nanog mailing list archives

Re: Writable SNMP


From: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 12:53:01 -0500

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Keegan Holley
<keegan.holley () sungard com> wrote:
It was more curiosity.  I'm looking in to scripting and starting to get
tired of having to account for ssh/telnet, credentials, differences in

'write a library'... someone once said.

platforms and code from the same vendor and my various failed attempts to do
all of the above.  Most of the automation suites I've seen work via logins,
rancid,HP NA etc etc.  Although there are better programmers that can and
have made it work it still seems cumbersome to me. I've pretty much made the

it is, somewhat, yes.

assumption that writable SNMP was a bad idea but have never actually tried
it.  I was curious what others were using, netconf or just scripted logins.
I'm also fighting a losing battle to convince people that netconf isn't
evil.  It strikes me as odd that if I wanted to talk to a database/website
full of credit card and billing info there's a long list of API's I could
use, but if I wanted to talk to the router or firewall in front of it I can
only use ssh or telnet.

sad, right? there are millions of restful program writers, only a few
thousand network device programmers, and the vast majority of 'network
management' is done by people perfectly happy with 'cisco-works' :(


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