Making monthly reporting program about Cisco product - python

I'm running a network infra consisted with Cisco product.
I'm trying to make a ordinary network monthly reporting program with Python.
I have never made any program before, So I think you guys have better way to do it.
Check my plan and teach me that is a good idea or not.
my plan as below.
Connect to Network Machine and collect log
telnet x.x.x.x
collect "show command"
save that log as text file
※ this action may run in telnet client program(like a SecureCRT)
open the text file and make a report
ex) combine "Show interface status" / "Show ip interface brief" / "Show ip arp" / "Show mac address-table" to make "Interface/IP/Mac/Port/Status" Report
This is my approximate plan.
Do you think it is efficient way? I need your teaching.
and I wonder how do you guys do similar job in datacenter.

We use Monitoring Tools for such tasks.
There are plenty of Open Source applications such as NeDi, Cacti and so on.
Why do you want to use "show" commands instead of using SNMP to get the device information?
Also I'd recommend to use SSH instead of telnet (for security reasons).
Cheers

Related

How to send raw string to a dotmatrix printer using python in ubuntu?

I have a dot-matrix printer LX-300 connected to my computer through the network. How do I send a raw string with ESCP characters directly to my printer in Python?
The computer is connected to the printer through another computer. I need to send a raw string because LX-300 image printing result is blurry.
The Problem
To send data down this route:
Client computer ---> Server (Windows machine) ---> printer (dot-matrix)
...and to not let Windows mess with the data; instead to send the raw data, including printer control codes, straight from the client computer.
My Solution
Here's how I solved a near-identical problem for a small in-house database application:
Step 1) Make the printer network-accessible without Windows getting its fingers in the data routed to it. I accomplished this by installing the printer using the "Generic/Text Only" driver, then installing
RawPrintServer on the Windows machine connected to the printer.
Step 2) Send raw data over the network to the TCP/IP port specified when you set up RawPrintServer (default is 9100). There are various ways to do that, here's what I did:
data = b"\x1B#A String To Print\x1B#" # be sure to use the right codes for your printer
ip_addr = 123.123.123.123 # address of the machine with the printer
port = 9100 # or whatever you set it to
s = socket.socket()
try:
s.connect((ip_addr, port))
s.send(data)
except:
# deal with the error
finally:
s.close()
Background
I thought about the problem in two parts:
Client machine: spitting out the data I need from Python with the correct formatting/control codes for my printer, and sending it across the network
Print server machine: transmitting the data to the locally connected printer
Number 1 is the easy part. There are actually some libraries in PyPI that may help with all the printer codes, but I found most of them are aimed at the little point-of-sale label printers, and were of limited use to me. So I just hard-coded what I needed into my Python program.
Of course, the way you choose to solve number 2 will effect how you send the data from Python. I chose the TCP/IP route to avoid dealing with Samba and Windows print issues.
As you probably discovered, Windows normally tries very hard to convert whatever you want to print to a bitmap and run the printer in graphics mode. We can use the generic driver and dump the data straight into the (local) printer port in order to prevent this.
The missing link, then, is getting from the network to the local printer port on the machine connected to the printer. Again, there are various ways to solve this. You could attempt to access the Windows printer share in some way. If you go the TCP/IP route like I did, you could write your own print server in Python. In my case, the RawPrintServer program "just worked" so I didn't investigate any further. Apparently all it does is grab incoming data from TCP port 9100 and shove it into the local printer port. Obviously you'll have to be sure the firewall isn't blocking the incoming connections on the print server machine. This method does not require the printer to be "shared" as far as Windows is concerned.
Depending on your situation (if you use DHCP), you might need to do some extra work to get the server's IP address in Python. In my case, I got the IP for free because of the peculiarity of my application.
This solution seems to be working out very well for me. I've got an old Panasonic printer running in Epson ESC/P compatibility mode connected to a Windows 7 machine, which I can print to from any other computer on the local network. Incidentally, this general idea should work regardless of what OS the client computer is running.
Ultimately, you will need and want to write your own wrapper/script to do this. And since you are using a distribution of Linux, this is relatively easy.
On a Linux OS, the simplest way to issue a print job is to open a subprocess to the lpr. Generally, using lpr lets you access the printer without the need to be logged in as root (being a superuser), which is desirable considering the amount of damage that can be done while logged in as a "superuser".
Code like the following:
import subprocess
lpr = subprocess.Popen("/usr/bin/lpr", stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
lpr.stdin.write(data_to_send_to_printer)
Should be a good jumping off point for you. Essentially, this code should allow you to accomplish what you need.
Be careful though; depending on your privilege levels, a call to open a subprocess might need root level/Superuser permissions.
Subprocesses generally inherit the User IDs and access rights by the user that is running the command. For example, if the subprocess is created by a root user, then you will need root user/Superuser rights to access that subprocess.
For more information, check out the hyperlinks I've included in the post.
Good luck!

