Month: July 2020

Cisco VLANs to MikroTik

Why VLANs? When I first started trying to setup my first MikroTik device, I very quickly ran into issues trying to configure VLANs. Using VLANs is so second-nature to me now coming from a Cisco background. In almost any network you should be using VLANs to segment devices off into logical groupings instead of having

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Ansible Inventory Scripts

# TIL It appears that you are required to use a .ini file with inventory scripts in Ansible. If you try and use static variables in the script, it will appear to work when running the raw Python or whatever you’re using to gather the data. It will then fail with seemingly nondescript errors when

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PoE Woes

What is PoE? Power over Ethernet… the ability to power an endpoint device such as a phone, access point, or raspberry pi over the same cable that delivers its network connection. Quite a wonderful thing if you ask me. Less cords! But, there’s so many types, PoE, PoE+, 802.3af, 802.3at, active, passive, etc… PoE, Type

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Useful Links/Software I’ve Found

This will be a running list of useful sites and various links to tidbits I come across and find useful. Sites Learn/test regular expressions (regex). https://regex101.com/ Test Sed commands/filtering https://sed.js.org/ Generate Cron strings https://crontab.guru Software Working with APIs. Makes building urls and testing basic strings much simpler. Also will show you code output for several

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How to debug Ansible

There are a couple of ways to get more information about why a command/playbook is failing. These are listed more or less, in order growing more verbose. This is a pretty long post mostly due to the example output. Debug module in playbook The second most common method is using the debug module in your

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