This package contains a tool called netcfg-grep that allows a User to extract (grep)
specific sections of a network configuration file.
The motivating Use-Case
As a member of the network team I need to perform configuration audits. I need a tool that will allow me to selectively extract sections of the config that I need to examine as I might not want to compare the entire configuration file. For example, I might want to only check the "IP access Lists" or the "VLAN interfaces" for audit compliance.
As such, I would use the netcfg-grep tool to extract only those sections I
want to examine from the actual configuration file. I will also have
expected configuration file(s). I would use the same netcfg-grep control
file to extract the same sections from the expected configuration file so
that I could diff the results of the acutal config against the results of
the expected config.
I want to be able to obtain the actual network configuration file independently
of the netcfg-grep tool. I may have another system that keeps these files,
or I may want to retrieve them on demand.
I want to be able to perform the diff of the actual configuration and the
expected configuration independently of the netcfg-grep tool. I could use
icdiff on my laptop, or I might want to use Github compare feature.
The following diagram illustrates the general process to use the netcfg-grep tool
for audit purposes.
Create a netcfg-grep filter control file (A) that defines your specific
sections you want to extract from the device configuration files. This is a YAML file, and the
structure of this file is described here.
Next, process (1), is to execute the netcfg-grep tool using the actual
configuration file (B). The output output file (C) will contains only the
sections defined in the control file (A).
Next, process (2) is to do the same with expected configuration (D) using the same grep control file (A). The output file (E) will contain only the sections defined int he control file (A).
At this point the output files (C) and (E) contents can be diff'd using any text-diff tool, or system that supports diff'ing such as github. The text difference, output (F), represents whether the audit is a "pass" or "fail."
This package is not yet available in PyPi. To install in your local environment:
pip install netcfg-grep@git+https://github.com/jeremyschulman/netcfg-grep.gitYou will need to create a YAML configuration file that defines the sections of
the configuraiton to filter. Once created, you can then use netcfg-grep to
extract the results from the network configuration file:
netcfg-grep -g grep-config-file.yaml -d device-config-file.txt > filtered-output.txt