“OSPF or IS-IS is most probably good enough for your data center… and if it isn’t, I sincerely hope you have an architecture/design team in place and don’t design your data center fabrics based on free information floating around the ‘net” “So far, EBGP is the only reasonable choice in very large leaf-and-spine fabrics… but does it really scale better than a link-state IGP in smaller fabrics?

“Containerlab provides a framework for orchestrating networking labs with containers. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create a topology of users choice and then manages a lab lifecycle." “Some implementations might treat physical link failure as a cause to start the Graceful Restart. Why anyone thinks that forwarding packets into a failed interface/link makes sense is beyond my comprehension." “Although the network research community has some consensus that DNS centralization is an issue, there is a lack of discussion on how to formalize the privacy risks”

Preface I wrote this guide to document the steps I took to build a flexible python environment on macOS 11 (Big Sur). This is in the pursuit of exploring network automation inventory solutions such as Ansible & Nornir but is in no way limited to network engineers. In fact, I wrote this guide after sifting through many articles detailing ways that Python developers set up their own environments. I found the parts that made the most sense to me and have consolidated and re-styled them for future reference.