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)

Rolling back configuration changes using NAPALM

Loading a configuration onto a device blindly, without verifying which lines actually change, can be a dangerous game, especially if the configuration that is being loaded has hundreds of lines or was generated programmatically. So, wouldn't it be nice if we could get a visual representation of all the changes that will be applied to our configuration and then decide whether we actually want to go ahead and apply them or discard the changes?

This is exactly what NAPALM allows you to do by using the compare_config() function together with commit_config() and rollback().

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

The following steps demonstrate how to connect to a device, view the differences between the new configuration and the old configuration, and then lets you...