Fleet inventory

A fleet is the set of devices a running nl6 simulator hosts. The scripts/fleet.sh helper captures a fleet to a JSON file (export) and replays it into another simulator (import) — useful for moving an interesting test topology between hosts, snapshotting a long-running scale lab before a redeploy, or shipping a reproducible inventory alongside a bug report.

For the underlying REST surface see Web API.

Prerequisites

• A running nl6 simulator with its REST API reachable (default :8080).
• curl and jq on the host running fleet.sh.

Export

Capture the current device inventory from a running simulator:

scripts/fleet.sh export http://sim-a:8080 nl6-inventory.json

The output is the raw GET /api/v1/devices response — one entry per device with its ip, resource_file, snmp_port, and any configured flow, traps, and syslog blocks. Server-assigned fields (id, interface, running) are kept in the file for reference but are dropped on import.

If the file argument is omitted, nl6-inventory.json in the current directory is used.

Import

Replay an inventory file against another simulator:

scripts/fleet.sh import http://sim-b:8080 nl6-inventory.json --netmask 16

--netmask is a prefix length and defaults to 16 — the flat 10.42.0.0/16 management plane the fleet now uses. POST /api/v1/devices accepts only 8, 16, or 24 (a dotted mask like 255.255.0.0 is rejected with 400), and the GET response does not echo a netmask, so import supplies one.

Dotted netmask in an inventory file

A batch-manifest file ([{start_ip,...}]) is posted verbatim, so --netmask does not apply to it — an entry carrying its own dotted netmask field (e.g. from an older export) is rejected with 400. Regenerate the export, or rewrite the field to a prefix length (16).

Import auto-detects the file shape:

File shape	Behavior
{data:[{ip,...},...]} (export output)	One POST per device — preserves per-device flow / traps / syslog
[{start_ip, device_count,...},...]	One POST per batch — compact range manifests like inventory/devices.example.json

Round-trip example

# Snapshot the source
scripts/fleet.sh export http://sim-a:8080 my-fleet.json

# Replay against a fresh target
scripts/fleet.sh import http://sim-b:8080 my-fleet.json

A 56-device sample lives at inventory/nl6-inventory.json — drop it into any empty simulator to populate a heterogeneous fleet spanning many of the 28 device types nl6 ships with.

Behavior and limits

• Fail-fast. The first failed POST aborts the run. A 409 on a duplicate IP halts immediately so partial imports are obvious.
• Sequential POSTs. Each device or batch is POSTed in series, no parallelism. For very large fleets prefer the batch-manifest shape — one POST can create many devices via device_count.
• Server-assigned fields dropped. id, interface, and running are produced by the simulator at device-attach time and are not part of the POST surface.