Research Telnet Automation Tools

[askpatrickw]

What are our options for automating telnet (without rolling our own) so that we can have automated tests run against a test instance of WWIV. I'll be capturing my notes here, feel free to add your thoughts.

If you have experience with automating Telnet, do chime in and offer input. Some of my critieria I'm looking for, not saying whatever we use will meet all of them, just what I'm considering:

• Telnet Support
• Open Source or Free
• Tests written in a manner that a non-dev can create and add tests
• Jenkins \ CI integration
• Commonly used \ Popular Language
• Can Run on on Windows and Linux

[askpatrickw]

AutoMate http://www.networkautomation.com/sales/terminal-emulation-automation/

Windows only Requires for fee license

[askpatrickw]

PolyScript http://www.probit.co.il/

C# Windows only $60

[askpatrickw]

AutoPutty http://r4di.us/autoputty/

Written in C# Open Source: https://github.com/r4dius/AutoPuTTY Last update 3 years ago

[askpatrickw]

AnyConnect part of VisualCron http://www.visualcron.com/

Windows Only $400+

[askpatrickw]

3-T-Py Python telnet framework http://sourceforge.net/projects/three-t-py/

Last update March 2013

[askpatrickw]

Expect-Telnet https://github.com/silverwind/expect-telnet

TCL based

[askpatrickw]

Robot Framework http://quintagroup.com/cms/python/robot-framework http://robotframework.org/

I'm most impressed with this one so far as its open source and well documented. But I've not dug that deep yet.

Main repository is python 2 only. robotframework-python3 for p3 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/robotframework-python3

I'm starting to explore the Python3 version of this...

[AlPrunty]

There is the mac OSX Automator and Applescript.

[grichter]

I did some automated testing around a 20 years with an open perl telnet library, and i've seen some dirty stuff done with expect in shell scripts....