Detect if connected to the internet using a tethered phone in Python

I was wondering if there is a way to detect, from a python script, if the computer is connected to the internet using a tethered cell phone?
I have a Python script which runs a bunch of network measurement tests. Ideally, depending on the type of network the client is using (ethernet, wifi, LTE, ...) the tests should change. The challenge is how to get this information from the python client, with out asking the user to provide it. Especially detect tethering.
Normally not - from the computer's prospective the tethered cell phone is simply just another wifi router/provider.
You might be able to detect some of the phone carrier networks from the traceroute info to some known servers (DNS names or even IP address ranges of network nodes - they don't change that often).
If you have control over the phone tethering you could also theoretically use the phone's wifi SSID (or even IP address ranges) to identify tethering via individual/specific phones (not 100% reliable either unless you know that you can't get those parameters from other sources).
In case anyone is interested, what I ended up doing was keeping the phone connected to my machine and used ADB to get this info. The command I run is:
adb shell dumpsys netstats
This is also a useful link.

Python, Rpi server status notifier

--First month in programming; be gentle with me--
I'm looking to build a short application using python to run on an RPi; the idea is to ping our company owned servers individually and eventually have them return as LED status lights. For now though; I would like it to broadcast a desktop notification to specific Macs on the same network.
I have 0 experience with python or programming general. Where should I start?
For learning Python there are too many very good web ressources easily found on the net, so I don't mention them here. For your nice little project for the Raspi you should get familiar with the python module called RPi.GPIO. With it you can easily turn on & off your LEDs depending on the ping response of your company servers.

How to communicate between client device and webserver?

I've build a little device based on the raspberry pi. Now I want to configure it using my web server. The idea is that I enter all the details on my django web page and then the device just pulls that off the server.
But there are two problems I'm not sure how to solve:
I have multiple devices for multiple users so some kind of Login must be provided.
The device also sends pictures from time to time. Right now it's using FTP with a general login, but I want to personalize that too for every device. The uploads will need a resume function so http is out!
So the basic question is: Should I get started with sockets or is there a better and safer way to do it? Maybe there is some kind of open source library that's been tested a lot?
Instead of hand coding sockets, I would suggest using HTTP with BASIC authentication to communicate between the device and the web server. You can uniquely assign an id/pwd to each device, and BASIC authentication is well supported by all web servers and client side libraries.
There are some security concerns with BASIC authentication even if you use HTTPS, but it maybe acceptable in your particular case here.
Maybe you could use SSH, with Fabric for instance. Here an example.

Python Twisted -- how to control buffered/unbuffered input in Telnet or SSH?

I want to write a Python Twisted server that serves text to its clients, and I want the clients to be able to write text back to manipulate the server. I will use Telnet, and the clients will use Putty or some similar terminal...I would also be open to using SSH if it is easier to do this.
My question is, how do I configure the server so that the client can send raw, unbuffered bytes (I don't want the user to have to press enter after a command)? Also, is there a way to change the configuration mid-session so that I can change back and forth to and from buffered/unbuffered bytes?
I think it is Telnet option 34 "Linemode" --- http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1700/10.htm
I just don't know how to set up Twisted to use that...
Any help setting this up for Telnet or SSH is appreciated!!!
Thanks!
twisted.conch.telnet.TelnetBootstrapProtocol is a good example of how to do some option negotiation. It also happens to perform some LINEMODE negotiation. Take a look at the implementation for details, but here's a snippet that shows the server asking the client to enable linemode, naws, and sga:
for opt in (LINEMODE, NAWS, SGA):
self.transport.do(opt).addErrback(log.err)
A real server might want to do more error handling than log.err if the negotiation fails, since the client will be left in a state that is presumably not ideal for use with the server.
Also take a look at some of the funky terminal demos that come with Twisted. These do lots of character-at-a-time processing.

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