this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that'll expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers next week on gordon ramsay's network nightmares all right you've all been given the task to build a lab of a sample company's enterprise network let's have a look at the first one okay so far i'm seeing ssh only access very nice distribution to accesses layer 2 nothing wrong with that wait hang on your stp mode isn't rapid you're using straight basic 802.1d stp what is the matter with you that being said that's probably forgivable as long as you have your stp root bridge manually configured with priority and of course you don't you mean to tell me you just walk around all hunky-dory not caring who your root bridge is all right i've had enough of this layer too it's driving me absolutely bonkers okay up to the core now looks like we have layer three links connected directly from just a core bit of ospf going on there hang on physically point to point links and you have slash 30s configured what could you possibly need with those other two addresses you think ips grow on trees then and you have the default ospf network type on a point-to-point link of course you do you want to have a drbdr election for two routers all right that's it i'm canceling the show will gordon ramsay really cancel the entire show five minutes into the second episode find out next week on network nightmares in the meantime stay tuned for the art of network engineering oh thank you oh that was fantastic all right tim you know i'm not sure how i should feel about that that was a pretty different tempo from bob ross you nailed it awesome you nailed it man he nailed it yeah and i will i i should say uh that was meant to be over the top i wasn't calling anybody out directly for for any of those uh over-the-top best practices but i will stand by my assumption that gordon ramsay does probably call them rooters yeah yes i was i was waiting for an effort well it's a family show all right i i am aj murray at no blinky blinky that was tim burtino at tim burtino tim how you doing hello everyone i am well it's been a good week aj i hope you're doing well doing very well thank you thank you andy at andy laptop at uh permitipandyandy.com how are you doing sir i've been off work for three days and i'm so chill i was just gonna say you're looking very gentle zandy's andy's here you gotta love sandy i'm so happy when i'm out there aj we're just gonna go right into it i think that's a sign i'm good man how you doing aj i'm doing real well um yeah i'm settling into my new job i'm having a great time i'm loving it i passed an exam today i'm pretty excited about i got my aws cloud practitioner locked in so that's pretty exciting nice nice thank you thank you appreciate that so yeah life's good that's good dan at howdy packet howdy dan howdy howdy how's life in dan's world oh you know it's uh it's going good just uh working on this house you know trying to get it sold doing some more electrical some of that stuff you know ooh you're daring i got a guy for that yeah there's a lot of things i'll do to my own house electrical is not one of them and that's mostly because every time i try to i uncover some sort of amateur hour that's happened uh previously in my home and i just i don't want to touch amateur hour yeah that's because someone like me right and that sound means it's time for the wins winning in our discord channel this week is tata the automator absolutely amazing win so on tuesday they passed the a plus core one on wednesday they passed the a plus core two on thursday they passed the n plus on friday they passed the server plus they later got an email directly from the comptia director of the emea and they were offered a ticket to attend the conference and speak about their experience taking all of these exams and passing them in just four short days absolutely amazing job and congratulations tata the automator angel english i hope i got that right starting a new role as a senior knock analyst congratulations dan jackson passed the ccna and our very own tim bertino passed his encore exam and is one huge step closer to the ccnp enterprise congratulations tim passed the fortinet nse five congratulations to everybody winning on our discord channel if you want your win heard on the podcast you can go to art of dead end dot com forward slash iatj for it's all about the journey join and drop your win in the winning channel and we'll read it here on the podcast new patreon alicia marquez is joining us thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering podcast and we thank all of our listeners for their support for what we do here thank you so much now back to the show this week for uh for tonight's episode i am super excited does not cover the word that i i feel right now i i can't really explain my feelings but i i'm very happy to welcome john capibanco to the show uh john how are you i'm at the edge of my seat i i'm super excited too uh we've been talking a long time about this and uh i'm i'm really excited to be here this is this is really special to me so thank you for the invitation and uh i'm really you know as a fan of your work collectively i think what you've done for the community the whole niche that you've carved out for yourselves you should be very proud of yourselves all of you guys really good big big win for just this show and this platform that you've you've provided people wow uh to thank thank you john i mean that means a lot coming from you uh we we certainly appreciate all the work that you do uh so so thank you thank you very much for those kind words about about what we do here appreciate that um so i don't know where to start with you you have so much cool stuff going on i do want to start by saying uh congratulations you um you recently won an award devnet create uh and so i i just really want to say congratulations very well deserved award for the devnet creator uh so so tell us a little bit about that if you could yeah that was that was really exciting for me i got a random email from um eric teal and um i was really excited like what's eric why is eric reaching out to me and to tell me that i had won this creator award and i uh it never entered my mind i didn't know that i was even nominated or like i knew there was a thing as a creator award but i never i certainly never considered anything that i've been doing worthy of it so i was i was florida i'm still floored one of the most exciting things to me was um seeing my mom and dad sharing cisco devnet content on facebook instead of uh you know minion memes and stuff seeing like my parents sharing definite stuff on facebook was super proud you know i was super excited and uh really humbled by the whole experience so so yeah thank you and um you know yeah we can start wherever you want my career my interest in computers networks automation i'm here for all of it guys i really am who you are and what you do awesome let's do that so so let's start with yeah we are well we all know that but what do you do right now and then let's go back to how did you get into this whole thing called i.t sure so i in my most of you know me from merlin in my open source work which is kind of like my superhero alter ego after my day job but in my day job i actually do run uh a sophisticated complex network for the canadian house of commons the parliament of canada in ottawa so this is you know like the equivalent of the white house in the states i i run the network for the canadian parliament and i joined them eight years ago to um you might heard cisco use some of the terminology digitize the business well we're not a business but we wanted they wanted to build a next generation cisco network and i mean all 40 buildings retrofitted the data center the edge the perimeter the the firewalling i mean