Someone asked me a few days ago if it would be possible to trigger Contrail operations via ansible. After a bit of looking around I did not locate anything already made so wanted to see for myself how doable this is. While keeping in mind that I never played with Python more than modifying a few things in scripts that I already found from others (I’m way better at reverse engineering and improving/changing what is already in place), I decided this would be a good challenge for starting things off.

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While searching for how to get started with Postman I found a lot of articles but nothing simple and strict to the point. As such here goes my attempt, with screenshots, at showing how a simple test looks. I will show case two simple operations:

• getting a Keystone Token from Openstack via V3 API
• using that Token and making a request to Contrail Controller to list the configured Virtual Networks

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If you’ve reached this article, then for sure you’ve been searching for how to get Contrail (or its counterpart Tungsten Fabric) to work with a Cisco ASR9K. One of the first links you most likely hit has been: Contrail MX ASR903 posted in 2014 where the Cisco case is referring to IOS XE, Cisco ASR 903, which most probably, if you came here, does NOT apply to you .

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Most of you have probably always faced the question of which solution to use for your virtualization needs in order to build a personal lab for playing around. The two most common ones seen so far would most probably end up being Cisco VIRL (cloud and offline/your server versions) and Unetlab/EVE-NG . There are other variants related more or less to Eve-NG that also seem to do partially the job ( GNS3 ) but we won’t be talking about them here. Purpose is to show how to modify the templates of Unetlab in order to add the Juniper VMX phase 2, to show how one can debug Unetlab errors when trying to start your virtual devices (in order to figure out what the right parameters to put in the template are) and also add new options in the HTML interface (VMX with dual RE for example).

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If any of you have played around with the Offensive Security certifications, then for sure you have discovered that they are quite creative and that the people administering them want to make you think by yourself with as little help as possible.
One of their courses, CTP (Cracking the Perimeter), even requires you to hack into a website, retrieve a code, decipher how to get a secret key and only then can you proceed with the registration which checks that you managed to fetch these values.
Without giving a way the challenge, I can only say that working with GDB is needed for the final tests and that I, being lazy, installed a plugin for it called GEF so that I could trace what happens with the registers and have the information visually displayed all the time.

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