Today I was reminded what a great git of Kit the really is. Its essentially a box that gives you Serial Access to a device via an RJ45 (Cisco pin-out) using WiFi, Bluetooth or wired, using a web GUI, or a bonkers driver setup on your machine.

For me, I use the AirConsole at work in a jack of all trades way.

• I cable the Serial Dongle to the Router
• I have a WiFi client profile configured that will auto join my (pervasively configured) corporate dirty network.
• I have a WiFi AP setup in the AirConsole that securely presents a new network that I can join to access the Serial Port
• I have NAT configured on the AP->Client WiFi so that I can still access the internet from that client Laptop
• I have the Ethernet port configured to bridge with the AP interface, so I can get a wired device to connect to the Serial setup, and the internet.

So, most of the time what I find myself doing is plugging in the AirConsole, then going to a nearby desk and connecting to the AirConsole Web interface via HTTPS over the dedicated WiFi. I can then configure my box, and still access the internet.

So by now you can use SoapUI and Python to read info out, and can utilise SoapUI Test Cases to validate, and deliver changes to the CallManager system. Again, please do ensure you have reviewed parts 1-3 before entering into this post. Its entirely contextualised within the series.

Up until now what we have been doing is quite focused on a single object being added or sense checked. In this, the final post in this mini series we will be looking at an end to end python script that can be used to add a new end user to the system, with pre and post validation.

This week is a first for me. I’m at Cisco Live in San Diego. It’s been pretty awesome so far I have to say!

Full Disclosure, I was brought here by Cisco to talk to Analysts about ACI. However, I should also point out my only session was closed door feedback on why we chose the solution, and how its helped us to date. Since we are only at the early stages, it was a short conversation. I thank Cisco for their hospitality, and for allowing me to access Conference Level sessions that my explorer level pass would not normally allow.

In this the third part of my mini series on using the CUCM API, we start to get further into the Ju-Ju, and check web app changes via the API, before then going on to make a change via the API itself.

As before if you haven’t gone through the previous two posts then please, head back to the start and we will see you back here shortly.

Whats your motivation today?

There are two reasons why you might want to use an API in your day to day changes.

In this part 2 of my API adventure, I will be looking at repeating what we did Part 1 via SoapUI, but this time in python using the suds library. If you haven’t read that yet, then really, please go back and do that. This will not be wildly useful otherwise.

Getting SOAP-y with Python suds

Yeah I went there…

So, we have a process that allows us to programatically look stuff up. Only its not very repeatable, and therefore not much use yet. With this post I will take you through the creation of a python script that mimics what we did previously - finding things, and showing them to you.