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)

Escalating privileges with netmiko

When dealing with configuration operations on a network device, we might need to enter a mode that has more privileges. This enable mode can, and should, be secured by a password.

In the examples so far, we have assumed that this was not the case and that everyone can just enter enable mode without being prompted for a password. In this recipe, we are going to see how you can provide netmiko with the secret when connecting to the device and then enter enable mode before retrieving the running configuration.

Getting ready

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

Make sure that your device is configured to require a secret when trying to enable.

How to do it...

Let's start by importing the required classes from the netmiko library. We will then set up a dictionary that contains our connection...