Book Cover I started reading Automating Junos Administration, the Ansible chapter in specific to get a start on automation. I will note a couple of things that were peculiar as I worked my way through. These are tips and failures that should affect anyone working through this chapter.

Console Connections

In the chapter, when connecting to a console, this is done via a Terminal Server rather than a Serial Conection. By default KVM provides serial ports for the console. These are Psuedo Terminals and provisioned under /dev/pts/* with * being the number/instance of the pts. However, for the purposes of the chapter we will need to reasign our consoles to be available via a Terminal Server. We do this with some XML fiddling so our relevant sections appear as follows:

<serial type='tcp'>
  <source mode='bind' host='127.0.0.1' service='4555'/>
  <protocol type='telnet'/>
  <target port='0'/>
</serial>
<console type='tcp'>
  <source mode='bind' host='127.0.0.1' service='4555'/>
  <protocol type='telnet'/>
  <target type='serial' port='0'/>
</console>

junos-netconify

If you choose to install via pip install junos-netconify, you will get a slightly out of date package with an error in the facts.py file. This throws a "list index out of range" error and basically means your console connections will not work with the junos_get_facts module. It should be changed to represent the following:

        # extract the version
        # First try the  tag present in >= 15.1
	swinfo = rsp.findtext('junos-version', default=None)
        if not swinfo:
            # For < 15.1, get version from the "junos" package.
            pkginfo = rsp.xpath(

Installing via the GitHub method should avoid this problem.

Conclusion

Well, in hindsight that seems all like a no-brainer but if you come up against this for the first time then I hope these hints can point you in the right direction.

So now we posess a multitude of Ansible foo, what to do? “Automate All of the Things” or “Automate Some of the Things”.

Update

junos-netconify has now been merged into PyEZ so when you read through the chapter…

  • you do not need to install junos-netconify

  • you need to adjust the code to reflect the PyEZ way of doing things.

So what was:

  ...
  junos_get_facts:
    host: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
    console: "--telnet={{ jaccess.console_ts }},{{ jaccess.console_port }}"
    user: "root"
    passwd: "{{ jaccess.root_password }}"
    savedir: tmp/
  register: jresult
  ...

should appear:

  ...
  junos_get_facts:
    host: "{{ jaccess.console_ts }}"
    mode: "telnet"
    port: "{{ jaccess.console_port }}"
    user: "root"
    passwd: "{{ jaccess.root_password }}"
    savedir: tmp/
  register: jresult
  ...



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