Hello everyone,
I've been looking over the past days for a solution to offer to our help-desk operators: basically it would be great if they might be able to change switchports vlans on their own, so to release some pressure for this kind of low-level administration tasks.
After evaluating all the options found around, the best approach would have definitely been the Embedded Menu Manager, as it seems to be able to offer the exact kind of flexibility / security to achieve this goal. What a deception upon the discovery that it works exclusively on the "T train", so it apparently cannot run on any of the switches!
My programming skills are unfortunately shameful, nevertheless I've been crashing my head on Tcl for more than 2 days... I came out with the dummiest script, which actually is able to prompt for the interface and then change the vlan -something like this:
puts "What interface do you want to change?"
flush stdout
set interface [ gets stdin ]
puts "What vlan do you want to set for this interface?"
flush stdout
set vlan [ gets stdin ]
ios_config "conf t" "interface $interface" "switchport" "switchport mode access" "switchport access vlan $vlan"
puts "...Configuring VLAN..."
flush stdout
And it works!
But the following problem is even more frustrating, because it took me hours to get this script to work: on the switches, not even the old "menu" command works! So I cannot embed this script in a menu which should be automatically run at the operators' login (thus having them working in a more or less "secure" environment).
So, this is the main reason of my post here: does any one of you expert (surely much more than me!) have an idea about how to make this to work? I cannot believe I'm the first network administrator in the world with this issue, and evidently I'm not smart enough to find a solution on my own (which I usually do, but after reading Tcl scripting manuals, having browsed through cisco feature navigators and tried all possible ideas, I'm still in a desert... any help would be incredibly appreciated!
Thanks in advance to everyone,
Dario
