So far so good.  In Part 1 we connected to a Cisco switch and and performed basic Authentication with Expect.  Part 2 we expanded on that and added configuration to our code that added a VLAN and configured an interface.  But as I have already stated we are writing quite a bit of code just to configure a single switch.  So the next step is to add multiple devices and flat files.  I mean yeah we could setup a static list in our code and add our devices to that but why?  Our real goal here is to create functional code that we can use to do real things in real networks.  So that means pulling a list of devices from NMS, IPAM or even our nasty old excel files.  Plus this helps us address  the idea of adding authentication files and other flat file resource pools.  Eventually we will transition the use of flat files into databases so we can do even more cool stuff but we will hold off on that for now.

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When you setup to learn new things you are bound to get a bit sideways once and awhile.  With writing code I think that is even more the case.  You start out with an idea and if your lucky like I have been so far it starts to flow and things just work.  But in the spirit of learning in manageable chunks and sharing the experience with you I started targeting a single host.  When I tried to make the leap to multiple hosts things got interesting.  Along with that it became clear that these posts were going to get messy quick.  So lets clean all that up and move on to the cool stuff. Read more