Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Changing access policies

Now that we have seen how to retrieve information about our access policy, what about changing it? Maybe we want to automatically carry out a workflow that checks all access policies against a list of valid policies and either automatically deactivates the policy or at least marks it for someone to have a look at it. We have seen the automatic retrieval of all lists in the previous recipe, Retrieving access policies. This recipe will cover the part about changing an access policy based on the policy ID.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called change_access_policies.py. Next, navigate in your terminal to the same directory in which you just created the change_access_policies.py file.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to change one of your access policies using the FMC REST API:

  1. Import the required requests library as well as the json and sys modules from the standard library:
    import requests
    import...