I am trying to write a small script that will help me automate some of my IT tasks regarding to VLAN management.
I do not want to log-in to my switch via command-line - I want to send commands to it and get response (over the NET).
Are there any alternatives? I have started to search the web but so far I did not found anything.
I know SNMP is an option to gain info but I want to check other alternatives
thanks.
You can try Netconf Configuration Protocol, it is RPC-like management protocol which is supported by Cisco and many other vendors.
SNMP is the only widely and commonly used option here.
You can use WMI to manage Windows-based infrastructure.
There is also legacy SYSLOG protocol (RFC3164) which is UDP based.
For traffic monitoring and billing purposes there are NetFlow,
sFlow, jFlow, IPFIX and RADIUS protocols.
There are some other protocols but mostly proprietary.
So I'd suggest using SNMP which is nowadays a de-facto standard in network monitoring domain.
You might look at Expect as a scripting language solution. It is commonly used to do exactly what you are needing:
log into device (with result cases)
execute commands
save config
logout
As you build out a script library, tasks become simplified as you could do things like run scripts with parameters and have Expect do all the detail work.
See the wikipedia article for an overview.
I have also used SNMP for this kind of thing but the functionality is different because you are using an SNMP read-write privilege to upload new parts or complete configs, saving the running config to flash and/or saving the config off-device.
Try NETCONF+YANG protocol because it is currently the best option for network device configuration. More about SNMP alternatives:
https://bestmonitoringtools.com/top-snmp-alternatives-because-snmp-is-dying/
Related
Jenkins's openstack-plugin uses openstack4j for talking to an openstack cloud. I'm looking for a way that we can we can monitor the amount of http(s) API calls openstack4j does, from client side perspective.
Some possible things to know:
Jenkins can tell me that? (although I believe openstack4j does the http(s) call independently)
it's running inside a container, some https call monitoring tools that I could use on that level?
Regarding your questions:
I don't think Jenkins can do this monitoring for you, in the end, it's just a big, distributed, job scheduler and runner. If there's no plugin purposefully written for this, it can't. You'd have to write it yourself.
Regarding the monitoring, there's a bunch of questions to answer, actually:
Do you want just a Java based solution?
Surprisingly, I couldn't find anything Java based, the standard Java Management Extensions (JMX) apparently do not have direct support for investigating a process' open network connections.
If it doesn't have to be Java-specific, you could use tcpdump or tshark to analyze the traffic, as long as you know where the calls go, for example.
Another generic Linux based alternative is to launch the process through strace. You might need to make some adjustments for Java.
Is the connection HTTP or HTTPS (it matters a lot)?
For HTTPS one option would be to man-in-the-middle the HTTPS connection with some sort of proxy. Then you can just check the logs of the proxy for the connections
I need to make freinds zabbix & other monitoring system.
My company uses Zabbix for monitoring. Our partner plans to use other system.
We need to exchange monitoring datas.
I'm interested in coopereation with the next systems: BMC Patrol, MS SCOM, NetCool, Portal.
What is the best way to integrate it?
Maybe via SNMP?
Replicate hosts and metrics into your Zabbix (use Zabbix trapper item type and setup also Allowed hosts value) and then just use some suitable zabbix-sender implementation and push data into Zabbix.
IMO it's terrible idea, because latency, syncing, ... Do you really need data (item values) or do you need only visualize data from different datasources in one graph?
Regarding BMC Patrol you can use History Loader/Propagator KM to export the monitoring data:
https://docs.bmc.com/docs/display/public/unixlinux912/PATROL+KM+for+History+Loader
or you can use the 'dump_hist' command to dump the history data from the agents:
https://docs.bmc.com/docs/display/pia9600/dump_hist+uility
Regarding Netcool events, you could get the information using different approaches, for example, depending on the version, you could get the events from the HTTP interface, as described below:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSNFET_9.2.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_7.4.0/omnibus/wip/api/reference/omn_api_http_httpinterface.html
Or perhaps you could create a flat file gateway to read the events and write them on a file:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSSHTQ/omnibus/gateways/flatfilegw/wip/concept/flatfilegw_intro.html
Is it possible to access my Cisco router details like Name,Model,IP Address,Connection status etc from my iOS mobile.
