by 000ooo000 on 2/6/24, 2:22 PM
In case you were struggling to find anything meaningful on the site regarding what netbox actually is:
>NetBox is the leading solution for modeling and documenting modern networks. By combining the traditional disciplines of IP address management (IPAM) and datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) with powerful APIs and extensions, NetBox provides the ideal "source of truth" to power network automation.
by jeffg-nbl on 2/6/24, 4:54 PM
Hey, I'm a product manager at NetBox Labs, the commercial stewards of the NetBox project. It's great to see such nice and useful feedback.
We're not even a year old yet as a company, and we know that it's currently not easy to find details on netbox.dev, and we're in the middle of a project to address that. In the meantime, I hope you'll check out the resources hosted on https://netboxlabs.com.
There's also a slack workspace at https://netdev-community.slack.com/ where you can interact with me and my colleagues. I'm @Jeff Gehlbach.
by twiclo on 2/6/24, 3:12 PM
I'm intimately familiar with Netbox. It has been the backbone of our WISP for going on 6 years. I just finished a long project where I had to do the first update to it in 5 years (a problem I inherited) and while it was painful to get everything ready on our end, I couldn't be happier with Netbox's side of things. The maintainers were able to easily answer questions on database design from 5 years ago. Great guys, great software.
by whalesalad on 2/6/24, 2:27 PM
by chpwssn on 2/6/24, 3:15 PM
My group has been running netbox for a few months now and it's been useful for keeping track of departmental address allocations and half a dozen racks of equipment. One note we've learned though: either host it offsite or set up an access point/laptop that you know will let you access it during a local outage.
by jonpurdy on 2/6/24, 2:20 PM
I actually used this when it first came out in 2016; it was developed by a DevOps person at DigitalOcean as a hobby project (IIRC).
My use at work was just a subset of features (IP and hostname), but I ended up using its Postgres DB as a source for SSH key deployment scripts (these days (maybe back then too) much easier to do with Ansible).
Glad to see it's still actively developed and has a ton of features, yet seems to still be great at its core features!
by Octabrain on 2/6/24, 2:19 PM
I've never used it although I've been aware of its existence for a long time. It's great to see a tool actively developed that uses a boring-yet-great-and-well-known framework (Django + Templates). Ironically, it's refreshing to see that stack in a world of JS frameworks, microservices and what not.
by dang on 2/6/24, 7:13 PM
by xwowsersx on 2/6/24, 2:56 PM
by candiddevmike on 2/6/24, 2:45 PM
Prior to NetBox I spent quite a bit time with RackTables. It was mostly manual documentation but really tickled my OCD itch (lovingly referred to as CrackTables), and it was really simple to use.
https://www.racktables.org/by jsz0 on 2/6/24, 8:21 PM
Big fan of NetBox I'm not even sure how I'd manage modern infrastructures without it. Unless your environment happens to be very static it's a huge time sink to document a network using old fashion Visio diagrams. The initial setup of NetBox can be quite an undertaking though. As long as you secure them properly CDP/LLDP/etc make the process much easier. One general rule of advice make sure you keep good backups of your NetBox because it's easy to make changes with unintended consequences that take a lot of time to manually back out
by gjvc on 2/6/24, 8:28 PM
by tw04 on 2/6/24, 2:28 PM
I struggle with netbox. I understand their theory of separation of duties, but without it doing DDI and without it having native integration into all the major dns players the usefulness is questionable to me. Relying on people to always update the source of truth never actually works in practice in an organization of any size.
by this_xor_that on 2/6/24, 3:37 PM
My org switched over to the Nautobot fork for the long term support aspect and integration with our other enterprise apps, both products are pretty great.
EDIT: should note we are using the on-prem version, not cloud/SaaS.
by maxboone on 2/6/24, 3:40 PM
Great tool, moved our IPAM to it at a major hosting company in the Netherlands a couple years ago.
Used a replicated PostgreSQL database and a Redis cluster (we went for KeyDB for HA) backing it and it's HA.
by cwk9 on 2/6/24, 6:47 PM
Netbox is amazing. I'm never going back to spreadsheets and Visio.
by samcat116 on 2/6/24, 2:31 PM
Can't say enough good things about Netbox. Really solid project.
by Already__Taken on 2/6/24, 11:25 PM
Is there a neat netbox > dhcp allow & dns/reverse loop config I can setup? How do you even do that in ipv6 and netbox IPAM?
by FL410 on 2/6/24, 4:24 PM
NetBox is awesome, super powerful.
I'm also really excited about the recently (like last week) added IPAM/Rack management in Hudu (kind of like IT Glue). It's pretty rudimentary but they seem to iterate quickly and that will be a great option for people who do IPAM/rack documentation for many customers.
by kristjank on 2/7/24, 9:53 AM
Netbox saved me a lot of headaches when managing clients. Turns out, it's a good idea to keep a network-only management tool that is manually updated, it fixes a lot of stability issues with other client management software, even if ti has an IPAM module
by lukevp on 2/6/24, 2:45 PM
Any comparison to PhpIPAM? That’s the only other open source IPAM I’ve used. Does this support scanning the networks as well?
by borlox on 2/6/24, 7:06 PM
Great tool, we‘re heavily relying on it for our network automation and have some custom plugins running.
by klysm on 2/6/24, 3:48 PM
Is it valid to just use IaC as the source of truth? That's where I do all my IPAM
by etc-hosts on 2/6/24, 5:08 PM
How does this compare to Infoblox?
by hash07e on 2/6/24, 5:33 PM
I would love some screenshots
by oriettaxx on 2/6/24, 5:54 PM
Is netbox intended to be some kind of "source of truth"?
I mean, if MyVM has today IP: 10.10.10.200, and tomorrow somebody change that IP,
* should I expect Netbox to change the IP assigned to MyVM?
Does Netbox do some kind of auto-discovery? or that's not its role?
Can Netbox ping my VM to know if they are UP, or that's not its role?
by sea-gold on 2/6/24, 2:09 PM
I haven't had a chance to play with this, but it looks really cool (and is actively developed).