What is Netmiko in Python? How to install Netmiko in Ubuntu

What is Netmiko in Python used for?

Netmiko is a multi-vendor Python library written by Kirk Byers. It is based on Paramiko and used to simplify SSH connections to network devices. It is multi-vendor including Cisco, Arista, and Juniper Networks

How to install Netmiko in Ubuntu

The video above demonstrates how to install Netmiko and use it to connect to a Cisco router using SSH.

Netmiko vs Paramiko

Paramiko is a generic SSH module that is used to SSH to devices, Netmiko is focussed on network devices and whilst you would be able to use Paramiko to SSH to network devices, Netmiko does make the task a lot easier.

Netmiko auto detect device type

There is a feature within Netmiko where it can guess the device type. It uses a mixture of SNMP and show commands to detect the operating system based on the output.

This is achieved using the netmiko.ssh_autodetect module

More information can be found here – https://ktbyers.github.io/netmiko/docs/netmiko/

More Resources:

Python Scripts for Network Engineers
Should Network Engineers Learn Python?

Does Netmiko support Telnet?

Since version 1.0.0 Netmiko supports Telnet connections but only for Cisco IOS devices. Inside Netmiko uses telnetlib to connect via Telnet. Once connected you have the same interface as you do with SSH. You just need to specify device type as cisco_ios_telnet.

How do I find Netmiko version?

If you already have Netmiko installed, simply run pip3 freeze to see the version you have installed. At the time of writing the latest version is netmiko==3.3.3.
To check the latest version go to https://github.com/ktbyers/netmiko

Netmiko