We recently had an integration where we needed to grab data, and update a patch, onto a “dumb” switch. This was part of a automated solution we were providing to a hardware vendor.

The switch had access via telnet and a stripped down http server. We needed to get on the box, run diagnostic scripts, and grab the logs. Using that data, we needed to make configuration changes, and report all of the steps to the operators for compliance and tracking.

We wrote a script that pushed up some shell code by echo-ing shell script to a file. This gave us the ability to binhex on the dumb switch. Then, after running the diagnostics and redirected the output, we could execute our binhexzip script, and echo/cat it to the terminal. We could then reconvert the hex back to the zip and back to the captured files.

Then we reversed the process pushed up the fix in the same way, and unpacked it, ran the updates and sent the notifications.