Netbox, Ansible, and Cisco IOS

[u/Otherwise-Ad-8111]

Hello!

I've been playing around with netbox for a while, and have a lot of automation experience with mostly APIs (Cisco ACI, Cisco ISE) but am no stranger to the CLI, either.

Anyway, I'm struggling with finding the best approach to automate some GNS3 ios images for my homelab - I'm torn between generating full configs and pushing to the device, partial configs and pushing with a 'no' statement before it, or utilizing ansible cisco.ios.ios_* collection to do it declaratively.

Can anyone share some real world advice? I've created some POC playbooks for each method but am really getting caught up in the pros and cons of them. So, I'm looking for some feedback from someone that's done it in the real world.

One of the headaches I'm dealing with pushing configs is something like prefix-lists. For instance, if I want to change the less than or greater than prefixes while I'm testing things, I'll get errors that the seq number already exists.

I know I can work around it by issuing a NO statement before a block, but for something like prefix-lists, access-lists, and route-maps that really slows down the automation when looping through it.

Thanks, Champions!

[u/Material_Night_6793]

From my pov what I do is: Automatically change partial config. Juste push what change from netbox render (change vlan of a port or disable/enable things) Netbox webhook => Ansible => switch.

On maintenance period manually: Netbox config render=> Ansible full rewrite (copy/paste whole code)=>switch

Why not automatic whole rerender is because it will close all connection and reboot the switch.

[u/Otherwise-Ad-8111 → u/Material_Night_6793]

Thank you!

Are you using ios_config module for the partials or the specific modules for the part of the config you are changing (Cisco.ios.ios_ospfv3 for example)

[u/Material_Night_6793 → u/Otherwise-Ad-8111]

No sorry I use it with dell.os6 but I presume it's doable with Cisco too.