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)

Testing network reachability using ping and NAPALM

So far, in this chapter, we have only discussed how to connect to a device (please refer to the Connecting to devices from different vendors using NAPALM recipe) and then how to issue a command (please refer to the Issuing commands to a device using NAPALM recipe). What we have not looked at, so far, are the vendor-agnostic methods that we promised.

The device we obtain from the vendor-specific driver offers a variety of functions; so, in this example, we are going to use the ping() function to test that our network device can reach a list of hosts.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called ping.py. Next, in your Terminal, navigate to the same directory that you just created the ping.py file in.

How to do it…

We will use the following steps to establish a connection with our network device. Then, we will use the ping() method to test connectivity:

  1. Import the napalm module:
    import napalm...