Multiple Threads to the Same Device

[bgile]

This came up in a side conversation here: (#325)
I'm not sure what ever came of this. Personally, I would love to be able to do this. My use case is AdTran devices which have no API, basically, all I can do is login and use the CLI. They have a max login of 8 so if I can send say 5 concurrent sessions and interact with the CLI it would greatly cut down on my automation work.

If anyone else has written something to bypass this I would love to see what they have come up with. Short of writing my own threading and thread workers etc... I was hoping to keep this all inside the frameworks capibility.

Thanks,

[ktbyers]

@bgile Just enter multiple names in Nornir inventory and point it to the same device. You would need to coordinate the work being done using each name however in the Nornir-Python code that you write.

Whether AdTran will actually support this or not...you would have to test. It would not surprise me if there are limitations here on the device side.

[bgile]

Well, I was excited till I realized I was not articulating what I was really after correctly haha. Yes, I needed multiple logins to the same device, but also needed to send different commands. The thought would be to increase iteration time by being able to send different commands per device, i.e. device1 sends x and device2 sends y but they would go out at the same time. This is not how the framework behaves, I would probably need to use async or something.?

[ktbyers]

Doesn't have anything to do with async vs threads. You need to figure out the logic of how to send cmd1 to device1 and cmd2 to device2. Should be doable.

[dbarrosop]

Assign them to different groups and run cmd1 to one group and cmd2 to the other group

[bgile]

Well, I thought I would update for what it's worth. I made 4 threads that pull from a queue that contains all the commands I want to execute. Inside my job function for each worker, I filter each device in the inventory with a max of 4 devices (all pointing to the same domain as discussed above) so that each command execution from the queue is its own session and then I basically just recycle the devices as one completes so I never clobber the other. Execution seems to work great, I will run 4 sessions to the same device and execute 4 different commands and they return at the same time and the next 4 commands get picked up, and so on.

Did I do this the best way? Not sure haha, but it seems to work very well so far in testing.

If you guys ever think about putting in async support I think that would be great :) As always I love this framework, it has allowed me to do a lot.

[bgile]

@dbarrosop Sorry did not see your suggestion.
I see, makes sense to use the group as a way to differentiate. I will test that out as well. Thanks all.