NetBox is open-source software that records your network and data centre as a single source of truth: the racks, devices and cabling, plus every IP address, prefix and VLAN.
These posts cover using it day to day: modelling sites and devices, managing IP addresses, custom fields and tags, the API, and feeding automation tools like Ansible.
A hands-on walk through NetBox 4.7.2 with an estate loaded into it rather than an empty demo. What each screen holds and what you do with it: rack elevations, cable traces, the IPAM tree, dual-stack interfaces, and the cabinet that turns out to be 90.7 per cent full of power while only 28.6 per cent full of kit. How to stand one up as a container stack and on a host from the packages, both run end to end. The order you have to fill it in, derived from which foreign keys are actually mandatory. How one install is carved into customers so another customer’s device returns 404 and an ungranted object type returns 403. Config contexts and the inheritance that makes them worth more than custom fields. Adding your own values to NetBox’s own status menus. Three ways to add the object your business runs on, including a datastore modelled with no code. How to write validation rules and validator classes so the database refuses what your house standard forbids. And the story of the 2021 fork that produced Nautobot, what it was for, and what has since converged. Plus driving the whole thing from the netbox.netbox Ansible collection, where the inventory is a query rather than a file and one module argument quietly allocates a new address every time it runs.