Any volunteers to build and maintain a NetBox demo?

[Jeremy Stretch]

Hi folks,

Many people have lamented the retiring of the demo NetBox instance I used to run when NetBox was first released. Unfortunately, with the current pace of NetBox development, I don't have sufficient time to rebuild and maintain a demo instance any more. The most difficult part of running the demo isn't maintaining the server itself, but populating the instance with realistic data. It's a lot of work to imagine an entire network from scratch.

However, if anyone within the community would like to volunteer, I'll gladly provision a server to host it. Ideally, we'd populate the demo instance with enough data to showcase all the features NetBox has to offer. This could be derived from (sanitized) real-world data, completely mocked up data, or a combination thereof. The demo instance should also reset itself every few hours, which can be achieved with a simple cron job. Once the demo has been built, it will need to be revisited after every minor release (e.g. 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, etc.) and data might need to be tweaked or added to stay current.

It's not glamorous work, but it would be a highly valuable way for people to contribute without needing any development experience. And of course, maintainers will be publicly credited. Any takers?

Jeremy

[John Kerns]

Is there a writable API yet? I think the last release I saw had a read-only API. If the data can be pushed in programmatically, then rebuilds and resets should be pretty "automateable".

Or I can build and test a dockerfile for a standard demo build and that can be used for quick rebuilds on minor releases. Then it should be easy to automatically reinstantiate the container every few hours.

I'd be willing to put a system together for the automation of this and babysit it if the interaction and rebuild times can be supplemented by that automation.

[Jeremy Stretch]

Rebuilding the demo can be done by simply restoring the PostgreSQL database at a fixed interval. There shouldn't be much to it really. It's the long-term maintenance of the demo data set that's more involved.

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[John Kerns]

Yea I wouldn't mind making up or sanitizing some real world data to show off new features when they are released.

How would you prefer to handle release rebuilds? Maybe just pull them from DockerHub?

[Jeremy Stretch]

I don't have much of an opinion on upgrading. Whatever's easiest, I suppose. I don't think it makes much sense to go with Docker for this though, since the demo server will only be used to host NetBox. It would just be an additional layer of abstraction.

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 6:11 PM, John Kerns <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yea I wouldn't mind making up or sanitizing some real world data to show off new features when they are released.

How would you prefer to handle release rebuilds? Maybe just pull them from DockerHub?

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[John Kerns]

That's fine. I was just thinking Docker would make upgrades easier since I can just pull the Docker Hub image, but I'm fine going with a simple build. Would it be possible to snapshot the OS in case I accidentally blow it up during an upgrade?


Do you already have a data set I can start with or should I build it all from scratch? I wouldn't mind doing it from scratch since I'll likely work on some automation in the process anyways.

[Jeremy Stretch]

> Would it be possible to snapshot the OS in case I accidentally blow it up during an upgrade?

I'll spin up a droplet on DigitalOcean. We can make snapshots as needed.

> Do you already have a data set I can start with or should I build it all from scratch?

I have a dump from the original demo but NetBox has grown quite a bit since then. It's also not very fleshed out. Building from scratch is probably best.

Jeremy

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 10:29 PM, John Kerns <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

That's fine. I was just thinking Docker would make upgrades easier since I can just pull the Docker Hub image, but I'm fine going with a simple build. Would it be possible to snapshot the OS in case I accidentally blow it up during an upgrade?


Do you already have a data set I can start with or should I build it all from scratch? I wouldn't mind doing it from scratch since I'll likely work on some automation in the process anyways.

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