IOS¶
Prerequisites¶
IOS has no native API to play with, that’s the reason why we used the Netmiko library to interact with it. Having Netmiko installed in your working box is a prerequisite.
Check napalm-ios/requirements.txt for Netmiko version requirement
Full ios driver support requires configuration rollback on error:
Cisco IOS requirements for 'Configuration Rollback Confirmed Change' feature.
12.2(33)SRC
12.2(33)SB
12.4(20)T
12.2(33)SXI
Downgraded ios driver support (i.e. no auto rollback on configuration error for replace operation):
Cisco IOS requirements for 'Configuration Replace and Configuration Rollback' feature.
12.3(7)T
12.2(25)S
12.3(14)T
12.2(27)SBC
12.2(31)SB2
12.2(33)SRA
12.2(33)SXH
12.2(33)SB
Note, to disable auto rollback you must add the auto_rollback_on_error=False optional argument.
Archive¶
IOSDriver requires that the archive functionality be enabled to perform auto-rollback on error. Make sure it’s enabled and set to a local filesystem (for example ‘flash:’ or ‘bootflash:’:
archive
path flash:archive
write-memory
Configuration file¶
IOS requires config file to begin with a version eg. 15.0 and end marker at the end of the file. Otherwise IOS will reject configure replace operation.
For the diff to work properly, indentation of your candidate file has to exactly match the indentation in the running config.
Finish blocks with ! as with the running config, otherwise, some IOS version might not be able to generate the diff properly.
File Operation Prompts¶
By default IOS will prompt for confirmation on file operations. These prompts need to be disabled before the NAPALM-ios driver performs any such operation on the device. This can be controlled using the auto_file_prompt optional argument:
auto_file_prompt=True (default): NAPALM will automatically add file prompt quiet to the device configuration before performing file operations, and un-configure it again afterwards. If the device already had the command in its configuration then it will be silently removed as a result, and this change will not show up in the output of compare_config().
auto_file_prompt=False: Disable the above automated behaviour. The managed device must have file prompt quiet in its running-config already, otherwise a CommandErrorException will be raised when file operations are attempted.
SCP File Transfers¶
The NAPALM-ios driver requires SCP to be enabled on the managed device. SCP server functionality is disabled in IOS by default, and is configured using ip scp server enable.
If an operation requiring a file transfer is attempted, but the necessary configuration is not present, a CommandErrorException will be raised.
Notes¶
The NAPALM-ios driver supports all Netmiko arguments as either standard arguments (hostname, username, password, timeout) or as optional_args (everything else).