I don’t really need to explain what Cisco DevNet is. and I saw the DevNet Zone! (I don’t even remember if it was called that at the time). I was looking for the self paced labs for Networking, got disappointed from the lab subjects and turned my attention to what else was available close by. Starting at Cisco Live in Berlin a few years ago, I came across a zone that allowed for some clever self paced labs to be done by those attended. However everything needed to be build from scratch and it was difficult to share code with anyone else. Pearl was really fast and provided ways to match exactly what you wanted for prompts and such as well as to extract information and use it further (like in those graphs I mentioned). Also at times the buffers didn’t play well and your connection could get dangerous. You could pretty much automate issuing commands either for showing info on screen or configuration but I had no way to extract information. The matching for the responses was a little risky. First using Perl to modify Smokeping plugins (essentially Perl code) so they could get latency numbers for the path from one Cisco Device to another (testing intermediate paths) and then straight through Perl scripts used to get Performance Data from Cisco Network Devices that SNMP could not provide (such as MLS Queues stats) and graphing them. One detail: The routers involved in these were not all Cisco. I remember changing password for all the devices in the Wan in a few minutes as an example of those benefits but I also had other uses such as automating fault checks to be used by members of our staff that didn’t have admin access to the Network Devices.

I used an Excel worksheet where all our Wan Devices IP Addresses were stored for our branches, added VBA code to extract the IP for the given Device from the respective cell, as well as some other details, and then started the session by calling the TCL/Expect scripts with those as arguments.

I have been experimenting for a long time, trying to pilot Telnet sessions at first and then SSH sessions through various languages.įirst it was TCL and Expect, a long time ago, probably around 2006-2007. It’s been some time now that I have started learning about network automation/programming through the Cisco DevNet channel, learning about NetDevOps, CICD and all those magical notions, presented by various incredible people on the Cisco Devnet Team.Īutomation with Network Devices is not new to me.

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