Python utilities for the Actiontec MI424WR Router

Author:	Lars Kellogg-Stedman
URL:	http://github.com/larsks/python-actiontec

Overview

This is a Python API for interacting with the Actiontec MI424WR router, as used by Verizon's FIOS service. The package includes the following classes:

actiontec.actiontec.Actiontec

This is a very thin wrapper around the pexpect project that lets you send commands to the Actiontec router via the telnet interface and receive back the result text.
actiontec.statistics.Statistics

This class extends the Actiontec class to include convenience functions for retrieving common operating statistics from the Actiontec router.

Requirements

You need to enable the telnet administration interface on your router.
- Log in to your router.
- Select "Advanced".
- "Yes", you want to proceed.
- Select "Local Administration", located in the menu under the toolbox icon.
- Under "Allow local telnet access", enable "Using Primary Telnet port (23)".
- Click "Apply".
You need the telnet command. If you're on Linux or OS X you're probably in good shape.
You will need to install pexpect.
- If you are on CentOS:
```
# yum install pexpect
```
- If you are on Ubuntu:
```
# apt-get install python-pexpect
```
- If you are on something else and you have the setuptools package installed:
```
# easy_install pexpect
```

NB: It's possible that the pexpect module will only run on Unix-like platforms (Linux, OS X, (Free|Net|Open|)BSD, etc).

Examples

Following are some simple examples. See the inline documentation (pydoc actiontec) for additional API details.

Basic usage

The following code prints out the top level help output:

from actiontec.actiontec import Actiontec

a = Actiontec()
text = a.run('help')

This assumes you are using the default password ("password"). If you have changed your password, the code would look like this:

a = Actiontec(password='mypassword')

If you provide invalid credentials for logging in, the code will raise actiontec.actiontec.LoginFailed. If you try to run an invalid command, the code will raise actiontec.actiontec.BadCommand.

Getting statistics

If you would like to retrieve the 1, 5, and 15 minute load average from your router, you would run code similar to the following:

from actiontec.statistics import Statistics

a = Statistics()
avg1, avg5, avg15 = a.loadavg()

To get detailed interface statistics:

stats = a.ifstats()

The ifstats method returns a dictionary of which the keys are interface names and the following parameters extracted from /proc/net/dev:

rx_bytes
rx_packets
rx_errs
rx_drop
rx_fifo
rx_frame
rx_compressed
rx_multicast'
tx_bytes
tx_packets
tx_errs
tx_drop
tx_fifo
tx_colls
tx_carrier
tx_compressed

Security considerations

This code uses telnet to interact with your router. This means that the username and password are sent over your network in cleartext. This has security implications, especially in a wireless environment: it is possible that with an appropriate level of access someone would be able to acquire your credentials and then have administrative access to your router.

You have several options for responding to this information:

You can ignore it. You're the best judge of the particular security risks associated with your own network.
You can use an SSL-enabled telnet client.

While the router support SSL-encrypted telnet, the telnet client distributed with most operating systems does not include SSL support. You may need to build your own version with SSL support.

You will need to specify an alternate port when using this API if you pursue this solution.
You can use an SSL wrapper.

Programs such as stunnel can be used to provide SSL support to tools that otherwise would communicate over a cleartext connection. You would use stunnel to forward a local port on your computer to the SSL telnet port on the router.

You will need to specify an alternate port when using this API if you pursue this solution.

Ganglia

Ganglia is a distributed monitoring system that, like other such systems, stores data in RRD files and graphs the data on a web interface. This package includes a script (ganglia/actiontec_metrics.py) that produces metrics for Ganglia using the gmetric tool.

Using this script you can get graphs of system load and network interface statistics for your Actiontec router.

larsks/python-actiontec