Python Network Programming

Python Network Programming

By : Abhishek Ratan, Eric Chou, Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Buy this Book

Python Network Programming

By: Abhishek Ratan, Eric Chou, Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

This Learning Path highlights major aspects of Python network programming such as writing simple networking clients, creating and deploying SDN and NFV systems, and extending your network with Mininet. You’ll also learn how to automate legacy and the latest network devices. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll use Python for DevOps and open source tools to test, secure, and analyze your network. Toward the end, you'll develop client-side applications, such as web API clients, email clients, SSH, and FTP, using socket programming. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have learned how to analyze a network's security vulnerabilities using advanced network packet capture and analysis techniques. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Practical Network Automation by Abhishek Ratan • Mastering Python Networking by Eric Chou • Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition by Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Title Page

About Packt

Contributors

Preface

Free Chapter

Fundamental Concepts

Network automation

DevOps

Software-defined networking

OpenFlow

Program concepts

Language choices (Python/PowerShell)

Representational State Transfer (REST) framework

Summary

Python for Network Engineers

Python interpreter and data types

Conditions and loops

Writing Python scripts

Functions

Python modules and packages

Multithreading for parallel processing

Using Netmiko for SSH and network device interaction

Network automation use case

Summary

Continuous Integration for Network Engineers

Interaction with Splunk

Automation examples on various technology domains

Example and use case

Summary

SDN Concepts in Network Automation

Managing cloud platforms

Programmable network devices

Controller-based network fabric

Network automation tools

Summary

Low-Level Network Device Interactions

The challenges of the CLI

Constructing a virtual lab

Python Pexpect library

The Python Paramiko library

Looking ahead

Summary

APIs and Intent-Driven Networking

Infrastructure as code

The Cisco API and ACI

The Python API for Juniper networks

The Arista Python API

Vendor-neutral libraries

Summary

The Python Automation Framework – Ansible Basics

A more declarative framework

A quick Ansible example

The advantages of Ansible

The Ansible architecture

Ansible networking modules

The Ansible Cisco example

The Ansible Juniper example

The Ansible Arista example

Summary

The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics

Ansible conditionals

Ansible loops

Templates

Group and host variables

The Ansible Vault

The Ansible include and roles

Writing your own custom module

Summary

AWS Cloud Networking

AWS setup

AWS network overview

Virtual private cloud

Direct Connect and VPN

Network scaling services

Other AWS network services

Summary

Working with Git

Automating configuration backup

Collaborating with Git

Summary

Sockets, IPv4, and Simple Client/Server Programming

Introduction

Printing your machine's name and IPv4 address

Retrieving a remote machine's IP address

Converting an IPv4 address to different formats

Finding a service name, given the port and protocol

Converting integers to and from host to network byte order

Setting and getting the default socket timeout

Handling socket errors gracefully

Modifying a socket's send/receive buffer sizes

Changing a socket to the blocking/non-blocking mode

Reusing socket addresses

Printing the current time from the internet time server

Writing an SNTP client

Writing a simple TCP echo client/server application

Writing a simple UDP echo client/server application

Multiplexing Socket I/O for Better Performance

Introduction

Using ForkingMixIn in your socket server applications

Using ThreadingMixIn in your socket server applications

Writing a chat server using select.select

Multiplexing a web server using select.epoll

Multiplexing an echo server using Diesel concurrent library

IPv6, Unix Domain Sockets, and Network Interfaces

Introduction

Forwarding a local port to a remote host

Pinging hosts on the network with ICMP

Waiting for a remote network service

Enumerating interfaces on your machine

Finding the IP address for a specific interface on your machine

Finding whether an interface is up on your machine

Detecting inactive machines on your network

Performing a basic IPC using connected sockets (socketpair)

