Titanium (NX-OSv) dodgy?

[wintermute000]

Anyone found the NX-OSv Titanium image dodgy? I've tested in both VIRL and in unetlab.


Boots fine, but actual connectivity is really inconsistent and does weird things e.g.


- two NX-OSv back to back, /30 routed port, no ping. no counters, debug ip packet reveals nothing.
- switch config to SVIs. Everything works.
- switch config back to routed /30s. Everything now works this way, WTF. I replicated this in both VIRL and unetlab.....
- rebooted the image, started with routed config, now works... WTF


I also could get it to ping a IOSv fine, but not a IOSv-L2 with a routed port, gave up and went to sleep at that stage


I have a really complex Nexus topology to re-arch and I was really hoping to lab it with 1:1 prod syntax but with this kind of behaviour I'm thinking of just labbing in traditional IOS and doing the painful syntax conversion during change prep

[that1guy15]

Yeah titanium has always been shit. I have never heard much good about it. The 9Kv though is a lot better. But still no hardware specific features. Thats OK though as you do get the API!

[wintermute000]

Out of curiosity as I haven't bothered with N9Kv yet (being alpha and needing manual massaging to get it into VIRL etc.), does the API now give you programmatic output?

When we were messing around with N7K NXAPI, one of the things that immediately stood out was great we can get outputs from RESTAPI... and it comes back as a dumb text block we have to manually grep instead of coming back as a list/dictionary **cough arista cough JUNOS cough **

[that1guy15]

Im pretty sure you get it back in a programmatic format. Dont have one up the the lab to test but remember its pretty easy to work with.

[wintermute000]

BTW this can take a lot of the pain out of stuff like older devices not returning programmatic output.

https://github.com/networktocode/ntc-ansible

If you're not using ansible you can simply rip out the templates and use them in python (textfsm) natively.

Warning: whether the outputs are correctly parsed you'll have to verify, I suggest looking into the code for the particular show you're trying to parse. Yours truly actually updated the current parser (pull request which was accepted, woohoo) for "show ip bgp", the original parser was super basic and did not handle anything except the most simple of BGP outputs. I quickly found that out trying to parse a 10k line BGP table with every syntactic corner case in the book, but even then I cannot be 100% sure its correct (stupid cisco line parsing) as I didn't sit there and match up 10k routes manually - but it defo had at least 99% of them in there. 

[that1guy15]

Thanks for the reminder. I always forget to check out what modules Jason and NTC has for stuff like this.