Network Automation & AI

The Configuration Backup Problem Every network team has a story about a misconfiguration recovery that went sideways because the backup was stale, incomplete, or stored in some engineer’s home directory. Pulling configs from a multi-vendor environment shouldn’t require bespoke expect scripts for each platform — scripts where the TFTP timeout handling differs between your Cisco ASR edge routers and your Juniper QFX datacenter switches. When your backup logic lives inside imperative Python scripts or complex Ansible playbooks, every OS update becomes a risk. One changed CLI prompt can silently break your entire backup pipeline. ...

The File Transfer Bottleneck in Firmware Upgrades Pushing a 2GB firmware image to 120 Arista switches shouldn’t feel like playing Russian roulette with your SSH session. Yet, most network engineers still babysit brittle Python scripts, praying a minor EOS or Junos update doesn’t break the regex parsing their pre-transfer disk space checks. Consider a typical maintenance window: you need to deploy an emergency patch across a multi-vendor spine-leaf fabric. Your automation script breaks at device 47 because an EOS update altered the dir command’s output format, causing your pre-transfer free-space check to fail. Each vendor demands bespoke expect scripts, and every OS update becomes a maintenance window risk. ...

Netpicker: Compare Configurations Between Devices Introduction to Netpicker and Its Capabilities When troubleshooting a connectivity issue on a pair of redundant core routers, the last thing you want to do is manually compare their configurations line by line. A single misconfigured access list or prefix list can cause inconsistent behavior, but finding the discrepancy can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Manually comparing the two show running-config outputs is time-consuming and prone to error. You could spend hours scrolling through thousands of lines of text, trying to spot a single misplaced deny statement or a missing network in a prefix list. ...

Tokenization for Network Engineers: A Practical Guide What Is Tokenization and Why Should Network Engineers Care? Network engineers diving into AI/ML-driven network automation will quickly encounter tokenization. It’s the process of breaking down network configurations, CLI outputs, or other text into smaller, meaningful units (tokens) that AI/ML tools can process. You might have seen it in tools like ChatGPT or config parsers without fully understanding its role. Think of it like parsing a configuration file into individual commands or variables. This process is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to understand and generate text, including network configurations. ...