Performing IPC using Unix domain sockets

Finding out if your Python supports IPv6 sockets

Extracting an IPv6 prefix from an IPv6 address

Writing an IPv6 echo client/server

Programming with HTTP for the Internet

Introduction

Downloading data from an HTTP server

Serving HTTP requests from your machine

Extracting cookie information after visiting a website

Submitting web forms

Sending web requests through a proxy server

Checking whether a web page exists with the HEAD request

Spoofing Mozilla Firefox in your client code

Saving bandwidth in web requests with the HTTP compression

Writing an HTTP fail-over client with resume and partial downloading

Writing a simple HTTPS server code with Python and OpenSSL

Building asynchronous network applications with Twisted

Building asynchronous network applications with Tornado

Building concurrent applications with Tornado Future

Email Protocols, FTP, and CGI Programming

Introduction

Listing the files in a remote FTP server

Uploading a local file to a remote FTP server

Emailing your current working directory as a compressed ZIP file

Downloading your Google email with POP3

Checking your remote email with IMAP

Sending an email with an attachment via Gmail SMTP server

Writing a guestbook for your (Python-based) web server with CGI

Finding the mail server from an email address

Writing a simple SMTP server

Writing a secure SMTP client using TLS

Writing an email client with POP3

Programming Across Machine Boundaries

Introduction

Executing a remote shell command using telnet

Copying a file to a remote machine by SFTP

Printing a remote machine's CPU information

Installing a Python package remotely

Running a MySQL command remotely

Transferring files to a remote machine over SSH

Configuring Apache remotely to host a website

Working with Web Services – SOAP, and REST

Introduction

Querying a local XML-RPC server

Writing a multithreaded, multicall XML-RPC server

Running an XML-RPC server with a basic HTTP authentication

Collecting some photo information from Flickr using REST

Searching for SOAP methods from an Amazon S3 web service

Searching Amazon for books through the product search API

Creating RESTful web applications with Flask

Network Monitoring and Security

Introduction

Sniffing packets on your network

Saving packets in the pcap format using the pcap dumper

Adding an extra header in HTTP packets

Scanning the ports of a remote host

Customizing the IP address of a packet

Replaying traffic by reading from a saved pcap file

Scanning the broadcast of packets

Network Modeling

Introduction

Simulating networks with ns-3

Emulating networks with Mininet

Distributed network emulation with MaxiNet

Emulating wireless networks with Mininet-WiFi

Extending Mininet to emulate containers

Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA)

Introduction

Finding DNS names of a network

Finding DNS host information

Finding DNS resource records

Making DNS zone transfer

Querying NTP servers

Connecting to an LDAP server

Making LDAP bind

Reading and writing LDAP

Authenticating REST APIs with Eve

Throttling requests with RequestsThrottler

Open and Proprietary Networking Solutions

Introduction

Configuring Red PNDA

Configuring VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.2

Configuring Juniper Contrail Server Manager

Configuring OpenContrail controller

Configuring OpenContrail cluster

Interacting with devices running Cisco IOS XR

Collaborating with Cisco Spark API

NFV and Orchestration – A Larger Ecosystem

Introduction

Building VNFs with OPNFV

Packet processing with DPDK

Parsing BMP messages with SNAS.io

Controlling drones with a wireless network

Creating PNDA clusters

Programming the Internet

Introduction

Checking a website status

Benchmarking BGP implementations with bgperf

BGP with ExaBGP

Looking glass implementations with Python

Understanding the internet ecosystem with Python

Establishing BGP connections with yabgp

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Chapter 8. The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics

In this chapter, we will further build on the knowledge we have gained from the previous chapters and dive deeper into the more advanced topics of Ansible. Many books have been written about Ansible, and there is more to Ansible than we can cover in two chapters. The goal here is to introduce the majority of the features and functions of Ansible that I believe you will need as a network engineer and shorten the learning curve as much as possible.

It is important to point out that if you were not clear on some of the points made in Chapter 7, The Python Automation Framework – Ansible Basics, now is a good time to go back and review them as they are a prerequisite for this chapter.

In this chapter, we will look into the following topics:

Ansible conditionals
Ansible loops
Templates
Group and host variables
The Ansible Vault
Ansible roles
Writing your own module

We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started!

Python Network Programming

By : Abhishek Ratan, Eric Chou, Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Python Network Programming

By: Abhishek Ratan, Eric Chou, Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Python Network Programming

Chapter 8. The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics