WOW it has been a long time. It has taken life and career changes to get me back to the point that I have been able to really think about picking this up again. I have had amazing feedback from the original audience and I am hoping to do even better for you al this time.
In the first season amazing guests in: Read more
WE HAVE WINNERS!! Big Congratulations to:
John Swanson
&
Hoping to get them both on the blog in the near future. Thanks to everyone who participated. Sign up for ACL, The StaticNAT Newsletter for future offers and to see what we are doing here at StaticNAT!
So lets start off with I am an old dog and I am learning new tricks. My entire career I have avoided the dreaded programing. In college I slid by my degree requirement for a coding class by taking Visual Basic for Industrial applications. I hated it. Debugging drove me nuts and there is still a hole in my bedroom wall at my parents where that brick of a VB found itself one night around 2am. From there I was just gun shy and honestly had plenty of other things going on that could afford to ignore learning anything outside of the basics of HTML and CSS.
Cut to today, I am in my late 30’s and going through a career transition of sorts. My timing for the transition is decent because the network industry is also going through a bit of a transition. For awhile now all the cool kids have been doing automation and Dev/Ops in the Server, OS and application space. But networks are trickier. I will leave out all the discussion of why because that horse has been beat dead a few times online. In this transition over the past six months or so I have found myself doing things I would never have guessed even a year ago.
So what types of things you ask. Ok for one I am now doing dev work. Mind you it is not great dev work and I will never be a professional developer but I have been writing code. In one case even some minor code for a library that is now in production with clients…scary huh. But mostly I am coding to learn and help move other people along the Path to Automated Networking including myself.
One of the lines that I have taken to heart in Life is “your only difference between now and ten years from now will be the books you read and the people you meet”. I read it years ago and since then I have doubled down on my reading. Prior to this I was reading lots of fiction and technical documents around doing my jobs as a network engineer. Since then I have expanded into Finance, Marketing, Strategy and more. I can’t begin to tell you the difference in my life it made. While I won’t go into details actions I took as a direct result of what I was reading helped me go from a mid five figure salary to a solid six figure salary and on a pace that made me part of the businesses I was with not just an employee. Read more
So we started off in Part 1 breaking down what a basic SSH connection and authentication looks like using Python and Expect. To add some context to this I am using the pexpect library for Python. This library falls back on system level tools like the the SSH client inside OSX or Linux. I can’t speak to how this works with Windows so just be aware of that as we move forward. In the long term I will start adding more complexity such as the ParaMiko and NetMiko libraries that use integrated SSH clients but for now I want to keep this as simple as possible so both you and I can get the most value out of these posts. Read more