ansible – Fredrik Holmberg

Category: ansible

Network Automation Day

On September 1st the Norwegian Juniper Elite partner nLogic AS hosted an event called “Ansible i praksis“, entirely focused on network automation using Ansible. Lots of interesting presentations and discussions from the Norwegian automation scene. A whole day of Juniper, automation and Ansible! Does it get any better?

I had the pleasure of leading a technical workshop at the end of the event where the attendees were challenged with common operations tasks worthy of automating.

A fun experience and all-in-all a great day!

Measuring wireless performance using Ansible, Elastic Stack and MikroTik

March 29, 2016 / Fredrik Holmberg / 0 Comments

Recently I got a fun challenge handed to me where the scenario was to use 20 MikroTik access points to continuously measure wireless throughput for clients in a large arena. The collected metrics could then be used as a baseline component and indicator of a good or bad wireless user experience.

The MikroTik model chosen was the “hAP ac lite” or RB952Ui-5ac2nD which supports 2.4Ghz and 5GHz (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac). Their OS, RouterOS, supports lots of security, wireless and routing features to play with. All this for a price tag of around 50 USD. Sweet!

To solve this challenge we need some way to execute actions on the MikroTik, then extract that output data into some useful format which we then can analyze and store. Then scale this up to n devices and repeat indefinitely.