Posts

Will FTTP ever replace Ethernet?

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FTTP vs leased lines. Which is better and which is worse? Will FTTP really replace fibre leased lines? Let's explore! Fibre to the Premises Fibre to the Premises or FTTP has been around for some time. It's an access technology used all over the world, based on the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector) G.984 (and it's amendments) standard, more commonly referred to as a technology as 'GPON' (Gigabit Passive Optical Network). FTTP marks the next step in network access for the home and business, decoupling the 100 year reliance on copper cabling for access to Internet services across the UK. Copper is used in the following methods of network access within the UK: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line ( ADSL version 1, 2 and 2+) Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line ( VDSL version 1 and 2) - also called FTTC or Fibre to the Cabinet G.FAST (Probably the last standardised DSL technology that will be used in the UK, with

Beautify your parsed output

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Parsed an output from a device and can't make heads or tails of it? This happens when you start looking at parsing data from devices and you're quote new to the world of pyATS, Genie or Python scripting. Outputs from devices are parsed using a specially-made Cisco or community-created scripts called parsers.  If you use the show ip interface brief parser your data goes from being human-readable (like this): LAB-1841-R1#show ip interface brief Interface                  IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol FastEthernet0/0            203.0.113.1     YES NVRAM  up                    down FastEthernet0/1            192.168.0.69    YES NVRAM  up                    up Serial0/0/0                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down Loopback0                  192.0.2.1       YES NVRAM  up                    up To JSON-structured. Like this: {'interface': {'FastEthernet0/0': {'ip_address': '203.0.113.1', 'interfac

pyATS - Reading from a Dictionary

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When working with pyATS, one of the first things that threw me off when working with the data that came back from my lab router was that the data was in a structure that I wasn't used to seeing. I really, really struggled with this, so I hope if you have found your way here, this blog helps you! The issue with the structure is that it comes back from a router as a dictionary. This is the output from a vty connection to an 1841 I have running in my lab: The information is taken from the running configuration of the router and printed on the screen in a human readable format. The same output through pyATS looks something like this: For human readable this output loses points, however this output can be very powerful if you can iterate through the dictionary  items  and find the  values  you need from the dictionary  keys.  One of the first things to do is get a feel for the actual structure of this dictionary. The dictionary itself makes more sense when structured like this: { '