[j-nsp] any way to do group inheritence only if parent exists?

[Saku Ytti]

> Any NMS(es) you recommend?  This one looks interesting:
>
> https://napalm-automation.net/enms-hackathon-project-presentation/
>
> and it is still under development.

I am opinionated and not necessarily right. But as far as I know there
isn't really a great provisioning tool out there. And if you can make
some heavy assumption, for example that every device is like junos
that it accepts full configuration and figures out how to get from
current to new full, then it's really easy to get 100% of configs from
systems. Even for journeyman developer like myself it's just weekend
POC to have something to show.

Ideally you'd do something like this:
   a) dump all configs as flat files, per router
   b) develop tool to push those configs to network, replacing existing ones
   c) start moving data from file to database, targeting biggest wins first

So no matter how poor your data hygiene is or how far the goal is, you
can actually start moving day1 and keep moving every day, instead of
some massive 0-100 project. This isn't a project it isn't even a
process, it's culture.


If you can't make that assumption, then I'm not sure if those
platforms even deserve to be automated, rather plan to replace them
and keep in life support with whatever process you are familiar with.
If network configurations are immutable, never changed, only replaced,
a very hard problem becomes very easy.

-- 
  ++ytti