Writing tests for networking

So far, we have been mostly writing tests for our Python code. We have used both the unittest and pytest libraries to assert True/False and equal/non-equal values. We were also able to write mocks to intercept our API calls when we do not have an actual API-capable device but still want to run our tests.

In this section, let’s look at how we can write tests relevant to the networking world. There is no shortage of commercial products regarding network monitoring and testing. Over the years, I have come across many of them. However, in this section, I prefer to use simple, open source tools for my tests.

Testing for reachability

Often, the first step of troubleshooting is to conduct a small reachability test. For network engineers, ping is our best friend when it comes to network reachability tests. It is a way to test the reachability of a host on an IP network by sending a small package across the network to the destination.

We...