Network Config Validation
Use this skill to review network configuration before a change window or before an automation run touches production devices.
When to Use
- Reviewing Cisco IOS or IOS-XE style snippets before deployment.
- Auditing generated config from scripts or templates.
- Looking for dangerous commands, duplicate IP addresses, or subnet overlaps.
- Checking whether ACLs, route-maps, prefix-lists, or line policies are referenced but not defined.
- Building lightweight pre-flight scripts for network automation.
How It Works
Treat config validation as layered evidence, not as a complete parser. Regex checks are useful for pre-flight warnings, but final approval still needs a network engineer to review intent, platform syntax, and rollback steps.
Validate in this order:
- Destructive commands.
- Credential and management-plane exposure.
- Duplicate addresses and overlapping subnets.
- Stale references to ACLs, route-maps, prefix-lists, and interfaces.
- Operational hygiene such as NTP, timestamps, remote logging, and banners.
Dangerous Command Detection
Duplicate IPs And Subnet Overlaps
Management-Plane Checks
Parse VTY blocks by section so access-class checks do not spill across unrelated lines.
Security Hygiene Checks
Examples
Change-Window Preflight
- Run dangerous-command checks on the exact snippet to be pasted.
- Run duplicate IP and subnet overlap checks against the full candidate config.
- Confirm every referenced ACL, route-map, and prefix-list exists.
- Confirm rollback commands and out-of-band access before any management-plane change.
Automation Preflight
Use validation as a blocking gate before Netmiko, NAPALM, Ansible, or vendor API automation pushes a generated config. Fail closed on dangerous commands and credentials. Warn on best-practice gaps that are outside the change scope.
Anti-Patterns
- Treating regex validation as a device parser.
- Applying generated config without a dry-run diff.
- Recommending SNMPv2 community strings as a monitoring requirement.
- Checking VTY blocks with regex that can accidentally span unrelated sections.
- Testing firewall behavior by disabling ACLs instead of reading counters/logs.
See Also
- Agent:
network-config-reviewer - Agent:
network-troubleshooter - Skill:
network-interface-health


