Arista Warrior, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Bash

Arista switches are really Linux servers optimized and programmed to be network switches. By this point in the book, that should not be a surprise, but what might be surprising is the depth to which you, the administrator, can gain access to the system.

Note

If you really don’t like the idea of junior engineers having access to Bash, you can limit their access to it by using AAA.

To access Bash, type the command bash from the enable prompt:

Arista-7280#bash

Arista Networks EOS shell

[admin@Arista-7280 ~]$

At this point, I am within a Bash shell on the switch. The prompt, by default, will be [username@hostname directory]$. In the previous example, I logged in to the switch with the default username (admin). I have not created a username in Unix; the switch took care of that for me.

At this point, I have just about all the control that I would have as a user in Linux. I am not a superuser, and my home directory is empty:

[admin@Arista-7280 ~]$ ls
[admin@Arista-7280 ~]$

I can navigate around the filesystem, just like I can on a Linux server:

[admin@Arista-7280 ~]$ cd /
[admin@Arista-7280 /]$ cd /usr/
[admin@Arista-7280 usr]$ ls
bin  etc  games  include  lib  libexec  local  sbin  share  src  tmp
[admin@Arista-7280 usr]$

If you’re at all familiar with Linux, you’ll be right at home in this Bash shell:

[admin@Arista-7280 usr]$ ls -alh total 0 drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 120 Oct 29 21:28 . drwxr-xr-x 29 root root 320 Nov 14 19:33 .. dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 880 Nov 14 19:34 bin drwxr-xr-x ...