Cisco IOS-XE Upgrade Tools Development: Part 2

This chapter marks the penultimate stage of the IOS upgrade automation journey, focusing on the development of the remaining four crucial applications. These applications serve as the foundational elements that will eventually converge into an end-to-end IOS upgrade application in the subsequent chapter. Throughout this phase, you will carefully write a set of tools with distinct functionalities. First, you will establish a connectivity validation tool, enabling you to verify network connections. Additionally, you will build a tool for an interactive collection of usernames and passwords, along with a file information reading tool. Further, you will write an MD5 check tool specifically tailored for file integrity verification on a Linux server. To complement these, you will develop a configuration backup tool for network devices, an IOS file uploading tool, and a router flash IOS MD5 check tool. In addition to these, you will create a user input tool, which will allow you to alter the application flow as needed. To round it off, you will develop a router reload tool with an accompanying post-check tool. Along the way, you will also learn to write the basic sequential Python code and enhance the code with parallel code using the threading module, which enables your Python code to control multiple devices using multiple processes. Each tool in this chapter has undergone rigorous testing to ensure robustness and to validate their functionalities. These tools lay the foundation for the final application, shaping it into a comprehensive and efficient IOS upgrade application.