i could keep going wireless voice over ip services that they didn't have when i joined and a digital framework and network obviously with a focus on security and resilience and reliability and and it was something that i um it was a real challenge that that i was excited to to do this and it's a real privilege and honor for me to work for that organization and i never uh prior to that i i had only dreamed about not only the organization but i'm about the technology and the computers and stuff right the scale and the complexity of this network is something that i you know it really was a challenge for me and i had to lean on studying and learning and even even when i got the job i can remember in my first week them talking about um vrf design and i remember coming home and telling my wife i think i'm in over my head like they're talking about a technology that i don't know anything about i said i'm almost a ccnp at that time i don't know if i had it or not yet but i had done a lot of cisco studies and i remember thinking how come i've never heard of a vrf before and this place is going to build their whole network using them and i don't know anything about them so i had this real splash of like you know imposter syndrome and was i up for this job and maybe i've made a mistake and i should go back does the old job would they take me back you know so that's what i do and um five years ago probably about halfway in my journey with the canadian parliament we had a particular change doesn't matter think of a change at scale i think it was qos or ospf some change that we needed to touch a lot of devices ideally in the shortest amount of time to reduce the impact in the outage and i was i wasn't satisfied with our approach of building this network was one thing and then maintaining it and supporting it and operating it is a whole nother problem right and it was that second problem that i needed automation to step in and help me do things at scale with it's not about the speed it is and it isn't like that's a nice thing to have is if it's fast but i need it to work right that's really the ultimately i need it to be bring up a healthy state that was defined by my intent um so you know i don't want to go too fast into the automation stuff but when i got my start in it um so and this is i hope people listening i know you have a really big fan base and all different walks of life may be listening to this i used to drive forklift and work on a heavy gauge aluminum machine like in a factory for 12 hours a shift uh steel toe boots and the hard hat and the whole deal and after a few years of that i was still a pretty young man at the time i decided to go back to school and um and and try to you know build on my passion for computers and and i took a programming course at the local community college and that that changed everything that changed the trajectory of my life for the for the for the better absolutely for the better and and everything the rest is sort of history now my first few years in it were hard it was hard for me to break into the field if you look at my about page there you sort of see a bunch of small little stints with various organizations but is that too much that's a lot to unpack but no that's sort of my introduction i want to stop you with the forklift so why did you go back to school you're busting your butt in the forklifts working really hard long hours it seems like there's a big pivot point in your life was there a particular thing that happened that you said i need to go back to school um just the general malaise and depression and and mental health i'm i'm physically a big guy i'm like six five and i weigh about 275 pounds and i was there because i was six five and i weighed 275 pounds and handle heavy heavy aluminum now i didn't want it i didn't want to necessarily do that be a physical mule for the rest of my life right and and i just i don't know why i went back to school but but i you know i knew i could do more and i knew that um even though i was paid fairly well like a good blue collar union job and i could probably still be there working pressing those buttons and pushing that machine and that metal around um i don't know how good my back or my knees would be but but i could have probably retired there you know what i mean after 30 years of it yeah i was curious if you got hurt i had a physical job and got hurt and that's part of what pushed me back to school so i was just curious selfishly um well i was i was almost killed in an industrial accident there once and that certainly opened my eyes whether or not i wanted to put my life on the line every day someone left a part in the machine and anyway yeah i was i was like a few inches away from being killed a piece of a piece of metal struck me and um had it had me here instead of here i don't know right like this might not be here right so i it woke me up and i was like so if you look i i actually was given an award from the college because um so i made a i made a move with the company and the union and the everybody was involved to get off of the 12-hour machine onto the eight-hour machine because the eight-hour machine had three rotations and i could give up my day shifts for night shifts so that's what i did i i i worked i went to college from like eight to four and then i went to the factory and worked till midnight for two weeks and then the third week was midnight to seven and then school till four um yeah yeah that's how i went back to my school and kept my job i needed to get out of there yeah it was it's tough i hated to manage both i didn't i didn't party or drink i had to work like i went to school and i worked i i didn't have a regular college experience same john i want to go back you know no it's an important part of your story i think it's important to bring that out yeah right i do want to go back to what you said when you started uh working for the parliament and you said that you ran into something new vrf in this instance that you had never seen before and that you needed to learn it and the imposter syndrome set in how did you deal with that how do you continue to deal with that that's a really good question so i that particular instance i like went right to my route book from my ccnp box set it was like why did you let me down official study guide and i just combed it for vrfs and then so then it was like i hit where i actually went was and i think it's an underutilized resource actually was the free cisco live portal so i actually went to cisco live on-demand stuff and i found some very good vrf related stuff decks and breakout sessions and you know brk426 or whatever i found a few of those that helped me um the other thing was big fans of that resource i got my hands dirty right yeah yeah i i think it's underutilized the live is it's like being there at home on demand in your browser or whatever right can i throw so go go oh yeah go ahead uh so so one thing i want to go back to is you said you you started going back to school and did you say you you went for like a programming degree yeah so i actually went for a three-year computer program or analyst diploma and okay we talked a little bit andy before we started about automation and ease and easy versus hard and the terminology and stuff i so right i actually went to school for three years i wrote c plus plus and cobalt and kicks and jcl and visual basic and java and javascript like i went to school for this stuff it was 20 years ago but it's like riding a bike right where i know how to write a for loop i know how to read javascript because i went to school for that but here's the funny thing dan my placement so we did a co-op for our it was like the last year and a half we did a co-op in the summer between my co-op was with the ministry the ontario ministry of health um but in a system support