As I’ve mentioned before,
I have a lot of networking equipment at home. I have a mix of Arista and Juniper
switches for complicated things, a bunch of UniFi switches for simple
things, a PC running VyOS for a router, a
bunch of servers, plus the usual assortment of WiFi APs, random IOT
devices, TVs, speakers, computers, and so forth.
For the most part, this all Just Works. The hard part is keeping
track of what is plugged in where and how it’s all supposed to be
configured. There’s no way that I’m going to remember that the upstairs
access point is connected to a wire that pops out in the basement in
port 7 of the patch panel, which then goes to port 28 of the Juniper
EX4300 switch in the basement. Sure, I can write it down someplace; I
think I have 3 or 4 docs in assorted places with various versions of the
config. And parts of the config have a reasonable home – the
UniFi web controller at least makes it easy to annotate which ports of
which devices go where. But that only helps when the whole network is
composed of their devices, and even then it only works so well.
That doesn’t help with other parts of network management, like
keeping track of which IP addresses are used where, or keeping track of
serial console cables, or keeping track of which devices are plugged
into which plug on managed power strips.
Fortunately, there are tools that are designed specifically
for describing network configs and keeping track of hardware and cables
and power and so forth. A couple years ago I got tired of tracking
static IP addresses with a spreadsheet and moved everything to Netbox, which is an
open-source network information tool. It’s basically an API and a Web
interface on top of a database full of network information. It doesn’t
try to autodiscover things, or configure things – it just describes
configurations and provides an API.
Basically, Netbox provides a source of
truth for network configs. Over time, I’ve been working to move the
most annoying bits of infrastructure to read from Netbox. About 2 years
ago I moved most of my DNS and IP management into Netbox, and then wrote
a tool for pushing
changes from Netbox into Google Cloud DNS.

scottstuff.net

The author discusses their experience with managing a home network composed of various networking equipment using tools like UniFi, Netbox, and Pulumi. They highlight how Netbox serves as a source of truth for network configurations, enabling better tracking of static IPs and device configurations. The post also describes the use of Pulumi, an infrastructure-as-code tool, to manage UniFi network configurations with code written in Python. The author shares their process of importing existing network setups into Pulumi and planning to further automate and manage network setups using Netbox as a primary source.

Experiments With UniFi, Netbox, and Pulumi

Starting with importing from UniFi to Pulumi