Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to connect to a single cisco switch. For this tutorial we are using the library knows at Netmiko. Please feel free to go in the link for more information.

Requirements

1. Have Python3 and Netmiko install.
2. We well need to configure manually the following parameters: SSH connection, username, password, mangement IP address.

Configuration on the Cisco Device

enable
configure terminal
hostname SW1
ip domain-name practice.com
enable secret cisco
username david secret cisco
interface vlan 1
description MGMT_VLAN
ip address 192.168.1.11 255.255.255.0
no shutdown
ip default-gateway 192.168.1.1
line vty 0 4
transport input ssh
login local
exit
write memory

Python Script

# We import a module from netmiko

from netmiko import ConnectHandler

# Create a dictionary representing the cisco device. 

iosv_l2 = {
    'device_type': 'cisco_ios',
    'ip': '192.168.1.11',
    'username': 'david',
    'password': 'cisco',
    'port': 22,         # Default value is 22
    'secret': 'cisco'   # Default value is ''
}

# Establish an SSH connection to the device by passing in the device dictionary.

net_connect = ConnectHandler(**iosv_l2)

#Execute the command to show IP address info on the switch

output = net_connect.send_command('show ip int brief')
print (output)

#Execute the command to show vlan information

output = net_connect.send_command('show vlan brief')
print (output)

#Execute the command to show interface trunk information

output = net_connect.send_command('show interface trunk')
print (output)

With a single program we are able to run multiple cisco commands and get information we need about the cisco switch. There can be more commands of course.