Notch For Linux

Notch is web service and Python client library which makes it easy to do stuff on your switches, routers and other network equipment. You can use it to build powerful, automated network management applications. It can support anything with a command-line interface and provides a consistent API for multi-vendor access.

Supporting the command-line (craft) interfaces of equipment from leading network equipment vendors, Notch makes it easy to build applications that support multiple vendors out of the box. Just about anything you can do in the vendor CLI you can do with Notch.

Applications like:

* automated network provisioning,  * live network state audit,  * N-way command-line interface (like Mr. CLI)  * RANCID-style network configuration backup (check out such a complementary tool for Notch).

are now possible with the developer able to treat network device command-line interfaces with a request-response interface.

Notch owes its legacy (though not its code) to the RANCID project. It's available as a Python WSGI web application or as a stand-alone Tornado web application and provides a HTTP/JSON-RPC v2 interface to allow it to be easily distributed across your network, improving availability and reducing latency issues in large networks.

Using a local or remote Notch Agent, you can execute commands on any routers matching a particular regular expression:

mrcli localhost:8080 --target "^[abc]r.*" --cmd "show ip ospf nei | i [0-9]+" cr1.mel: 10.100.0.3 0 FULL/ - 00:00:31 192.168.0.7 POS3/0 10.100.0.33 0 FULL/ - 00:00:33 192.168.0.1 GigabitEthernet1/0

ar1.mel: 10.100.0.1 0 FULL/ - 00:00:37 192.168.0.0 GigabitEthernet1/0

Use `easy_install or pip install` to install the Notch package from the Python Package Index. e.g.,

easy_install -U notch

Notch has a few other dependencies from packages not in the package index (such as Tornado), which must be installed manually. See the installation documentation for more.