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)

Authenticating using public-private keys with netmiko

In all recipes so far, we have used a combination of username and password to authenticate ourselves against the device. A different approach employed quite frequently, and sometimes even required by certain audit requirements, is that we use public-private keys to authenticate.

In Chapter 2, Connecting to Network Devices via SSH Using Paramiko, we saw that Paramiko supports the usage of keys instead of a username/password combination to authenticate. As netmiko is built on top of Paramiko, we can also do this conveniently with netmiko.

In this recipe, we'll see how to use a private key to authenticate against a device and issue a command.

Getting ready

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

Make sure that the device you are using is configured to use public-private key authentication...