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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Expect, telnet and Dell switch

Recently I've tried to find a way to obtain MAC addresses of computers attached to a Dell Switch. I've found that i.e. show bridge address-table ethernet 1/g3 returns  MAC addresses behind the port 3. I found small problem - it's not so easy to query all ports (or a chosen set of ports). Therefore, I decided to use expect. You can find the script below.
It connects to a switch run the command and finally print a mac address in the format with ':' between number doublets.
However, there are two issues. I don't know how to avoid sending everything to the standard output. Moreover, if there are more than one MAC address connected to the port (i.e. virtual machines), only first address will be print on the bottom of the output. To be precise the address  appears in the line 6 of output (see line started with set temp_mac).


#!/usr/bin/expect -f

set timeout -1

set machine [lindex $argv 0]
set port [lindex $argv 1]
set command "show bridge address-table ethernet 1/g$port\n"

#Connect to the server
spawn telnet $machine 

expect "User:"
exp_send "admin\r"
expect "Password:"
exp_send "myXEN\r"
expect "?*>"
exp_send "enable\r"
expect "?*#"
exp_send $command
expect "?*#"
set temp_mac [ lindex [ lindex [ split $expect_out(0,string) "\n"] 6] 1]
exp_send "exit\r"
exp_send "quit\r"

puts "\n"

# Creating mac address in DHCP format (with ':')
set mac [ string range $temp_mac 0 1 ]
append mac "."
append mac [ string range $temp_mac 2 6 ]
append mac "."
append mac [ string range $temp_mac 7 11 ]
append mac "."
append mac [ string range $temp_mac 12 13 ]

puts  "$machine/$port:  [ string map  {. :} $mac]"

exit
Oh one more thing. To make a list of all following it's good to run the script in loop and the following one should be good base to start with.

for ((i=1;i<48;i++)) do mac-dell.expect esw44-1 $i| grep "esw44-1/$i"; done

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Upgrade Dell BIOS from XenServer 5.6

I've just found that to upgrade the Dell BIOS for R310 (and I guess other servers) on XenServer 5.6 you have to provide the lockfile file which comes from the procmail RPM.