In my earlier post I described the setup I use for Wireshark contributions. In this post I’ll present a small memo about how to test a merge request (MR) that has been submitted in the Wireshark repository in GitLab. Here is an example of a MR that has not yet been merged in (as of […]
One of the cornerstones in successful Zabbix monitoring implementations is a database that performs well even under heavy load caused by saving large number of monitored values per second. Database partitioning is a feature that can be leveraged to speed up specific operations in the database. In short, partitioning enables dropping old slices of data […]
Over the years I’ve done quite much software, integration and business process development using NetBox. Still, when developing code and configurations in various contexts, I’m sometimes unsure about the object or model syntax I need to follow. Thus, this post. Update on 2026-01-27: There is NetBox PR #21209 currently in the progress to unify the […]
In F5 BIG-IP devices there is iControl REST API for interfacing with the devices programmatically. In this post I’ll briefly describe the basics of using the API in Python. I’ll be using BIG-IP version 17.1 here with a separately created non-administrator user account. For starters I’ll use a Python virtual environment to contain the separately-installed […]
I’ve recently used various kinds of message queues when building various apps that have needs to communicate with other parts of the app. For remote use, when the messaging parties are not on the same host, I’ve mostly used Amazon SQS, the Simple Queue Service. When using the SQS ReceiveMessage API call you can select […]
I have made occasional contributions to the Wireshark project for over five years now. I started with small documentation updates, and later I have added two new protocol dissectors (Zabbix and Z21) as well as improved some other dissectors. It can be several months between contributions though, so this post is my own memo about […]
In Python, sometimes you just need to catch all exceptions and show which one was it:
In my Basic Mocking with Pytest post I showed simple cases. Now let’s do more mocking. First I’ll create the environment for my code: $ mkdir more-mocking$ cd more-mocking$ python3 -m venv venv$ . venv/bin/activate(venv)$ pip install -U pip wheel…Successfully installed pip-24.0 wheel-0.43.0(venv)$ pip install pynetbox pytest…Successfully installed certifi-2024.2.2 charset-normalizer-3.3.2 idna-3.7 iniconfig-2.0.0 packaging-23.2 pluggy-1.5.0 pynetbox-7.3.3 […]
I have worked with NetBox for over five years now, and NetBox plugins feature has existed since version 2.8 in April 2020, but it was only recently that I got a need to start leveraging plugins to extend the NetBox functionalities. Most of the publicly available plugins work with Django model-based data that is saved […]
First, let’s show how the commonly-used plain datetime.datetime.now() gets the local time but does not have a timezone: >>> import datetime >>> now = datetime.datetime.now() >>> type(now) <class ‘datetime.datetime’> >>> now datetime.datetime(2024, 2, 17, 12, 47, 40, 34210) >>> print(now) 2024-02-17 12:47:40.034210 >>> now.tzinfo is None True >>> Let’s add timezone to it, using the […]