Using Ansible to update Junos Device Configurations

Lately I’ve been using Ansible to update configurations on my JunOS devices. Here’s a fun little script to get you started. It will print the configuration of the DHCP service on a JunOS device, then update the name-server DHCP option to something new. The following playbook uses the JunOS ansible role

Install with “ansible-galaxy install Juniper.junos”

The structure of your inventory file should be like so —

---
wra:
  children:
    juniper:
      hosts:
        HOST_NAME:
          ansible_host: 10.0.30.1
          ansible_ssh_pass: your_ssh_pass
          ansible_network_os: junos
          ansible_user: root
          dhcp_pool: 10.0.30.0/24

---

wra:

children:

juniper:

hosts:

HOST_NAME:

ansible_host: 10.0.30.1

ansible_ssh_pass: your_ssh_pass

ansible_network_os: junos

ansible_user: root

dhcp_pool: 10.0.30.0/24

Here’s the complete playbook. You’ll want to change the “Commit” option to “True” when ready to run. Run with:

sudo ansible-playbook -i your_inventory_file.yaml /path/to/ansible_junos_update_dhcp.yaml

1	sudo ansible-playbook -i your_inventory_file.yaml /path/to/ansible_junos_update_dhcp.yaml

December 11, 2018December 13, 2018

Updating Pulse Secure Connection Profiles with PowerShell

Are you using a Pulse Secure VPN Appliance and need to roll out a connection profile update to clients, but don’t want to reinstall them all using MSI’s and command line parameters? Then you’ve come to the right post!

I recently encountered a situation where I had a need to update the connection profiles on a large number of clients using a Pulse Secure Appliance. According to documentation and a forum post, this isn’t possible to do programmatically. After doing a little research, I wrote a script that will do the following.

1. Confirm that your Pulse Preconfiguration file is accessible from the client’s location.
2. Check for an active VPN connection. If it’s active, the file will be copied locally before the connection is broken.
3. Read the local connection database (connstore.dat) and remove each existing connection.
4. Import your custom pulse configuration and start the client again.

Here’s the full script — Hope you find it useful!

December 6, 2018December 6, 2018

Backup configuration of a Palo Alto Firewall With Powershell!

Here’s a quick script to backup the configuration of a PA Firewall using the API to a XML file, Similar to a few other scripts online, but a little cleaner. Modify the following to suit your environment

Continue reading “Backup configuration of a Palo Alto Firewall With Powershell!”

December 6, 2018December 6, 2018

Onkyo Receiver Service Monitoring and remediation with Python/Grafana/InfluxDB and Vera

Background

If you have an Onkyo receiver, you probably notice odd issues with the network stack at times, causing various services (Spotify, DLNA, Etc) to stop responding to requests. The only resolution for fixing this state on the receiver is a physical power cycle (A soft reboot will not work). This is a well documented issue. It’s been blamed on faulty hardware, but it’s really a bug in the network stack somewhere causing this state.
Continue reading “Onkyo Receiver Service Monitoring and remediation with Python/Grafana/InfluxDB and Vera”

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018

Monitoring your APC UPS with the TICK Stack and Grafana

Recently I acquired a second hand APC Smart-UPS 3000. With the cheap addition of a network module SNMP V2/V3 support is easily added to this unit.

The next step is setting up monitoring. To do this I’m going to use parts of the TICK stack, primarily Telegraf (for polling and data collection) and Influxdb (for backend database) – Here’s a short introduction on those modules. Continue reading to see the tasks required to set this up.