Ruby-Cisco

This tool aims to provide transport-flexible functionality, for easy communication with Cisco devices. It currently allows you to execute commands on a device and get back the output of those commands.

To install:

git clone git://github.com/yakischloba/ruby-cisco.git cd ruby-cisco gem build cisco.gemspec sudo gem install cisco-<version>.gem

The library provides two styles to use:

cisco = Cisco::Base.new(:host => “10.0.0.1”, :password => “accesspass”) cisco.cmd(“sh ver”) cisco.enable(“enablepass”) cisco.cmd(“sh run”) output = cisco.run

This will return an array of results, one string for the output of each command. The following block style usage returns the same results, though some may prefer it:

output = cisco.run do |x| x.cmd(“sh ver”) x.enable(“enablepass”) x.cmd(“sh run”) end

SSH and Telnet should be working OK at this time. Unfortunately due to the asynchronous design of the Net::SSH library’s API, it is not easy to provide an interface for operating conditionally on output data in the middle of a session like you may be used to, for example:

output = device.cmd(“show version”) if output =~ “IOS” device.cmd(“run some ios command”) else device.cmd(“run some catos command”) end

Similar behavior could be achieved by setting up the SSH session yourself. You can peek at the #run method in ssh.rb for how to do this. Instead, the interface of this library allows you to simply execute a series of commands all in one run, and get the output at the end. I have limited the synchronous advantage of Net::Telnet by conforming it to this model, but I wanted to have them both be used in the same fashion.

The Base class should be used unless you know what you’re doing and what I have provided is not adequate. Telnet is used by default. To use SSH, you must specify:

cisco = Cisco::Base.new(:host => “10.0.0.1”, :user => “admin”, :password => “accesspass”, :transport => :ssh)

You can also pass an array of direct arguments that are used to instantiate the transport object. This is useful, if for instance, you want to use public key authentication with SSH:

cisco = Cisco::Base.new(:directargs => [“10.0.0.1”, “admin”, :auth_methods => [“publickey”]])

In the future, I would like to provide subclasses to retrieve, present and set configuration parameters in an OO fashion, like:

router.int.speed

> 100

router.int.speed = 10 router.apply!

I have yet to come up with a good way for implementing this that will scale across a wide variety of devices. Please let me know if you have input and want to help.

jakecdouglas@gmail.com yakischloba on Freenode

Thanks to Jamis Buck for creating Net::SSH and helping me understand how to do this.