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Alrighty friends, let's talk about the answers. So the first question we have

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been asked

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that many of the devices in our network are very old, can we still automate

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them?

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Well, as I hope we've learned within this particular skill, we are not limited

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by having

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old devices. In fact, so long as these old, dusty devices can be managed

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remotely via SSH,

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then you can utilize particular tools such as NetMico to basically log in

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remotely and run all the

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commands that you need just in a programmatic manner. So the first answer to
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commands that you need just in a programmatic manner. So the first answer to

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this question is

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they resounding yes, don't let all devices put you off, automation is still

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possible. Okay,

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next one, we have over 100 devices in our network. Is this going to present a

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problem? Can we connect

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to them all? Well, is this going to present a problem? Certainly not. 100

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devices, not a big issue

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at all. Now how can we connect to the mobile? Technically what you could do is

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you could write the

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connection details for every single one of your 100 devices, every single 10

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year rate a script,

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and just bait the details directly into the script. Now you may be thinking
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and just bait the details directly into the script. Now you may be thinking

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this is not a good idea.

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And if that is your intuition, then you certainly would be correct. Remember

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what we did in this

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particular skill. Instead, we simply wrote the connection details for all of

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our devices, which in

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this case here would be 100 a little bit more than four, but nevertheless we

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could write them into

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a YAML file and we only need to write that information once and then in the

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future for every single time

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you want to run a script, we can just add in very simple logic to read in the
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you want to run a script, we can just add in very simple logic to read in the

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information from this

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particular file, utilizing say, for example, the PI YAML library. And after

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that, what can we do? We can

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utilize things such as loops to iterate through each element within that object

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and then connect

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your devices sequentially one by one by one. I will say for posterity, if you

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get a little bit more

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familiar with Python, you can actually do some cool things such as threading,

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which is essentially

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going to allow you to connect to all 100 devices at the same time as opposed to
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going to allow you to connect to all 100 devices at the same time as opposed to

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one by one by one by one

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in a regular Python loop. But forget about that for now, that's way beyond what

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we're talking about.

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Quite simply, if you're just beginning to automate with only 100 devices, a

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Python loop is probably

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a perfectly reasonable option, albeit perhaps not the most efficient solution

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but never mind that, okay?

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If you suggested a Python loop, then in my book you still get all the points.

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Okay, so the next part,

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they ask, will we be able to make configuration changes or just run show

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commands? Well, in the case of

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NetMico, we know we can use the send command methods, which is going to allow
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NetMico, we know we can use the send command methods, which is going to allow

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us to send show commands

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to our devices. Okay, so that sounds pretty good, but what about making

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configuration changes? Well,

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as we know, NetMico also has another method known as the send config set method

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, and this is going to

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allow us to send actual configuration. So what we could do is we could have our

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configurations in some

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type of text file, and then we can read in those configurations using the open

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function and then

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break it down line by line by utilizing the read lines methods, and then we can
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break it down line by line by utilizing the read lines methods, and then we can

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take this data and

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pass into NetMico's send config set to make the actual configuration changes.

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So the last one,

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the big boss has heard about network testing. They're asking is this possible?

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How can we implement this?

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Well, similar to what we just saw before we know NetMico can send show commands

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, but in the case of

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our old devices, this is going to return just regular string data, but what we

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can do is we can

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utilize tools such as text, FSN with NetMico, and this can basically transform

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our regular CLI text
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into structured data, whereby we can parse it and then implement Pythonic logic

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to effectively

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conduct particular tests. You know, is our NTP server matching what we expect?

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Are our OSPF

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neighbors in the full state that type of thing? Really, when it comes to

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network testing,

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as long as you have your data coming back to you as structured data, then the

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only real limits are

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your imagination, anything you can think of, you can pretty much implement. So

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friends, that is us

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for our validation challenge on writing Python scripts for network automation.
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for our validation challenge on writing Python scripts for network automation.

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I hope it's been

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in the form of 'to for you', and I'd like to thank you for viewing.