Netbox

Summary Over the past few months, I’ve been part of a project team to migrate an on-premises IP PBX to the Microsoft Teams cloud-based phone system. One component of this project is the Enhanced 911 (E911) service. E911 enables the capability to automatically provide the location information of the caller to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) when an emergency call to 911 is placed. Any multi-line phone system implemented today must provide dispatchable location information. Recent regulation in Kari’s Law and RAY BAUMS’s act detail the compliance requirements. ...

Overview NetBox is a DCIM and IPAM tool for modeling infrastructure and serving as a source of truth for the desired state of the network. Okta is an IAM company that offers a single sign-on product, which can act as a central point to manage user access. As of NetBox version 3.1.0, native support for SSO authentication was added via inclusion of python-social-auth. This library supports many backends, including Okta via both OAuth2 and OpenId Connect. Until then, the only options for an external authentication provider were LDAP, an external plugin, or moving the authentication to a proxy and passing the results to netbox via HTTP headers. ...

Timo Reimann wrote a handy NetBox plugin to collect and display support expiry information (End-of-Sale, End-of-Support, etc.) as well as the current Contract and Warranty coverage dates for all Cisco devices defined in a NetBox installation. His README does a good job showing the process for setting up the plugin, so I won’t repeat all the details here. The general process is: register an app with Cisco and obtain the API ID and secret. install the plugin (pip install netbox-cisco-support) enable the plugin (add to PLUGINS in configuration.py) configure the plugin (add to PLUGINS_CONFIG in configuration.py) apply the Django migrations (manage.py migrate) collect the EoX data (manage.py sync_eox_data) If all goes well, there will now be two additional tables in the UI device page for on any device whose manufacturer matches the manufacturer value in PLUGINS_CONFIG (default Cisco). ...

NetBox has an available integration with the NAPALM automation library. For supported devices, the NetBox device view will show additional tabs for status, LLDP neighbors, and device configuration. It will also proxy any (read-only) napalm getters (get_environment, get_lldp_neighbors, etc.) via the REST API. The basic configuration outlined in the documentation assumes that the NetBox server has direct ssh access to these devices. That is not the case if you use a bastion host or jump host. Here is how to configure this feature to work in such an environment. ...

While trying to wrap my head around some of the NetBox database relationships, I found myself wishing for a database schema diagram. I looked through the documentation and code repo, but didn’t find anything. A colleague recommended trying schemaspy, so I tried it. Setup I set up a fresh install of netbox on a Debian 10 VM, and downloaded schemaspy and its dependencies. Alternatively, they publish a Docker image. Install Java sudo apt install dfault-jdk JDBC Driver PostgreSQL has a download page for the JDBC driver. ...