Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By : Bassem Aly
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By: Bassem Aly

Overview of this book

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We’ll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you’ll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Using the telnet protocol in Python

Telnet is one of the oldest protocols available in the TCP/IP stack. It is used primarily to exchange data over an established connection between a server and client. It uses TCP port 23 in the server for listening to the incoming connection from the client.

In our case, we will create a Python script that acts as a telnet client, and other routers and switches in the topology will act as the telnet server. Python comes with a native support for telnet via a library called telnetlib so we don't need to install it.

After creating the client object by instantiating it from the Telnet() class, available from the telnetlib module, we can use the two important functions available inside telnetlib, which are read_until() (used to read the output) and write() (used to write on the remote device). Both functions are used to interact with the created...