role so i remember saying like i'm not i didn't graduate with any real programming experience in the field and i have this year of frontline support and systems building and networking and server type stuff i you know i don't the two didn't mesh at that time there was no devops right i'm the og devops i went my placement in the field was building networks and computers but i graduated as a programmer so yeah that's why if you look my first certification that i wrote was my a plus because i had to start from the bottom of the systems world i did i decided i had another break point do i want to pursue being a programmer and try to find a job as a junior developer somewhere which was hard for me and or do i pursue this networking windows desktops windows servers type world it versus is we could say and i i like networking more at that time i just i don't know i enjoyed it so i i pursued my a plus and my network plus and then a bunch more certifications i really thought i was going to be once i started with the insurance company and actually get my foot in with a company and they give me some responsibilities and it wasn't just a contract i i started in the help desk i became the senior help desk person then i moved to the windows team now here's the funny story you're going to see a bunch of windows exams and certs like four years of my life and i wanted to get the it wasn't ea uh it wasn't mcse anymore in 2008 it was called itp enterprise admin ea still but it was seven microsoft exams including the vista exam and um the day that i passed it i brought the piece of paper into my director at the time really excited i've got news and they beat me to the punch they said no we've got news we've got to meet can you come into my office this afternoon no problem i have something i want to share you and i was going to like show off this enterprise admin designation and he's like we're moving into the network team what are you talking about i said just pass my i just passed my enterprise admin you know what he did he pulled out my network plus and held it up he said yeah but you've got your network this is like you can't get any better with a microsoft exam than this it's like i'm like this is hard stuff and he's like no but you've got this comptia network plus we're gonna put you on the networking team and i was like that was my first corporate world like they don't they're not really connected with maybe certifications and what means what but there was like for them absolute parity between my network plus and my microsoft certified enterprise administrator that there was no difference to them they're like we're putting on the network team all right yeah hey yeah i was curious so then i said certainly they actually had a good news sorry yeah go ahead go ahead uh so that i was curious when you said that you went to school for programming i was like well so how did you get into networking but then there it is i think i've seen it that's the question i want to ask you john from a coding background was it easier learning networking than learning coding because i'm a networking guy trying to learn coding and man it's a mountain oh so my programming course there was one single networking module and so i don't the college certainly believed that all you needed was a semester of networking to have subnetting ping right basic stuff not to not an n a not a ccna level not even a network plus level a semester of college level networking um i think that networking is a little more challenging because there's layer one and physical things in the way i don't you know what i mean i don't know if that makes sense but a for loop is going to run forever unless it's interrupted a network can be disrupted a lot easier than a application in my opinion um but dan how i got into networking to back up this we're moving into the network speech that they were giving me uh they actually can i mention a training provider i don't know i don't want to oh yeah yeah sure oh yeah sure yeah yeah no yeah yeah so anyway okay so i just didn't wanna they they sent me on the global knowledge ccna boot camp which at that time in 2010 i want to say was a 60-hour five-day so five 12-hour days plus probably two hours of homework a day boot camp for the n a i did that because i you know they wanted to give me a fighting chance of putting me on the network team i also actually had the keys so i had an admin login i had real network gear to sign into and play with so i got my n a pretty quickly after the boot camp and then from there i just never i never wanted to let my n a expire it was so hard it was so hard and i still have this fear in the back of my mind if i let any of these things slip i've got to write that in a again and i do not want to do that i don't know about you guys but i still n a was harder than t-shoot route switch design professional data center professional i'm telling you that n.a exam i wrote the first one so anybody listening out here if you're if you're struggling with it the struggle is real okay that's a real struggle to get the ccna that was a tough exam still maintained today to me one of the hardest i've ever passed and then i was like i went in there kind of like you know i passed the enterprise admin for microsoft i mean how hard could this i was like i can't click back what do you what do you mean i can't click the back button the microsoft i can do whatever i want they're like you log into the microsoft exam and they're like don't run regex or regedit okay i won't run regedit and don't reboot the server sandbox okay i can live with that but there's no like you can't click next my answers are locked in are you serious it took me six minutes of exam time to process the fact that that i couldn't go back to question one i just sat there dumbfounded like that was my answer like i can't change that so so john i i just wanna i've had the opposite experience right because my first certain exams were cisco and i i was used to the fact that i couldn't go back and then i took another another oem's exams and i'm like you can go back you can review questions before you submit the exam what is this wizard stuff this is crazy that's hilarious this one's hardcore man well then you write something like the itil where you can even phone a friend i think i'm taking the wrong test yeah oh my gosh so um yeah so that's sort of my journey in the nutshell on certifications i don't want anyone to get like you know don't be overwhelmed by my list i'm i'm i'm in i'm an older man now i've been doing this a long time and i i'm telling the guys earlier um like i try to write at least one exam a year and that's been like a personal goal almost like a new year's resolution of mine i sort of forecast my year ahead say okay i'm going to try this one in may and this one in november and if i fail in may then i'll try it again in november so like i yes i've accumulated quite a few certs and exams some for sure i failed one three times i think you know so my my dcm my ccna data center exam two of two the second one killed me killed me sans and the stan the the storage area network stack and fcoe and uh it was a killer it really killed me that exam twice it killed me um i think one of them even spoiled my cisco live i took it as my free exam and i spent the week kind of pouting in the bar like i failed that twice so so like it happens and like i don't say i'm the best of us but it happens to the best of us where you get knocked down you fail it you're maybe maybe you weren't ready like and that's you know boils down to swallowing that pill of i you know i just wasn't ready for the exam you know i didn't fail i just wasn't ready for it this attempt you know so when you take the the two exams a year like how do you pick your exams is it because of stuff you're working on or do you just see that as like