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I have a Cisco catalyst switch and there is a task to code some web gate which will allow billing to control ports in switch, gather different statistics, etc. What is the modern way to achieve that? Earlier with a supermicro switch I just wrote a PHP script which did a shell_exec passing commands to netcat which connected to the switch. I don't think this the best way to do that so I am asking for help.

Maybe there are some libraries for that? For Perl I saw a library called Net::Appliance::Session and it looks really good as I see, but I am not that good in Perl so I am looking for something PHP/Ppython based.

Update What I found so far for Python is Trigger and Exscript. Looks pretty nice for my simple port on/off and speed change tasks:

from Exscript.util.interact import read_login
from Exscript.protocols import SSH2

account = read_login()              
conn = SSH2()                       
conn.connect('14.45.43.5')     
conn.login(account)                 
conn.execute('conf t')              
print conn.response
conn.send('exit\r')           
conn.close()

But I still think I am going to have some headache parsing different status reports, so maybe I need to do that using something different or split stats gathering and operation functionality. Use SNMP for stats for example.

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    Have a good, hard look at SNMP. This is still a good way to gather that kind of data from a switch.
    – Sven
    Oct 2, 2014 at 11:34
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    Look at Cisco's own CiscoWorks software
    – Chopper3
    Oct 2, 2014 at 12:00
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    Documentation on it so awful ... I haven't even found concrete CLI examples. Besides i do not see the point of it. It's a standalone solution and i see how to communicate with it from code.
    – Glueon
    Oct 2, 2014 at 12:04
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    You might try the clogin expect script (part of RANCID)
    – Mark Plotnick
    Oct 2, 2014 at 23:53
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    You may wish to look at SNMP for writing, too. See stackoverflow.com/questions/9170644/… for an example.
    – Mitch
    Oct 4, 2014 at 4:23

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I ended up using PySNMP. It wasn't clear that SNMP v3 has pretty encryption and it also allows not only to gather data but also manipulate the device.

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