2021

Meraki automation using Typer

In college, one of my Computer Science professors gave us some sage advice:

Computer Scientists are lazy.

He was right. Any time I can avoid spending time writing code that isn't related to my end goal - I'm all for it. It's an added bonus if I can use a library that gives me tools to easily make my end product more polished and professional.

If you haven't heard of Typer, it's a library for building CLI applications. It boasts an easy to understand syntax, features to minimize code duplication, and options to provide auto-completion and automatic help for end users.

Automating Cisco CallManager

Last week, I was presented with the need to modify a number of translation patterns in Cisco CallManager (CUCM) to support the implementation with a new auto attendant for one of my customers.

If you've worked with CUCM before, you likely know that translation patterns work similarly to NAT for phone calls. For example: you might set a translation pattern's calledPartyTransformationMask to map a call to an external number from a remote party to an internal extension in your organization.

API's are much more interesting to me than the intricacies of CUCM, so I'll save you the headache of hearing about that. Suffice it to say: there isn't an easy way to find all translation patterns with a specific calledPartyTransformationMask and modify that mask to reflect a new internal extension.