GNS3 Talks: Python for Network Engineers with GNS3 (Part 6) - In-band management and save configs

Udemy: Get the course for $10 here: https://goo.gl/QYC988 GNS3 Academy: Get the course for $10 here: https://goo.gl/vnZJhg More free Python videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhfrWIlLOoKPn7T9FtvbOWX8GxgsFFNwn

Learn Python programming with GNS3. In this series of videos I will show you how you can quickly and easily program Cisco networks using Python. In this video we program a Cisco IOSvL2 switch with VLANs by using Python on an Ubuntu Docker container.

Script on GitHub: https://github.com/davidbombal/pythonvideos/commit/aaddef04d798f3ac538e93eca0d6d13f7b0100cd

This is one of the multiple videos teaching you network programmability using Python and GNS3.

In the previous video, we created this out-of-band management network and you might say well I don't have an out-of-band management network and that's not a problem. We could simply delete the direct links between switches and build the topology in this way. You just need to be careful if you don't have an out-of-band management network and you are making changes to interface, as an example, your script could be blocked if Spanning Tree is converging or something else happens on your network. So an out-of-band management network is preferred if you have that option.

But notice we could run our script again and as long as the script has IP connectivity to the devices in the network, it will be able to make configuration changes on those devices. So we've already made configuration changes to, in this example switch 4 and at this point my script is hanging because it may have a problem accessing switch 5 using in-band-management network.

So it looks like it didn't complete. Let's verify connectivity to the devices in the network. It looks like I was actually too impatient because it was busy configuring the switch. So show ip int brief

Let's test if we can ping that switch and we can. So may have just needed to wait a bit for say for Spanning Tree to converge. That's the problem with using an in-band-management network. If Spanning Tree is converging or there's another problem on the network, your script or application will not have access to the network devices.

So here you can see it completed without any problems. An out-of-band management network is better than an in-band-management network. But that's not always possible in all networks out in the real world.

Now one thing we're not doing in our script is saving the configurations of devices after we've made changes to them. So what I'll do is simply add another line here called WR. You could do copy run start if you wanted to but I'm just going to use the abbreviated version. And now it's a simple matter of running the script and letting the script save the configuration of the devices.

So if I connect to the conso ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsHcYzYNn9Y