Tag Archives: python

Automating backups of your floor plans and AP locations using Python

Background

At my new $dayjob, we’re undergoing a migration/refresh to Juniper Mist which will encompass over 13K APs when the dust settles. If you’re reading this, you already know that just performing a 1:1 swap for that many APs requires a lot of planning and resources. And depending on the size of your team, things may move faster or slower, or you may opt to contract out some of the work that’s required. Now, some organizations with large deployments choose to refresh portions of their network on a yearly cycle, let’s say 20% per year over 5 years. For us, that would have been a pretty manageable 2600 APs per year. However, given the variables listed below, we’re having to move fast (I mean like Jimmy Johns fast), but our team is small so we’re also having to pull in more resources, including external ones which can result in inconsistencies if left unchecked.

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Finding non-working and statically configured radios in Mist with code

Table of Contents

    Background

    When working with networking vendors in this day and age, AI and ML are terms that are thrown around as features that add value to your team by proactively monitoring and alerting you of interesting or problematic things that may unknowingly exist in your environment. At face value, that sounds great! You don’t have to constantly check your network for issues because the system will bubble them up for you. And in an environment with close to 310,000 APs across multiple orgs and sites, it’s pretty much table stakes. The good news is that I’ve seen this work, as long as you’re checking those alerts because today, these systems will most likely alert, but not automatically remediate any of its findings. The remediation process still requires human intervention in most cases. However, what happens if the vendor’s AI/ML solution isn’t trained to find something in your environment that it should or something that you might be interested in looking at? That’s where knowing how to code and also work with APIs really comes in handy these days. I’m going to walk you through two different scenarios where writing my own code to leverage one of our WLAN vendor’s APIs led to insightful discoveries in our environment to help find a few needles in a massive haystack. One of the scenarios even led to the vendor implementing their own proactive checks into the platform which has sparked an auto RMA process for us.

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    Building a power conversion tool in Python

    I’ve been doing less and less Python development since moving to a new company back in June. At my previous employer, I worked on Python command-line scripts and a custom-built web app fairly often that assisted with daily, monotonous tasks as well as troubleshooting. I really enjoyed the process of learning more about Python and developing tools that helped not just myself, but also my team.

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