#netbox

Cannot create IP address x.x.x.y/z inside range x.x.x.x

I think my summary is: "I don't like green eggs and ham". NetBox is not for me.

This is a network administrator's dream tool, if you are fastidious, but this product annoys me. To give it a fair shake I stood up an actual NetBox instance in my home lab. I loaded much of my lab setup into it, and I now just look at it and scratch my head–wondering what I would ever do with it. I am not going to toss it, but I will say if you are not a network administrator this product leaves much to be desired for documenting a more compute and storage focused setup.

Maybe I am just wrong but when I think of DCIM I think of network, power, compute and storage. This product does fine for network and power, but the compute and storage record keeping is really not helpful.

I will give a good example: when you create virtual machine records you have to specify the disk size in megabytes. This is just so byzantine. If you are trying to represent say a 2U server with compute blades–there is no easy way to do this where you can go to the rack view and see the 2U box with blades–you simply see a 2U chassis with N of M nodes populated.

This is likely my last post about NetBox. If I find some use case down the road I will possibly post again.

Here are some resources I found useful in getting this going:

NetBox Guide with Data Model

Jeremy Cioara YouTube Videos (No playlist, but you can find a bunch of content on NetBox. Beware the videos are kinda old so things look different now.)

Also I created this basic backup setup for mine to create a database backup to improve restore outcomes–since my NetBox is a virtual machine that is regularly backed up via snapshots.

Backup Location: /pgres/netbox_backup

Backup Script Location: /usr/local/bin/netbox_backup.sh 

#! /bin/bash /usr/bin/pg_dump --username netbox --host localhost netbox > /pgres/netbox_backup/netbox_$(date +%s).sql

Cleanup Script Location: /usr/local/bin/netbox_backup_clean.sh

#! /bin/bash ls -1t /pgres/netbox_backup/netbox_*.sql | tail -n +6 | xargs -r rm --

Crontab