Arista Warrior

Chapter 19. Email

Email on a switch? Hell yes! Arista switches allow emails to be sent from the EOS command line, from bash, from scripts, and from all sorts of interesting places. Once you see this in action, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Ever have to copy the output of a show tech from flash, to a TFTP server, and then to your laptop? You’ll never need to go through that nonsense again with email configured on your Arista switch. Ever copy and paste from the screen, only to discover that your scrollback buffer wasn’t big enough? With email on an Arista switch, just email the output directly to your (or anyone’s) inbox. But enough hype, let’s dig in and see how it’s done.

Arista switches contain an email configuration mode that is accessed with the email command:

Arista#conf t
Arista(config)#email

Once there, hit the question mark and see what’s available:

Arista(config-email)#?
  auth       Email account authentication
  comment    Up to 240 characters, comment for this mode
  default    Set a command to its defaults
  exit       Exit from Email configuration mode
  from-user  Send email from this user
  help       Description of the interactive help system
  no         Negate a command or set its defaults
  server     Email relay
  show       Show running system information
  tls        Require TLS
  !          Append to comment

In its simplest form, mail on an Arista switch requires configuration for a from address and an email server to send through. This is done with the from-user and server commands. Here, I’ll configure the from-user to be ...