I'm even ready to write small mobile app in iOS to get all router details.
Since I have just started learning in iOS, don't know if any library already exists for above task.
If my router does not work or gets hang.. I even want to try for restart of router using my mobile.
If example code exist, it will be very useful.
Like Cisco already has andriod and iOS app for same above function but dont want to use this app and want to write my own app with limited features only.
(http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/cisco-connect-express-manage-router-settings-remotely-android-ios/)
Thanks,
Accessing network gear is best done by using SNMP. Cisco has extremely rich management/monitoring capabilities via SNMP and all of their MIBs are publicly available here.
Almost all Cisco gear supports the SNMPv2-SMI MIB (the 1.3.6.1.2.1 OID) so querying things like sysName, sysLocation, sysContact, sysDescription, sysUpTime should be very easy. This MIB even supports tables for listing all the interfaces and IP addresses and has a whole lot of other things that might be of interest to you.
If you have SNMP write access on the device then you can even make config changes and perform management functions like rebooting or bringing an interface up/down.
There are a few SNMP libraries for ObjectiveC and I think Net-SNMP is the most popular (It's not .net even though the title suggests that).
If you are new to SNMP then I suggest starting simple by querying easy objects like 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5 (sysName) and 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.6 (sysLocation) before trying to jump into tables like 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2 (ifTable)
Remember, you don't have to stick with the standard MIBs you can download all of the custom ones that are particular to your device which will give you incredible amounts of flexibility.
You could use a screen-scraping technique to telnet or ssh to the Cisco device and parse the "show version" output. This will give you some of the information you need. For others, like IP addresses, you can use "show ip interface brief", "show cdp neighbors" etc. as you need.
Keep security in mind: make sure that telnet/ssh credentials are adequately protected in your app's settings, and try to restrict your commands to those that do not need privileged access on the Cisco device.
Be aware that Cisco devices have a small pool of available VTYs, and every telnet/ssh access from your app will use up one VTY. So if you have for example 30 guys wanting to use the access the device simultaneously from their apps, some of those instances are not going to get access to the device.
If this is a concern, SNMP is a better and more scalable option as suggested by previous answer. Make sure that you (a) have a read-only community string configured on the device, and (b) use only the ro community string from the app.
I am wanting to know what would be the best way to expose a library via zeromq. Say, I install a machine learning library (mll) on one machine, and I have a zeromq broker running on another. Now, if I have a zeromq client which needs to call functions within the mll, how can it do so via the broker.
I am wanting to know the steps I will need to take to make this work for libraries in a generic way.
Basically you need to have a "listener" that picks up data from ZMQ and feeds it to your machine-learning backend code, then transmits the results back to the requestor.
There are a lot of design choices to be made, such as what format to use to serialize data between client and server (JSON? YAML? Pickle? Thrift? ...) , and how to encode requests and request options. But all things considered, this is a pretty straightforward ZMQ usage.
The problem comes when you want a more feature-rich, complete, robust, etc. design--things like multi-threaded or multi-process servers, multi-machine scalability, secure user / request authentication and authorization, job reporting and dashboard, or job checkpointing. All those "extras" are common "network job scheduler" or "(enterprise) message broker" functions that tend to come out-of-the-box with packages like Celery or RQ.
If you don't want to go the full "message broker middleware" route, you might start by examining others' designs for lightweight ZMQ-based job brokers, such as this one from Jeff Knupp.
As you know Proxifier is a program that allows network applications that do not support working through proxy servers to operate through an HTTPS or SOCKS.
It can handle any transmission from running applications. I want to know how it can do this and how I can write one like that.
FreeCap is your way to go.
It's released under GNU General Public Licence and written in Delphi.
A socksifier defines a dynamic library with the same functions as the OS socket layer, but defined in such a way as to use a socks proxy. The program being socksified uses that library instead of the OS-supplied one for its network communication.