Author: Joseph Jenkins

How I handle credentials and shared variables in Python

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How to handle common variables between programs

I have been writing a lot of python programs lately for interacting with the Meraki Platform. I was tired of copying and pasting my variables and credentials between programs, plus I wanted the ability to easily upload the programs to GitHub without having to worry about sanitizing the program of my companies or personal data. I did some searching and didn’t find a lot so what I figured I would do is put this information into a python module and then I could call that module from within my programs and then I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping all of my data secure. I decided to call my module cred.py and then I could call it from within the program with just a “import cred”. I used to copy this file into each of the directories where I was working on a program. Then I ran into a problem where I had to change an API key, I then had to go through and find all of the cred.py files I had created and then update the data in them. That proved to be more of a pain than I wanted to deal with so I decided to place it in a central directory for all of my programs. This proved much easier, but then I had to figure out how to call it from within Python without making it a module in the install path.

That is where I came up with this:

import sys

#Import the CRED module from a separate directory
sys.path.insert(0,’../CRED’)
import cred

With this it allows me to keep one central directory to store all of my credentials, but also commonly needed variables. I call it from within the program and can then run my programs easily. Love to hear how others are handling this or if there is a better way for me to do it.

Walt Disney World in October

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As a family we made our yearly trip to WDW for Food and Wine and to have some fun in the heat and humidity. We as parents like going and our son likes to go and has a good time. At least we think he does and usually he doesn’t dissuade us from that notion. Here are some of the shots I took as we went to Epcot and Animal Kingdom.

Epcot food and Wine and of course character Meet and Greets:

 

Random shots from around the park.

What trip to Florida would be complete with out a thunderstorm and some really bad weather. This was a shot I got as we were running back to our hotel trying to get in before the storm hit.

Animal Kingdom and Avatar Land:

And of course since it was a quick vacation here is the child hurriedly finishing his homework before he has to go back to school the next day. So sad for him.

Moving Cisco UCS to 10G Interfaces

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We initially implemented our Cisco UCS chassis and FI’s with 4 port channels each with 2x1Gb interfaces connected to our Cisco Core Switches. Now we are in the process of moving from a dual Cisco Core to a Juniper Virtual Chassis Core, more on that later in another post. Part of getting the new core was finally getting 10G for our network. We had been surviving just fine with our current network connectivity, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to get 10G and connect whatever we could to it.

What I could not find searching around the internet was how the UCS FI’s were going to handle the additional links and how the traffic would move over. I was afraid it would do some sort of Spanning Tree blocking and not allow them to pass traffic. However I realized after checking the existing links that I had two from each FI and both of them were actively passing traffic and neither was in a blocking state.

I then went ahead and started to plan the turnup of the links. For us the majority of our servers are sitting in the UCS environment from bare metal linux and windows machines, to our 500 Guest VMfarm. With so much crucial infrastructure we wanted to make sure we didn’t have any downtime or lose any traffic during the transition. So as part of the planning I built out a python script that would ping a list of known addresses to ensure they were all up and on the network as each part of the plan was completed. I wanted it be useful across any platform so that the code was reusable, so I made some allowances for the different versions and the unique requirements of each OS. The only requirement is a file called hosts.txt with your ip addresses in it you want to ping. Its multi threaded so it will run a lot of the pings at the same time and complete it as soon as possible. Then you just need to go through the output and look for anything that is failing.

 

 

[codesyntax lang=”python”]

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import os
import platform
import subprocess
import threading

plat = platform.system()
scriptDir = sys.path[0]
hosts = os.path.join(scriptDir, ‘hosts.txt’)
hostsFile = open(hosts, “r”)
lines = hostsFile.readlines()

def ping(ip):
if plat == “Windows”:
ping = subprocess.Popen(
[“ping”, “-n”, “1”, “-l”, “1”, “-w”, “100”, ip],
stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
stderr = subprocess.PIPE
)

if plat == “Linux”:
ping = subprocess.Popen(
[“ping”, “-c”, “1”, “-l”, “1”, “-s”, “1”, “-W”, “1”, ip],
stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
stderr = subprocess.PIPE
)
if plat == “Darwin”:
ping = subprocess.Popen(
#[“ping”, “-c”, “1”, “-l”, “1”, “-s”, “1”, “-W”, “1”, ip],
[“ping”, “-c”, “1”, “-s”, “1”, “-W”, “1”, ip],
stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
stderr = subprocess.PIPE
)

out, error = ping.communicate()
print out
print error

for ip in lines:
threading.Thread(target=ping, args=(ip,)).run()
[/codesyntax]

For the migration we took the subordinate FI and brought up the 10G interface as we watched traffic flow over it we then ran the ping script a couple of times. We then started to shutdown the trunk interfaces each time running the ping script looking for issues. After we had the Subordinate FI moved over to the 10G and new core we then then did the same with the Primary FI. I was happy to find that at no time did we lost any connectivity to our hosts/guests and that everything went smoothly.

Manta Ray Night Dive

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What dive trip to the big island would be complete without a Manta Night Dive. My wife, son, and I all did the Manta Dive with Jack’s Diving Locker. We did the late afternoon dive and then the Manta Dive after the sun set.

We met up with boat and took our Dramamine just to make sure that we didn’t get sick being out on the boat at night, with no horizon or reference point. Once the boat got to Keauhou Bay we then dropped into the water to do a dive while waiting for the sun to go down. This was a nice warm up dive for us and we we’re excited to see more of the big island from below. There wasn’t a lot of difference between diving here and diving in Oahu. We didn’t really see anything that we hadn’t seen before. We surfaced for about an hour and then descended down after dark hoping to see some mantas. We were not disappointed we had a couple that came around to visit us and swim through and eat. It was really a cool experience to see these majestic creatures swim through the water and effortless glide around and do loop de loops over us and around us.

While this is a dive done at night, it really isn’t. With all of the light above by people on surfboards, the baskets of lights on the sea floor, and all of the people down below with lights, it is basically brighter than the day. In fact when you swim around you see balls of light that I am pretty sure are brighter than the sun and just as blinding. So really you don’t need to be an advanced diver to do this dive, just the ability to dive should be enough to enable you to experience this truly exceptional experience.