Oh, Hi Mark!

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Hey all,

I’ve been buried in a bunch of stuff. Since I last posted, I wrote a few books, just finished an INE series, and earned a couple of JNCIEs.

Stay tuned, I’ll see if I can find some time to make the odd post again and also start making content for my YouTube.

I made a YouTube channel!

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Hey All,
I finally got around to making a youtube channel, and managed to upload some 200-301 content.
The first videos up are how to setup a wireless lab, and the next batch will be about DNA Center, followed by the new automation topics.
Check it out if that interests you:
 
I’ll also be moving on to CCNP and CCIE content as time moves on.

Ticket Please – A ServiceNow Automation Post

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Awhile back I did a post on why screen scraping is annoying compared to APIs because you have to spend some effort cleaning up the output before you can use it.

Today we are going to have some fun with Cisco’s PyAts toolset and their Parse_genie Ansible plugin. Ultimately we will parse some output from a Cisco router and use it to create a trouble ticket in ServiceNow!

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So I occasionally stream on Twitch

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Hi All,

Man I really need to get around to finishing some posts on here! I got some neat ideas I’m working on finishing soon(ish?)!

In the meantime I have been experimenting with doing some labbing on Twitch at:
http://www.twitch.tv/PacketThrower

I’m currently going over some CCNA/CCNP Security stuff on there so you can check out the recordings if you are interested. They are still a bit rough but I’m getting there. Eventually I will probably either cut up the streams and dump them on YouTube or record them but its all for fun.

Bossing Cisco Around with Ansible

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I’ve been talking about Infrastructure as Code / Automation / Python a lot with colleagues and peers so I figured I may as well make a quick intro to ansible post since it is just too hot out today.

I’ll preface this by saying, this is only really covered exam wise in the CCIE Written and possibly the cloud track but I figure it might be neat to see. If this is decently well received I might continue on and look at some of the other Evolving Technologies in the written.
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Taking a Rest(ful API)

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Yesterday we did a quick discussion on what python is all about, I closed things out by showing a simple script that runs a show command and prints the results. Running a script that pushes commands and looks for certain output is called “screen scraping” since python doesn’t know or care what device it connects to and what the output should look like so it just “scraps” the results and lets you deal with it.Yesterday we did a quick discussion on what python is all about, I closed things out by showing a simple script that runs a show command and prints the results. Running a script that pushes commands and looks for certain output is called “screen scraping” since python doesn’t know or care what device it connects to and what the output should look like so it just “scraps” the results and lets you deal with it.

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