relevant skills that you want to acquire that you know maybe it's something you haven't been exposed to yet that you want to be exposed to how you know how how do you make that selection it i i sort of have a projection um for me i used to anyway it's almost like world of warcraft if i get these three achievements then i get this meta achievement and i get a mount so like sometimes i used to pick and choose based on what designation it would get me right um other times it was pragmatic so i get a lot of you got to end p day on on route switch and you did dp route switch like why haven't you taken your ie how come you haven't done the lab or whatever that at that point in time our our enterprise my day job my clark kent roll they um we just got a brand new nexus data center and i was like if i'm going to build and support and maintain and automate this thing i really have to know nexus so i i made a choice to and when i do these things i always try to start with associate even if maybe i could have skipped a professional or whatever i i like to do exams and read books it's just something i enjoy and it's weird i don't enjoy the exam or failing but i enjoy knowledge seeking let's say right so data center was like i'm gonna get n a yeah and then np in data center and then that would give me np np data center and dp and then maybe i'll look at name then maybe i'll look at ie and then you know what happens devnet comes along and it's like put the ie back on hold i gotta do it ben that i need that associate right and um speaking of exams so i don't know maybe you guys do you guys have like a favorite it used to be t-shoot for me where you got the tickets and you actually had to do tickets and the exam love that exam top favorite exam of all time and then i did associate for devnet just fantastic you actually have to fill in api calls and like i'm not memorizing part numbers or some what's the root bridge value for your ccna do you remember 32 600 and no it's like you got to make a request or how does curl work or the bash shell or i don't know it was like it was something i could touch and feel like if i'm solving i'm answering real questions i'm not being tested on my memory right right i don't know i it was i don't know i should know definite associates have you guys taken a shot at it yeah i haven't no yeah yeah i i've passed that i did it last december and i i agree with you um you know a lot of the past exams that i've taken before they revamped the entire program were very much the the jeopardy style knowledge memorization kind of questions but that now the newer exams i've taken the encore i've taken the design specialist exam and i've taken the the devnet associate and th they're very much like knowledge based questions you know like when i was taking the np track np route switch i've been in it for 15 years i've done networking for a lot of that i felt completely lost learning some of that stuff but now i go and do encore and i i brought that 15 years of experience with me and i felt like it helped right like i managed wireless networks for a good portion of that time i had done virtualization for a good portion of that time and and so it felt like that was i don't know almost validated that having that experience actually helped me get a professional level certification whereas it did absolutely nothing for me you know studying for and attempting the previous one so i think they've done a really great job with these new exams so john i i want to pivot here for a second i'm i'm looking through all of the things you've done in your illustrious career up to this point and i see something here that says professor college professor do you want to go into that at all so i um i hate idol time and free hands and i went to see seinfeld with my wife in kingston and right behind me literally right behind me in this in the seating was my c plus plus professor slash program coordinator at the college where i went back to school and um she had heard about some of the work you know kingston's a small town so she heard empire's network and everything was really you know doing well under my work and um i said i had a particularly bad day or something i don't know some change went wrong and i kind of said like do you need a professor out there like how's you know what's your she's like well you could come in the fall and start teaching the network program if you'd like that was my interview i didn't interview with the human resources department wow i didn't meet with a single another person from the college she's like right on the spot if you want to develop the course and i said so here's she said we need two we need we have two openings and you be the professor for both the windows active directory course and the networking course and i so i agreed and i said but so i've just i said i just finished my ccna i just finished my microsoft enterprise admin can i develop my own material for these courses or do i have to follow you know i didn't want to take the previous instructor and just go through the motions i wanted to make the material and then deliver the material so that's what we did and i i tailored it to ccna now it's not a network academy so i didn't have access to packet tracers or different things like that but but we had some fun i brought some gear in from the lab that the company let me bring in to get them on to the cli and things of that nature and then the windows one was you know group policies and active directory basics and things of that nature it's one of the most rewarding jobs i don't even i don't consider it a job it was like a privilege and an honor to be in front of adult age people paying to learn and to become like what i did right there's people in there trying to go back to school to change their life there's kids right out of high school there's retired military people that are trying to start a second career a wide variety of people and um some of them like one one guy he's gone on to be a very important like he makes more money than me now can you believe it he learned everything he knows from me and now he's out there making more money for some private company but some of them have gone on to really successful careers and i that really is meaningful to me and here's a funny story so i came in and in my second year i was going into to prepare my lab and i got to the end of the hallway where my lab was and the whole wall was gone no drywall just gone and a construction crew there framing a new wall i said what i said this is my lab down here what's going on and the guy said well the teachers in this room have been complaining about some loud professor in this room so the college is putting soundproofing in between your lab and the shared classroom next door i said you're kidding me she says no we get complaints all the time that they can't teach in there because you're laughing and sharing memes and everybody's having a good old time and like are you teaching them anything and i was like that's just the way that's how it's done like i'm having fun and we're really i'd have like you know the winner is coming meme and i'd have like you know exams are coming and i'd use memes and we were we had a blast i love that job and um you kind of get to know the job twice like are you really good enough to explain layer two to a room full of people what a map what a subnet mask is what like it really sharpened my skills and then you've got these hot shot kids that like i'm still a teacher and they're still going to try to make me look like a fool in front of the room right oh you got that notation's wrong that's in the wrong broadcast domain okay like you know i'm not using subnet calculator right now i'm trying to do it in my head on the chalkboard right so i love being a professor yeah hey john you said you built a lab for the