NETCONF

That's not my goal.

The goal is really to be composable, is probably the best word, composable with... any MCP or any skill or any platform, including SSH, including CLI, including REST and NetConf and, you know, Yang and all the good stuff that's made up our toolbox over the past 40 years, yeah.

Okay.

So, for example, if I, you know, am running an NMS and it's got an MCP server, could I, instead of going to that NMS dashboard, could I just like query NetClock, tell me the top five things I might want to look at from my NMS? Yeah,

Well, let's say that you need some knowledge on things like...

I'm placing the YAML structures, you know, or understand a little about how GNMI, NetConf, how those kind of things actually work.

Sure.

They are working on your topology.

Ansible uses playbooks to run configuration tasks, commonly without installing agents on network devices.

It can connect through SSH, NetConf, or APIs.

Terraform describes desired infrastructure, commonly using HashiCorp configuration language, and uses providers and stored state to plan changes.

Let's put this into practice with our second scenario.

Which tool fits this requirement? Ansible or an agent-based framework?

Ansible is the correct choice because it is agentless.

It executes tasks directly over standard protocols like SSH or NetConf using modular playbooks, making it ideal for network appliances that cannot run custom host agents.

That saves us from trying to install specialized daemons on network hardware where we don't have operating system root access.

Right.

Which is NETCONF, YANG.

Yeah.

I remember that.

They made it extremely complex with version three.

Netconf is a much nicer interface to work with."

There's also a security history people forget, two thousand and two.

The Oulu University secure programming group found vulnerabilities in SNMP message handling across most implementations.