Getting your router to Tweet

Getting your router to Tweet

Original post-link # http://routing-bits.com/2010/01/20/tweeting-router/#more-1697

so an earlier post sharing a really neat geek trick is awesome, but how the hell does one go about configuring a router to tweet something? (if you not a programmer)

To do it, you would need the following:

• IOS image that supports EEM.
• A twitter account.
• A base64 encoded representation of you twitter account’s
• Bruno’s twitter script. Download tweet-policy.tcl here.
• The IP address of your nearest twitter server. (nslookup or dig will help you there)

The IOS obviously must support EEM.

Then once you have your twitter account, you need to encode your twitter account’s username:password to a base64 encoded representation.  Could be done using this website. Example:

Then copy the downloaded tweet-policy.tcl to your routers Flash:, either by TFTP or manually create it. I’ll show how to create the file manually in Flash:

Then configure the event manager policy settings:

The last thing left is to execute the EEM policy. This could be done manually or by specifying an EEM detector. Here is the manual way:

All credit is due to Bruno Klauser for assisting and writing this neat script. Obviously be careful what you tweet to a public system. I won’t recommend tweeting your production networks syslog, unless you limiting the viewing access to your twitter account. I have another idea or two, that I will use this for. But more on that later.

Visit http://twitter.com/EASyDMI to see Bruno’s tweeting syslog.

PS, just a tip. Once you loaded the policy, if you change something in the policy file, you need to de-register and re-register the policy. Just changing the file is not sufficient, because IOS parses the policy and loads it into a protected memory space upon registration. The command below is an exec command which combines de-registration, tftp download and re-registration.