Have you ever had the need to programatically obtain information from a network device. In general when we deal with manageable network devices the smartest way is to use SNMP. However in some cases your head can get fired from problems concerning SNMP. Sometimes you would want just to obtain the output of a common terminal command. Well it could be a bit tricky when communicating with Cisco switches. I will share my experience now - problems and resolutions about this issue.

In my case I’m developing a webconsole application. It should have the feature to search for a mac address in the ARP tables of a couple of switches. Of course what I did first was to try doing it with SNMP. Read the rest of this entry »