Update: Extensible & Automated is Moving!

Hello all, It's been some time since I posted here. Much of the contents of this blog will soon be making a transition. I made this decision when I decided to create Smooth Automation. This will be a website in which I provide: A blog A newsletter 10x more content than you will ever find …

2018 – Lessons Learned and Accomplishments

2018 was a crazy busy year for me, as well as an extremely successful one. While everyone has their usual definition of "New Year Resolutions", I don't go the New Years approach. I start my goals when I feel like it (As in, as soon as I realize I want to start accomplishing them). In …

2018 – My 20 Noteworthy Reads

2018 was quite a year in terms of accomplishment for myself. Not only did I read 83 books, but I also completed a major draft of my "Foundations" guide, which is essentially my set of principles on living, thinking, making decisions, etc. On top of that, my career transitioned to something I've been working towards …

Security Tools to Secure Your Digital Life, Part I: The Basic Tools – Analysis

In this post, I'd like to cover several security tools that may be of great use to anybody reading this post. Firstly, let's get to my intentions behind writing this post. I see a lot of folks talking about how their computer is "so secure" with antivirus. Understand that, while antivirus may help for many …

Efficient Infrastructure: Automating your Network, Part II – Ansible Basics

In my last post, I talked about reasons you used network automation, why you should care, and an introduction to Ansible as an automation tool. Well, the file structure that is. In this post, I'd like to show what goes into each file, how each of these files contribute, and an example playbook or two …

Efficient Infrastructure: Automating your Network, Part I – The Necessity to Automate

One of the big buzzwords in the network community these days, aside from SDN, [insert new overlay technology here], and vendor lock-in (*cringe*), is network automation. What is network automation, why should you care, and how should you approach this emerging topic? To really understand automation, we must first understand where it'd be appropriate. Where …

IP Layer/Transport Layer Firewalls vs Application Layer Firewalls: Use cases

I am going to assume some people visiting this post are not familiar with the purpose of a firewall. Well, let me vaguely describe before proceeding to the use cases (Or you can apply your Googling skills and proceed to the next paragraph). A firewall is a program that inspects packets (How your data is relayed …

The CCIE Journey: Saving lab time with automation, Part 3

Since I last made a post about the functions in the script to automate my CCIE lab, there are many new additions, tweaks, and restructuring I have put into the scripts. You can find the updated script as well as its complimentary files here. Let's go through what has changed, what has been added, and …

The CCIE Journey: Saving lab time with automation, Part 2

In my last post, I had covered a function I wrote that would backup all configurations of my devices in the lab environment. In this post, I will be applying several additional functions to this script to extend my usability as well as reduce the interaction required when redeploying the lab environment from scratch. Referencing …

The CCIE Journey: Saving lab time with automation, Part 1

Sunday, I was reading through the recently released "Routing TCP/IP Volume 2, Revision 2". For those who have read it, most of the book covers BGP configuration and implementation. As of now, this is one of my initial studies to CCIE. My lab environment currently consists of a couple things: 10 CSR1000Vs in a server …