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)

Chapter 4: Configuring Network Devices Using Netmiko

In Chapter 2, Connecting to Network Devices via SSH Using Paramiko, we saw how to connect to a network device via SSH using the Paramiko library. While we can do pretty powerful things such as executing commands against our devices using Paramiko, it was built as an SSH library, not a library to connect to and configure network devices. Enter netmiko, a library purpose-built to connect to and configure network devices using Python.

The netmiko library is build on top of Paramiko, hence the similarity in name, which abstracts away some of the quirks of dealing with SSH connections, including differing escape codes, and is purpose-built for connecting to and configuring network devices using either an SSH or telnet connection. This purpose-built abstraction becomes particularly useful when dealing with devices from different vendors and not with a homogeneous single-vendor deployment. Additionally, netmiko provides a nice set of...