for the class right why did you use physical gear and not virtual or emulated uh i didn't so i was new and i didn't really know how to interface with the college's i.t like is not to be blunt but i didn't know how to best tell the college i needed a chunk of compute and i needed some vms and i sort of worked on the local desktop so for the for the domain stuff andy um we use vmware and vm workstation just yes to set up like domain stuff but the networking stuff it was hard i i tried so here's something you might not know to get a college to be network academy you have to have two faculty that have at least ccna and i couldn't get for the life of me these other professors just to go get their ccna so that i could bring network academy in so then i could use packet tracer and other like legitimate tools i wasn't about to go to youtube or you know the torrents and you know like i didn't wanna i wanted it to be legitimate right so i didn't do any of that stuff um but i i really wish the college had you know maybe forced one of the other professors to get their their ccna but but that never materialized so taking the job at the college or at the parliament in ottawa that was actually the hardest decision for me to make was to that i would have to stop um being a professor at the college and you couldn't develop it's another one of these um it was the geography the geography and me driving back to kingston a couple times a week it just wouldn't it just wouldn't work out and also the professor being a teacher or whatever it's it was one of my many money losing moves like it actually cost me money because i gave up my on-call and my overtime and i had a balancing act with my day job at the at the insurance company so to make up those hours that i was away at the college i gave up my on call and my overtime i didn't stop working on call and overtime i just stopped getting paid for it so that i could go work the second job at the college it's hard to work two day jobs it's hard to say like okay i'm off to the college for a couple hours to your normal manager right so i had to give up something and it was my on-call and my overtime so teaching actually you know i probably made like three bucks an hour or something in the end but you know not everything i do is for money i i've lost money on the book if you can believe it after all this time still haven't broken even there um you know so like yeah it's it's i i i don't really worry about that stuff though when i'm when i'm making content or creating that's no i didn't certainly do it to become financially you know wealthy or rich or anything i i wrote the book because i thought there was a place for one and that the industry needed one and andy i was where you were how like how do i start with this automation why is it so hard have you been to docs.ansible.com and try to start from scratch like i wish good luck right what's a yaml file what's what are they talking about so i i i wrote the book after a year of this and the legend is true my first ansible playbook was written in notepad and i used tftp to send it to a centos box and i did that back and forth until it ran properly because i was a network engineer and i knew how to use tftp and and notepad plus plus didn't know a thing about vs code didn't know a thing about git github azure devops um even ansible was brand new to me so i wrote the book out of frustration with some of the books i had read even that's a big ansible on the cover of the book they just didn't do it for me because they didn't tell you that you needed an ide and you needed to use gif and there's a lot more to this than six lines of yaml and you say ansible playbook andy's yaml there's more to it right so do you guys want to start talking about automation like can we you want to get into the google stuff or what yes yeah let's make me mad all right yeah yeah you can swing over to that here's here's what was my mistake i jumped right into a production grade change that i thought i just need to swap out what the humans are doing for tasks in an ansible playbook and it was not it was it was never that simple or easy to begin with and then i what i was trying to do was affect change and i think most of us jump to it's not valuable unless it's complex or it's not valuable unless i'm changing something or network automation equals change management and i you'll get there but i disagree with that being you know even pushing vlan 10 blue to a switch with ansible i wouldn't recommend that i really wouldn't i like to gather state capture stuff because it's safe i'm just running a show command it's not going to push anything i'm not going to get it wrong it's not going to leave a bad taste in my mouth because all i'm doing is running show version in a framework ansible or python and i'm getting structured data back now that's that in itself is a lot to unpack andy just how do we connect i know how to use putty i know i need to use ssh i know it's port 22. i know it's an ip address i know i have credentials i have to handle that in itself is tricky i don't want my password in the naked i don't want clear text passwords in my git repo now i have to look at ansible vault or some vaulting technology it's not easy andy so don't be so hard on yourself just the act of connecting and securing your credentials is difficult okay do you anything you want to add or do you have a question do you know what i mean is that no thank you well thank you for saying that because i feel that the automation evangelists and networking paint it with this easy's probably the wrong term but it just to me for my seed it seems so easy to everybody and you know like you said all you gotta do is write a yaml and just call it and it's easy and i'm glad that you're calling out that it's it's not because it makes me feel inept when it's not easy for me and i'm like what am i doing wrong you know so hey a1 fans aj here to remind you about nordvpn.com nordvpn will help secure you wherever you go i use nordvpn on all my personal devices whenever i'm out about i just go into the nordvpn app hit quick connect and away i go nice and secure don't have to worry about prying eyes anybody looking at my connection if i choose to go work from a coffee shop locally or you know even while i'm traveling if i bring my personal device devices i will use nordvpn to help keep things safe and secure i'm using nordvpn right now and there's no degradation in my signal everything looks good when you guys watch us on the live streams so i i can't say enough good things about nordvpn they have some great additional services included with their vpn product they'll scour the dark web for your credentials and see if they've been involved in any sort of hacks or anything and then if they have they'll let you know and you can go change your passwords and do whatever you need to do to help keep yourself safe and secure they also have a mode that will block any websites or ads known to possess malware and they just have general ad blocking anyway because you know who wants ads uh as i record an ad anyway if you want nordvpn and you do go to nordvpn.com forward slash t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and you can get a really great deal 73 percent off two years plus four months free so again that's 73 off two years plus four months free of nordvpn if you forget that url just go to nordvpn.com at checkout you can use the promo code t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and we appreciate your support as well as nordvpn support of the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show so john let me let me ask something real quick on when you when you first started oh yeah sorry so when you first started uh you know writing these your scripts and stuff like that you said that you were doing like show comments and stuff