Opensource

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.

Part 1 of 3. Some are lying. Most never have to, because they are paid by the vendor whose product they are recommending and nobody has to tell you. The tells that say you are being sold to rather than engineered for, and what never makes it onto the shortlist.

I counted every commit to Ceph’s main branch for the last ten years — 69,613 of them from 1,718 people across 478 organisations — traced all 38 Steering Committee members to their employers, and gathered the publicly stated deployments. The result is a project that absorbed the loss of its founder and its second-largest contributor without dropping a beat, and is still shipping at the same rate today.

Twenty years back you bought software and the copy was yours. Now you rent it, and the supplier sets the terms. Part 1 of 8 walks through how that happened, and why every step made it harder to go elsewhere.

The first 2 posts looked at what dependency costs you. This one looks at who else foots the bill: the volunteers keeping software going for very large companies, and the businesses bought, borrowed against and stripped back. Part 3 of 8, in plain language.

Since 2025 the European answer has turned from plans into things you can install. Part 8 of 8 covers what has landed, what is honestly still years off, and gives 3 questions to work out where you stand.