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Does anyone use ACI toolkit?

richard-ziga
Level 1
Level 1

Does anyone use the VM ova?

or the Docker container?

 

Or is ACI toolkit flawed and useless?  Because I don't see any decent videos on youtube or anywhere on how to set it up, There are no instructions for getting network connectivity for the ova or the container that I could find.

9 Replies 9

Rick1776
Level 5
Level 5
Great question, I was wondering the same.

I installed and tested ACI Toolkit in Windows 10.  It works, but with limit support.  The document is version 0.1 at https://acitoolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, it seems for programmers. 

I suggest before trying the ACI Toolkit, go through all free lessons (about 10 lessons) online from this book “Learn Python the Hard Way” then if you like it, buy the book. 

I wish we can have a decent forum to discuss about this tool.

I have been studying python for about 8 weeks and I have a fairly good understanding how to interpret and use most of what I find.  But I had no luck installing acitoolkit to my ubuntu vm (and I followed the instructions step by step)  and I couldn't find instructions regarding the network config of the ova or the container versions.

 

check out this community, there is very little going on there...

https://communities.cisco.com/community/developer/apic-dc/aci-toolkit/content?itemView=detail&dtid=osscdc000283

 

I have failed when doing the Linux because my limitation of the OS itself so I use Windows.  If you want to try Windows version, you need to install git-2.14.2.2-64bit, python-2.7.14.amd64, and VCForPython27 (for simplification and compatibility, use Python 2.7, not 3),

*The git installs a Git Shell where you have Linux like environment such as vim, cat... 

*Python-2.7 is the compiler

*VCForPython is another Windows app to install Python.

After all three apps install, you can follow the instruction download and install ACI Toolkit

Hope that helps.

Have you done anything useful with acitoolkit?



Have you looked at Ansible? There seems to be more resources online available and more videos on youtube... I am not sure which is a better at getting the job done, but the lack of resources regarding acitoolkit makes it seem less desirable.


First, a fair warning: if you install ACI Toolkit successfully, in the samples folder, there are many scripts you can try.  All the scripts with the name “aci-show…” are OK to run, but do not run other scripts like tutorial.py in your production environment until you understand what the script is doing.

To answer your question, if you ask those ACI developers/programmers, they will tell you sky is the limit what can you do with the script, but I am a network engineer try to learn programming so I think it is very limit and not useful. 

Below is a script that can mimic the “show ip int brief”.  My point is why do I have to go to all the trouble to write this script?  

import json
import acitoolkit.acitoolkit as ACI

creds = ACI.Credentials('apic')
args = creds.get()
sess = ACI.Session(args.url, args.login, args.password)
sess.login()

dat = []
r = sess.get('/api/class/ipv4Addr.json')
intfs = json.loads(r.text)['imdata']
for i in intfs:
	dat.append((
	i['ipv4Addr']['attributes']['addr'],
	#i['ipv4Addr']['attributes']['operSt'],
	#i['ipv4Addr']['attributes']['operStQual'],
	#i['ipv4Addr']['attributes']['dn']
	))
for rec in dat:
	print rec

 


Trinh Nguyen wrote:Below is a script that can mimic the “show ip int brief”.  My point is why do I have to go to all the trouble to write this script
 

 


Exactly!  The programmers are running network engineers out of a job it seems.

it's becasue it's an unexplorer area, programmers do not touch networking, and vice versa, there is an oportunity on it, for automate, right now i installed a centos with acitoolkit, and let you to do a lot of things in the aci.

CSCO12550173
Level 1
Level 1

I recently decide to explore this option, it's really helpful, it comes with samples that are scripts for creating specific things like bd, context and tenants, other like monitoring, and the best one are the applications, like link, acidiagram and endpointtracker, you have to have linux, bd and some python knowledge to install, setting and use it. if you need more guide, don hesitate to post it in the forum

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