is that like what you broke your teeth or cut your teeth on uh whenever you uh started down this path like just doing show commands and and just pulling your structured data or was there a project that you were trying to accomplish uh because i think for me one of my struggles when i was getting into a little i'm not big into automation just yet but my little bit that i am into it uh it was trying to find something that makes sense right like like not just doing something just to do it right like something that would accomplish something at the end of it right so there's a couple things i'll work backwards i i myself and this is just me and i'm not trying to um you know say anything bad about this approach i can't learn from the flip a coin 10 times python example or make a deck of cards or abstract like here's how you do it and okay so i make this coin flip how's that going to help me automate a network it doesn't those dots don't directly connect for me it was doing something now where i started and again this was a big mistake was a little overconfidence a little too much maybe a testosterone in the room but we were going to take a yaml file and then a ginger template so the and generate an intended state okay put that into boot flash and then trigger a config replace okay so that was the first actual thing i did with ansible was to distribute a target config into boot flash and then trigger the cli command config replace from that target we just put on there that was automatically generated from a template and a data model worked out very well i wasn't actually using like the ansible ios config module i was using the ios command module that let me issue the config replace command now config replace is very close to some people listening or someone on the call here you may have done a config replace where it statefully puts in a totality running config into running memory it's almost like a copy start run but without the disruptive nature of that broken copy start it's a it's a config replace right so that was my first thing that i did with ansible and then i pulled way back and said like i don't understand this tool enough we got lucky and it worked it took like six weeks to develop this thing it was a one-time throwaway task so not really a great candidate even for automation um six weeks to write one playbook that we're never going to use again right like just just not really connecting this whole approach right so but here's here's what here's where i got lucky i you know my career is a is a a series of lucky breaks that my teacher was right behind me right at seinfeld i reached out i saw a simming uh simmings post from the pi ats team he had a blog post and i happened to look into him and it said he was in ottawa so right away i reached out to my cisco contacts that are at the house and so do you have any idea who you know simming and jb there's a whole team in the ottawa region that developed this pits tool they um they did a demo for me and my team in the cisco office we're like a few blocks apart so we all walked over there and had timbits and coffee and watched the pie ts demo and that that was like a big eye opener to me and and sort of so here's i'm rambling a bit here but i had ansible okay and then around ansible you can tap into the genie framework and genie lets you take show ip interface brief show version show whatever you want and it gives you structured json back now that what i just described is really the the key to everything else you guys have seen me do everything else is the fact that i have json and it's structured data so the it was an easier step for me to move to python and the pi ets framework so there's the parsers and then they actually have a framework and so then my job became moving all of my ansible playbooks into these python pi files same same tasks let's say right same series of things i want to accomplish but now i'm doing them pythonically without yaml files in the yaml framework andy i know i'm rambling on and i'm going very deep here i'm sorry but that's sort of what's led me to where i'm at now the other one okay the other thing i so i get that a lot um it was so i had a i have this information gathering that i've talked about go get the state of the network go run a bunch of show commands and then create artifacts from them everything from a csv file to a mind map there's different ways to present that data that we get um it was slow like i have hundreds of devices it doesn't do me any good to have the network state from seven hours ago i'm like i really can't use that i might as well not even run it if i'm not going to get the output like it's not a cobalt batch job right i don't want this in 12 hours i want it now so that was a big driver it was performance the other driver was ansible was very slow for me yes absolutely i've heard that and it's under the hood stuff andy um it uses like parameco whereas pi ets or python so here here's one thing i don't want to mix up or people listening python capital p object oriented programming language and the particular framework that i've chosen pi ets there are many you can use nornier you can use scraply you can use others the point is these things remember i talked about you have to connect and that involves an ssh and ip and credentials and these tools that you deal with that ansible lets you deal with it in a hosts file whereas other fi other tools like pi tsu's what they call a test bed file i don't even use a testbed file anymore i generate it automatically through python but once you've connected then these parsers can scrape that screen show whatever command and give you back something that looks like data you would get from an api now i don't want to suggest that ansible is a bad tool and i don't want to suggest people shouldn't use ansible or start with ansible but i have to be honest right if someone were to ask me i have x amount of time in a week to learn something should i invest that time in ansible or should i invest that time in python i mean i have to be honest and say python right and it's for a variety of reasons how many how many jobs do you think there are for people that know python broadly speaking compared to i know ansible it's totally different right it's a bigger market there's more things you can do with it it's a full language right but but i'm not going to judge someone if they want to use ansible like i really don't want this to be a gatekeeping type thing or or me passing judgment i'm happy that people either is better than none right i think we can all agree that both are better than hop by hop device by device manual operation so and i still think my book is a great place to start andy i really do just and and it's not quite pseudo code but like just do it in human language honestly like that's that's how i solve the problems is is just okay i have to connect to a device or many devices let's start with one i need to right need the ip i need credentials i need ssh what do i want to do once i've connected well i'd like to show version okay and then i'd like to make a csv file from that or an html page or i don't know just put it on my screen right just write them down in human ideas and then you literally go stack overflow article by article buddy you just you just google the hell out of it and find that answer that says oh to do a for loop in python it's for x in y colon you'll find it right but the idea is to be curious and try to take a simple relevant something relevant like i i want to well why not make a vlan on that device you're going to quickly accelerate once like it only it only doesn't work until it works like i know that sounds simple but like you it'll honestly it only fails five six times ah it works i got the right code and now i can move on to the next problem and i know how to do that now right