Using netlab for Classroom Training with Sander Steffann

I know a few software development companies use netlab to test their network management software (and contribute back to netlab – thanks a million!), and I always wanted to chat about that. As I have known Dinesh Dutt for ages, it wasn’t hard to decide who to invite to have that chat with ;) As it turns out, it’s dangerous to put Dinesh1 and me in the same (virtual) room – we were all over the place, from the ancient history of Vagrant in networking labs to the recent Ansible woes, but we did manage to cover how netlab helps Stardust Systems test new SuzieQ features.

I always wanted to find someone who is more positive about AI than I am, while having solid “can deliver working stuff at scale” credentials. Andrew Yourtchenko definitely fits the bill. I first met him (online) when he was still an engineer in Cisco TAC, and when we finally met in person, he was busy automating the deployment of Cisco Live networking infrastructure. He was also instrumental in bringing us closer to ubiquitous IPv6 deployment with Happy Eyeballs.

I stopped tracking the (lack of) progress in network automation years ago, when I realized I had nothing new to say. As an eternal optimist, I hoped I was just missing something, but Urs Baumann (the guest of Software Gone Wild Episode 206) destroyed my hopes when he said, “I can still use the same slides I created 10 years ago”. On a more positive note, he recently completed his Master’s thesis on AI in network engineering, so we ended with a nice chat on its potential impact.

Whenever I’m ranting about vendors changing their data models or APIs with every other release, there is inevitably a vendor engineer chiming in, saying, “Life would be so much better if the customers wouldn’t insist on doing screen scraping for the last 50 years.” While some of that screen scraping is pure inertia, we sometimes have good reasons to do it rather than use protocols like NETCONF, gNMI, or protobufs. In Episode 205 of Software Gone Wild, I’m discussing some of those reasons and exploring the gap between vendor theory and reality with Dinesh Dutt, who is unlucky enough to have become the world’s foremost expert on crappy network telemetry.

Why do we need Infrahub, another network automation tool? What does it bring to the table, who should be using it, and why is it using a graph database internally? I discussed these questions with Damien Garros, the driving force behind Infrahub, the founder of OpsMill (the company developing it), and a speaker in the ipSpace.net Network Automation course. Listen to the podcast

The first IPv6 specs were published in 1995, and yet 30 years later, we still have a pretty active IETF working group focused on “developing guidelines for the deployment and operation of new and existing IPv6 networks.” (taken from the old charter; they updated it in late October 2025). Why is it taking so long, and what problems are they trying to solve? Nick Buraglio, one of the working group chairs, provided some answers in Episode 203 of the Software Gone Wild podcast.

In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature. Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of IPv6, the impact of CG-NAT on fraud prevention, and why digital twins don’t make sense in large datacenter migrations.

When I first met David Gee, he worked for a large system integrator. A few years later, he moved to a networking vendor, worked for a few of them, then for a software vendor, and finally decided to start his own system integration business. Obviously, I wanted to know what drove him to make those changes, what lessons he learned working in various parts of the networking industry, and what (looking back with perfect hindsight) he would have changed.

It’s been over four years since I published the last Software Gone Wild episode. In the meantime, I spent most of my time developing an open-source labbing tool, so it should be no surprise that the first post-hiatus episode focused on a netlab use case: how Ethan Banks (of the PacketPushers fame) is using the tool to quickly check the technology details for his N is for Networking podcast. As expected, our discussion took us all over the place, including (according to Riverside AI):

As I started Software Gone Wild podcast in June 2014, I wanted to help networking engineers grow beyond the traditional networking technologies. It’s only fitting to conclude this project almost seven years and 116 episodes later with a similar theme Avi Freedman proposed when we started discussing podcast topics in late 2020: how do we make networking attractive to young engineers. Elisa Jasinska and Roopa Prabhu joined Avi and me, and we had a lively discussion that I hope you’ll find interesting.