Author Archives: bitcollector

Zero Touch Provisioning with DHCP (KEA)

In my last blog I wrote about building ZTP configurations for SONiC switches using the data in NetBox. This post will explain how those configurations are served to these devices without the need for any human intervention. The key elements … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Zero Touch Provisioning with DHCP (KEA)

Infrastructure as Code: Using NetBox and Jinja2 to build Zero Touch Provisioning for SONiC switches

When I was hired at eBay one of the first tasks I was given was to find an easy way to swap switches within a rack to help facilitate testing of various SONiC platforms. I knew this as ZTP from … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Infrastructure as Code: Using NetBox and Jinja2 to build Zero Touch Provisioning for SONiC switches

NetBox Shell Examples with Jupyter Notebook

When I started working with the hardware team at eBay I was shocked to learn that they were tracking ALL of their assets with Wiki and spreadsheets. Everything was static, all of the IP addresses, the hardware locations, serial numbers, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on NetBox Shell Examples with Jupyter Notebook

How I melted a data center switch and effected changes to an existing product line.

I was hired onto the Hardware Platform Engineering team at eBay just as they started getting ready to deploy their next-gen 400G network that was using SONiC, an open source network operating system. The team is in charge of validating … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on How I melted a data center switch and effected changes to an existing product line.

Snake Test: 4 Nodes @ 800Gbps = 25.6 Tbps

The Network team took our traffic generator so we needed to build our own using (4) servers with (8) 100G NIC’s. Here is the design I came up with to build our own “home brew” traffic generator used to saturate … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Snake Test: 4 Nodes @ 800Gbps = 25.6 Tbps

DNS over TLS over VPN and back

DNS over TLS is a big step in fixing a badly designed protocol, at least in terms of privacy, but it still leaves you having to trust the endpoint with all of that data that you are trying to keep … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on DNS over TLS over VPN and back

Prepping for changes with EVE-NG; SONiC, Arista, Juniper and Cisco

This weekend I got motivated to start building out my EVE-NG lab with SONiC since we are in the middle of testing out 400G in our hardware labs. The green links below need to be added to our real environment … Continue reading

Posted in bgp, Networks | Comments Off on Prepping for changes with EVE-NG; SONiC, Arista, Juniper and Cisco

Object-Oriented Programming vs. Functional Programming

Today I found a great article on hacker news with regards to Object Oriented Programming. Some interesting arguments about code complexity causing issues with Volkswagen accelerator issues and the Boeing MAX issues. https://suzdalnitski.medium.com/oop-will-make-you-suffer-846d072b4dce “None of the built-in OOP features help … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Comments Off on Object-Oriented Programming vs. Functional Programming

OSX 10.15 on 2009 Macbook Pro & ESXi 7.0

I updated my 2009 macbook pro this weekend from 10.11 (last supported OS) to 10.15. The best part about it all is that the computer runs FASTER with Catalina installed then it did with El Capitan! It’s possible that this … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on OSX 10.15 on 2009 Macbook Pro & ESXi 7.0

Python Inventory Search

I wrote a python script to query a website and check to see if an item is in stock. If it finds the product in question it will email me a report with a hyperlink so that I can click … Continue reading

Posted in Python | Leave a comment