The Cave Tech
About Us
Can't get a job without experience. Can't get experience without a job.
The conundrum we're solving at The Cave Tech!
We are a group of people focused on taking on real world projects and providing an opportunity to individuals looking to gain experience in all areas of technology to build their CVs.
Spinning out of "The MakerMesh", a maker space focused on bringing people in STEM to work on .... projects, the "Sewing Room" has been repurposed during the business day to operate as a high tech company where people show up and build projects and products.
We are a non-profit. We build proof of concept projects that are disruptive. Our main project at this time is to build a completely open source alternative to Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly DNA). We're starting with Network Plug and Play and we have a roadmap to include the hot topics.
Our Project
Netbox All-in-One
Building a Cisco Catalyst Center alternative in the Open Source based on NetBox (get link to netbox).
Installation
NetBox is a difficult environment to spin up. We're simplifying it so any computer running Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS (even a Raspberry Pi) can be installed and configured with a fully operational NetBox environment. Currently, this is based on qemu/kvm, later versions will be based on Linux Containers.
Plug-and-Play
At the heart of everything networking. We're making a platform which allows NetBox to be used for automatic provisioning of switches. You provide the templates, then with some basic configuration on the upstream switches, we'll take care of the rest. The new switches will initially show up in a waiting state and as soon as an administrator clicks "Provision", the switches will be configured and brought online!.
[Php]https://github.com/The-Cave-Tech/Network-PnP
Kea DHCP Integration for IPAM
A free IPAM build right into NetBox! The work has already been done. [Netbox](https://github.com/The-Cave-Tech/netbox-ansible-cloud-init).
Our task will be to automatically install and configure Kea DHCP and prepare Netbox to manage DHCP directly from the UI.
Roadmap
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SD-WAN, frr - Free Router Project - NHRP (DMVPN with IPSEC)
No subscription, we'll update everything to use any standard TLS protected MQTT service to get everything working. Only one site needs a public IP.
User integration
We'll connect to external identity providers using LDAP and/or Active Directory and add a pane to the NetBox UI to see the relationships.
FreeRadius
We'll add full support for 802.1x and FreeRadius through NetBox! The idea is a "single pane of glass" for user connectivity!
User and Device network information
Where are the users logged in? What are the statistics on their interfaces? What is the RSSI information for WiFi? We'll add it all there.
More to come
As we hear from the industry what's needed most and most importantly, as we gain more people looking to gain experience, we'll add more items to the list!
"Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you are part of a team."
from The Lego Movie
by Tegan And Sara feat. The Lonely Island