TL&DR: Programmers writing Cisco Nexus OS code should have known better. They didn’t (care?).

One can understand that an operating system written in the late 1980s generates crappy suboptimal error messages, even though it was known even in those days how to do things right.

Is it too much to hope that the programmers writing newer operating systems (like Cisco Nexus OS) would be better? Obviously, it is 🤦‍♂️

When Donnie Savage announced the open beta of OpenEIGRP, I quickly asked him whether it would be possible to get an easy-to-use container with OpenEIGRP integrated with other FRR daemons (and its CLI).

Donnie delivered ;) – you can download a ready-to-use container and try its EIGRP features. Let’s see how you can make that process even simpler with netlab:

After his excellent Git for Networking Engineers series, Tony Mattke decided to take netlab for a spin (thank you!), starting with Install netlab, Build a Lab in Five Minutes

The DNS Museum documents tons of crazy uses of DNS, the world’s most distributed database (OK, a key-value store), including a “DNS for configuration management” podcast episode with Corey Quinn.

Have fun!

My initial “configuring Arista cEOS with Netmiko or Ansible” test was a bit biased. netlab generates the final configuration snippets in both cases (due to Ansible FUBARs we had to deal with), but then Netmiko just sends the configuration commands to the switch (after entering configuration mode), while the Ansible eos_config module executes show running, identifies the difference, and sends only the changes to the device.

While that use case is highly relevant (after all, we’re configuring network devices ;) I really should have done an apples-to-apples comparison, and FRRouting virtual machines are the ideal playground.

Now that we know what we need to make layer-3 services (BGP-free core transporting IPv4 and IPv6 traffic) work with SRv6, let’s go through the steps needed to configure them on Junos, continuing from the baseline SRv6 with IS-IS configuration (and again relying on the excellent SRv6 Micro-SID (uSID) Basics article by Krzysztof Szarkowicz).

In the BGP-Free Network Core with SRv6, we identified the components we need (assuming IBGP+IGP design):

I decided to make Netmiko the default configuration deployment method netlab uses for Cisco IOS XR. It works great, and I don’t have to worry about whether the user runs IOS XRd control-plane (in which case scripts work) or vRouter (in which case there’s a VM inside the container, so no luck).

After fixing the initial glitches (more on that another time), all integration tests passed except the OSPFv2 default origination test. It turns out the default waiting time (30 seconds) is way too low; Cisco IOS XR needs almost 90 seconds (after its reboot completes) to originate the OSPFv2 default route.

With the growing number of SRv6 implementations that netlab supports, it made sense to create a set of topologies to help you get started exploring the SRv6 world. The sample topologies include:

• SRv6 with IS-IS including LLA-only core links
• Multivendor SRv6
• IPv4 Islands over SRv6-Enabled IPv6 Core
• IPv6 BGP-Free Core with SRv6
• IPv4 L3VPN over SRv6-Enabled IPv6 Core

Read the getting started document and have fun exploring the scenarios 😎

We launched device configuration with Netmiko in the September 2026 netlab release and made it easier to use in the October 2026 release. It will become the default configuration method for several popular platforms (Arista EOS, Cisco IOS, Cisco Nexus OS, Cisco IOS XR, FRRouting virtual machines) in a few months, but before doing that, I wanted to check whether the change matters.

TL&DR: Yes, it does.

The Network Automation Forum is running the annual State of Network Automation Survey (here are the 2025 results).

If you’re involved in network automation in any way (I hope you are), please take a few minutes and complete it. Thank you!