so i think you should be really like it's an opportunity more than anything right but we were asking earlier like is there is it the tools themselves andy that maybe you just haven't found the right mix of tools or is it that you just you're just stumbling to to get started with some project of some kind i think it's time i think we were talking before the show about how much time you have you know during your work week too like you said google fridays or something like i haven't been able to find the time to do all this digging that you're saying what i have heard from a lot of different people python over ansible for all the reasons you espoused and the structured data is a big thing i've been working for six weeks now to try to structure a excel csv file of data you know to structure data that i can actually do something with so i'm learning and i'm chipping away and i'm getting there um but yeah it seems like a lot of time you know that you really have to invest to get this at least for me and i just haven't been able to find that during my work week well and i want to i want to add on to that andy in the the getting started so so from a network standpoint from a system standpoint uh we tend to give the advice of start with this material go after this certification like the the classic network thing is you want to get into networking takes read some network plus books get into the ccna prep that kind of thing what's your advice for that around automation and python what is it is it really just come up with a use case do some some googling the stack overflow thing or is there really a a day zero to day one um advice that that you can give people that are really just trying to start out john's book well yeah i i actually wouldn't um i hate taking people's money for that book now it's it's like technology moves so fast and the book feels so dated and and ansible itself has changed so much and oh let me come i'll come back to the book we'll talk about the book in a second but to answer your question tim there's two tracks i think depending on your mindset if you're uh i like to find a web link and click and do labs and and really just follow along cisco devnet start now if anyone just googles even just google cisco start now dwan lightfoot's program the new devnet start now program there's literally like a four module getting started with api's guide that that will get you from zero to to started pretty quickly what i like about apis and structured data and i'll throw some sites or some ideas out to you guys and i know i just this is going to go against me saying don't just write a flip a coin app but how you can have some fun with it or i don't know if anyone on the call has children of any age but if you want to get your or anyone listening if you want to get your children involved in python there is a pokemon api i'm not kidding you there is a star wars api there's a world of warcraft api there's a deck of cards api there's an international space station api if you want to know how many humans are in space if you want to get your children excited say how many kids are how many people are in space right now kids let's go find out pythonically honestly you go into postman and this is the biggest hidden feature on the whole world that people just don't know about in postman there's a reveal code button in postman so if you can make that get api against luke skywalker on the star wars api you can click the reveal code button and hit the drop down and pick python it will literally say import requests request.getswapi.com luke skywalker whatever you take it out of postman you make a dot pi file and you run it and it will work and you'll have the json in python without even knowing python it's copy and paste from postman into python if anyone's listening do it right now it's just incredible so that to me is the tactile experience of trying it and doing it now i still do this guys i find some new api i don't just start writing code like i really don't i appreciate everybody's you know belief in me but you know i still go to postman and do the api call and find the json and struggle with this and this error and that error um on the book before i forget if you've been covid displaced from your job if you're a student if you're in the developing world if you simply can't afford it please contact me i will send you a pdf of the book i really will just reach out to me it may take me some time to get to if i get 6 000 requests for the book from this podcast but i'll do my best to get you a copy of the book honestly i i don't want finances to be the barrier i didn't write it to make money i write it so that you could read it right and if you need me to send you a copy to read it i will i will happily do that john that's it that's incredible i i think that's a very generous thing to do with uh you know what you've done here and i want to take some time to talk about your book you you were kind enough to send us uh five copies of your book so i have those here and uh shortly after your episode airs we will uh go to twitter and we will give these books away to some lucky listeners and and social media followers so i definitely want to thank you for that and uh you know for for one writing the book and doing what you do and then uh putting it in our hands so we can give it away to folks that follow and listen to us so so thank thank you very much for that and we will also put a link uh to your book where you can get it in the show notes uh so that way if anybody wants to they can they can come in and buy it well i i appreciate that and um i was telling you guys before we started those those books were supposed to go to dragons on canadian dragon's den which is the canadian version of shark tank but um the world wasn't quite ready for a talking computer network that phoned you yet that i don't know maybe i'll talk to my handlers i think they sent me too far back in time i think maybe 30 years ahead i think that world will be ready for me i want to say something else um i put out a ton of clips and content and i i don't do it to show off i really hope that i hope that's not how it comes across i certainly don't do it to make it look easy maybe look easy and inspire someone to try it kind of way i i just want people to know that i this whole merlin thing and the open source thing and the tool it's it's a collection of ideas and a collection of you know pythonic ways of dealing with network state information i'm certainly having fun and um i find these things like you know maybe it's a little far out there but but why can't our network phone us right like why why doesn't this just ring if i lose a bgp neighbor that's important to me i really think that could you know that that would be maybe not a phone call with a human voice but an instant message a discord message with a adaptive card all kinds of neat stuff right um so i if anybody wants to get involved with the code or clone the repo or make a pull request or have me give you a personal tour of the code we can use a live share and vs code and um and i'd be happy to connect i really would um i you know i'd like to see someone take it and make it better someone who actually knows how to write python and it wasn't um but you know a real python developer what they could do with it right so well john let's let's dive into that a little bit let's back up for anybody that's listening that doesn't know maybe hasn't watched you you know this might be someone's first introduction to you and the stuff that you work on so so what is merlin and what are you doing with that well that's great so it actually is an evolution of that ansible playbooks i was talking about go show version and and here's where it started um and and and this was going to sound familiar to a lot of people and i i'm glad we're going to talk about