Thanks for the clarification. As a proof of concept I think it’s amazing. I’ve had plenty of debates recently about Puppet’s place in the networking world and I’m always of the opinion when managing things like switchports it’s just as suited as using puppet on servers. I was testing with a L2IOU image, I’ll submit the bug reports for what I’ve found hopefully this weekend if it helps you out.

I must confess, I’ve never done anything with the reports, inventory and such in puppet before, this proof of concept was to see how it would go solving my specific problem in our datacenter.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but you might like to check out http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/trends/open_network_environment/index.html?CAMPAIGN=Cisco+Open+Network+Environment&COUNTRY_SITE=us&POSITION=sl&REFERRING_SITE=Cisco.com+homepage&CREATIVE=open+network+environment2+homepage+spotlight It looks like we might be getting an API yet *fingers crossed*! It’s not your work I don’t love (keep up the good work, it’s great) it’s the platform not lending itself to easily integrate with a tool like this. While it solves my problem, personally I’m not going to use it with the worry of cisco changing the way I/O works in a later version, it doesn’t feel me with great confidence to embrace this solution.

I am curious though, when writing the module, did you ever consider getting/setting the values from snmp?

Thanks again for reading and love your work!

Thanks for your detailed article about Puppet Network Device. First, let me state, as the author of said code, that in my view it was much more of a proof of concept than production ready code. My point was for some other people to help build something bigger, adding more network device or feature.

That just didn’t happen; my spare time being limited I couldn’t really bring the network devices stuff up to what I’d like it to be.

Regarding some of the shortcomings you’re talking about, you can setup encapsulation in puppet (add encapsulation => “dot1q” to your interface resource). Also, if you found any issues, please report them as bug in the puppet redmine bug tracker. That way I could have a look, and possibly fix then.

Amd finally, yes, the cisco network device is more like a giant smart expect script, but that’s because to my knowledge IOS doesn’t support any public API. For instance the F5 module uses the F5 API to do all the configuration.

One subtle difference with an expect script, is that Puppet is idempotent, while an expect script can only deal with things you took into account.

Also, note that all the network device gears with PND become full-fledged puppet host, so that means you get reports, inventory and such for free when using this tool.