from your network devices.

Git Graph is an extension recently released for Microsofts Visual Studio Code, and I have to say, it's pretty cool! For those of you who are new to VSCode, it can save you a ton of time when developing - highly recommended - check it out here. In

When it comes to open-source network automation tools, NAPALM is one of the heavy hitters in the industry. For those of you who are new to NAPALM, it is: ... a vendor-neutral, cross-platform open-source project that provides a unified API to network devices. Typically NAPALM is used for configuring devices, and