After over a year of procrastination, the “Chilli-net UC and Networking blog” now has a new home under my website that I built for more proactively promoting my freelancing services (http://213.136.90.199).
I plan on being a bit more active in the next months and have several topics I plan on covering, again with a focus on UC and Network programmability.
Look out for upcoming posts on the following:
- Cisco Platform Administrative Web Services (PAWS) API. This is the API used by Prime Collaboration Deployment and can be used quite well to script upgrades and installations without having to bash around a GUI. I expect this will be useful for UC Engineers who do not have a PCD installation at a customer and who have many consecutive files to install (such as Clusters with dozens of locales) which is still pretty cumbersome with PCD.
- Cisco Serviceability API. This API provides access to real time cluster information such as phone registration (IP Address, which node it’s registered to, etc) and active firmware in use. I’ve found this quite useful to quickly get feedback on device firmware upgrades and also checking whether all telephones have re-registered after upgrades, and identifying the individual phones that didn’t make it back.
- Supplementary Open Source Applications supporting a Cisco UC environment. There’s a few tools I wanted to explore a bit more as to how they could make life easier supporting a such as Graylog (open source logging solution), Rundeck (platform for running various automated tasks, with advanced user access control and a secure keystore – good to avoid saving sensitive passwords in cleartext in scripts)
- Network Automation Tools. So far I’ve been pretty focused on UC based automation and programmability so I’d like to take deeper look on the networking side. There’s already plenty of blog posts already on Ansible for pushing out configs with Jinja2 templates and general SSH access via Python Netmiko/Paramiko etc so I’ll try find something a bit more specific that doesn’t already have as much coverage.
More to follow soon….