Yesterday afternoon I was asked to come up with a way to automatically reconfigure an option in the SMC cable modem/router boxes we adopted last year for our commercial customers. While there is a minimal command line interface, the option that we need to set is only available through the HTTP interface.
Did I mention that we're now up to about 40,000 customers?
I tried using Keytext but couldn't get it to do what I needed. I then tried Clickymouse and so far, I am able to get it to reconfigure a router pretty quickly. Once I have the router's login page loaded, the macro logs in, goes through and sets the needed option, then applies it and logs out.
However, when I try to automate pasting a router's IP address into Internet Explorer, the macro blows up. (I'm using IE because I know that the SMC was developed with it in mind. It probably works OK with Mozilla but I don't want to add something else to possibly troubleshoot at this time.)
So at this point I have a way to speed up the reconfiguration of a boatload of deployed routers, but it's still going to require babysitting to feed in the boxes' IPs and deal with any errors.
A coworker suggested using a Perl script to parse the HTTP outputs and input the required config changes, and I suppose it's possible. For example, there are Perl scripts that will allow one to use Yahoo! Mails's HTTP interface via a POP3 client. The only problem is that I don't know Perl.
The really annoying things about this all-of-a-sudden high priority project are that the config change that we're making is something that's been known about for a few years, and the next version of the firmware that will be loaded onto the boxes will allow for this config change to be made easily via SNMP.
Friday, October 15, 2004
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