Many tasks within the Information Technology realm are repetitive in nature. Some tasks have been mundane and will be mundane as long as we have IT systems. This was true in the world of IPv4 and will be true in the realm of IPv6. We try to make the machine do the majority of the work any time we encounter a set of these tasks. How many times has your enterprise been faced with changing ALL of the passwords within your WAN ‘right now’ due to a personnel action? Or perhaps changing ALL of the SNMP community strings ‘right now’ due to a security directive. We have faced these issues and created several tools to accommodate the demands. Our programs do not care if the network transport is IPv4 or IPv6.
For instance, one client ( long before tacacs+ ) had a policy of changing passwords in the network every 60 days. The network was large enough that it took several days to accomplish the task manually. When we introduced this task to the Expect programming language, the duration of the task immediately went from days to hours, with far fewer errors!! Also, with Perl we were able to automate several aspects of a network management system such as; capturing the alert, sorting the actions based on the domain name, performing relevant checks prior to opening a trouble ticket, and then opening the trouble ticket. Expect and Perl are merely the centerpieces of these efforts. There are many other environments such as Sed, Awk, Korn Shell, etc. We have been able to automate many tasks thus allowing Engineers and Administrators just a little more time to focus on the issues that need human intervention. Check out our Resources Section, some of the tools that we have developed are available for free download. If you have any questions give our team a call. Or, send us an email at scripting@ipv6-inc.com.