Automating Junos Administration

Chapter 8. Initial Provisioning

Your personal toolbox now contains several tools for automating Junos devices: some that run off-box and remotely control a set of Junos devices and some that run directly on a Junos device. This chapter introduces two new tools that integrate with, and extend, the tools you’ve already learned. These tools, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and Netconify, focus on initial provisioning of the Junos device.

You can’t provision customer-facing services on a network until each participating network device is provisioned with a core set of services and protocols. This core set of services enables administrative access to the network device. In addition, initial provisioning may include one or more routing protocols to dynamically exchange routing information within the network. At a minimum, initial provisioning typically includes configuring the parameters required to administer the device over an IP network. Along with some network-specific configuration parameters, you will usually need to configure:

• A root password

• A hostname

• A management interface IP address

• A default route

• DNS name servers

• System management protocols (SSH, NETCONF, REST, etc.)

Either ZTP or Netconify can be used to speed the deployment of this initial configuration on hundreds of devices. In addition, ZTP and Netconify can be combined with some of the tools we’ve already explored, or integrated with the Ansible framework covered in Chapter 10, to automate the deployment of thousands of Juniper ...