Working on my Powershell skills, I was playing around with a Barracuda Load Balancer and noticed it supported some APIs which is kind of cool. At first I was playing around with it in postman and got to login and put some servers in maintenance mode, but then thought it would be really neat if I could get this working in Powershell, that way us humans can just run a script and even thinking in the “future” maybe have some automated process (a.k.a AI) handle this for us. 😉 So in this post I’ll talk about the script I created and some of the small challenges I had with this overall it was kind of neat putting this together. Continue reading “Barracuda Load Balancer- Powershell”
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I keep doing the automation dance, there are a lot of different tooling products out there. I have been trying to understand a use case around using it with network automation. Recently I have been dancing around with Ansible. My personal belief is that using any type of these tools would be helpful but it can be a steep learning curve if you really don’t have any programming knowledge. This is not something that is relatively easy to use or understand, don’t expect to have a working network automated tool in production on day one. I think this is great for learning, and using this in a network sandbox. If you don’t have programming mindset it might make your job harder on day one before it gets easier, but just like learning to dance you have to learn the steps, the moves, and maintain the rhythm. So with that let’s at least figure out the starting points, and begin learning the steps of the automation dance. 😉 
Starting from ASA 9.3(2) and onward the 5500-X hardware supports a RESTful API as an additional method for configuration/monitoring ASA hardware. Infrastructure as code as they call it, not anything new but I was reading a post that 
Although GNS3 can run local on your computer and you can use VMware Workstation and have the GNS3 appliance. I found it much more stable and predictable to run GNS3 on a dedicated server. Using this type of installation, all the projects, and images are stored on the GNS3 server, so I can install the GNS3 client any computer and get access to the same projects I was working on. You can also have multiple people working on different projects that are on the same server. I find that neat for educational use or if you where helping someone with a project. In this post I’ll walk though the steps needed to set up a GNS3 server.