this i think that more and more stakeholders are interested in network state information i think it's become so vital to every organization every every vertical every horizontal public private government doesn't matter has a network that's vital to their operations that could mean money making it could be serving the public right but the network is is it is the key to all of these and um early in my career i had we purchased 6509s okay and the finance person said i'd like an inventory from the 6500s we just purchased do you know what i brought them junior network engineer that didn't know any better i brought them to print out a show inventory and um this finance person looked at it and almost threw it back in my face and you know what they said so we deal with spreadsheets around here john okay come back to me when you have that in excel and i was like i went with my tail tucked between my legs and uh i explained to my senior network guy who laughed his ass off at me did you yeah look it's right here she basically crumbled it up and threw it back in my face so um it's always stuck with me that this 6500 can do vrfs mpls tags bgp is iso but i can't get a spreadsheet version of the data on it that's up to me right i can't just run show whatever spreadsheet give me an excel file right that still baffles me to this day so anyway that was the that's the genesis of this whole thing was now that i have a parser and i have structured data i can make that business ready as i call them business ready documents from network state now here's a real world example i deal with publicly funded things right like i have to account for every part and sfps are getting expensive if you've bought a 40 gig gpic for a 7k right we have to track all this stuff what do you do the big bang walmart with the gun scanning barcodes and you want you go part by part no you run some show commands and you parse the data you stick it into a spreadsheet and you give it to the business and say there's every part down to the sfp every serial number and then you can connect it with say the contract to api from cisco smartnet so now i'm feeding those part numbers to a contract database in the cloud and it tells me whether or not it's under contract and what my sla is right it's about can it's like tony stark and iron man and he just does this stuff with his hands and he's whipping around well we can take that json and send it to northbound apis send it into sharepoint online send it to a github repo all kinds of different things right so that's where merlin started and has continued to evolve um most recently um and let me do a sidetrack here uh there was a product from cisco called johann by florian paschinger and it's an open source utility and and there's actually a four or five part blog series that goes along with this tool that you should read um and it is what actually sparked in my interest in django now django is a python framework but what it does is it's it's like batteries included guys so it has a front end in in like an apache 2 web templating engine and a back end in a postgres or mysql database so like we come from this world of 3t or apps right we can kind of relate the web app database tiers really lines up with that nicely where i have my controller my so they call it a model view controller you'll remember this from page 31 in the official study guide for devnet associate they talk all about this model view controller business but but it lets us model our data from the network so yeah like if you look up the genie parser it has a json schema that relates one-to-one to a model to a database table so now i'm not just running ansible or python and making a bunch of files on a unc path right like hundreds of files i'm storing them in a sql database and then i can with the views they call them views present urls to the users now here's something else i found along the journey if you're googling things or have your browser open visit datatables.net now what data tables are if you've ever made an html table they're nice but they're static right they're just a static table on a page if you plug data tables in which is free open source a little bit of javascript that you don't have to write you just import it a little bit of style sheeting you just import it well now that html table is paginated it's searchable it's sortable i can drag columns around it even comes with buttons that let me print the table or or view it in a pdf so now i've really actually achieved this sort of business ready documents by just visiting merlin slash show version and there's a data table of the show version output right hmm okay so did you know i i know it's that's incredible i'm sorry so did you go back to them with that or was this yours down the road after uh your incident with the uh with that department oh uh i wish i could go back to them with that that was at my old company no that they i don't i would love to i would love to go back there and show them here's that excel report you asked for 15 years ago yeah no i i didn't get a chance to do that but you know what i did do to get back at that department i um i was installing the wireless access points in that finance department and that same person came by and asked me if that meant they could finally use wireless mice and i said yeah your whole department because that's why we're putting them in is that you can all use wireless mice in here um so that's my way of getting back at that finance person john i i i hate to say that this has been a fantastically fun hour um i unfortunately we are going to have to wrap it up uh some of the the co-hosts here have other things that maintenance windows and stuff to move on to and i want to make sure everybody gets a chance to wrap up here so um i i want to start by saying thank you so much for joining us um really appreciate it i i will invite you back for another episode right now before we finish this one because i feel like we have so much more left to talk about uh thank you so much for uh the copies of your book that we're gonna give away so um if you're listening to the podcast stay tuned for that and follow us on twitter we'll we'll post more about these books and the giveaway there john um if people want to follow you learn more about you how can they do that well i i would come back anytime all the time whenever you want just let me know i love you guys i love this platform and i had so much fun tonight i hope i didn't talk too much or you know hog the stage i i i was really excited you were fantastic wonderful so uh follow me on twitter it's john underscore capobianco you can go to automateyournetwork.ca i even renewed my cert this month so so that's a secure page you can reach to visit me there if you want to find me on linkedin you can you can connect with me on linkedin as well i'm very open and happy to help i i don't do any private mentoring or anything of that nature but i'm happy to help you with code or get started or answer questions if you want my book and can't afford it reach out to me and i i had such a great time guys anytime absolutely open line just let me know i'll be there okay awesome thank you awesome awesome we're going to hit you up with a lot of ideas for for uh content we can do either another podcast youtube video uh we want to do more with you awesome i'm sorry so thank you john thank you to uh all of our our patreons for hanging out with us tonight um if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of neteng and we thank our patreons as well as all of our listeners for their support of what we do here at the art of network engineering john again thank you so much for joining us uh well we're gonna do this again i i promise you and everybody listening to that and uh until next time we'll see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you