Unable to load banner MOTD on Arista

[mirceaulinic]

Firstly, I am not entirely sure what's the right format expected. I tried loading:

banner motd
!!aaaaa
EOF

With this, it fails:

>>> config = '''banner motd
... !!aaaa
... EOF
... '''
>>> e.load_merge_candidate(config=config)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/napalm/eos/eos.py", line 245, in load_merge_candidate
    self._load_config(filename, config, False)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/napalm/eos/eos.py", line 225, in _load_config
    commands = self._multiline_convert(commands, start=start, depth=depth)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/napalm/eos/eos.py", line 157, in _multiline_convert
    ret[s] = {'cmd': ret[s], 'input': "\n".join(ret[s+1:e])}
TypeError: sequence item 0: expected string or Unicode, dict found

Testing against a vEOS running:

Software image version: 4.18.1F
Architecture:           i386
Internal build version: 4.18.1F-4591672.4181F
Internal build ID:      6fcb426e-70a9-48b8-8958-54bb72ee28ed

Changing the line 157 to:

diff --git a/napalm/eos/eos.py b/napalm/eos/eos.py
index 4216ae5..bcb07e1 100644
--- a/napalm/eos/eos.py
+++ b/napalm/eos/eos.py
@@ -154,7 +154,7 @@ class EOSDriver(NetworkDriver):
                 depth = depth - 1
         except ValueError:  # Couldn't find end, abort
             return ret
-        ret[s] = {'cmd': ret[s], 'input': "\n".join(ret[s+1:e])}
+        ret[s] = {'cmd': ret[s], 'input': "\n".join([ele['input'] for ele in ret[s+1:e]])}
         del ret[s + 1:e + 1]

         return ret

As it looks like ret is a list looking like: [u'configure session napalm_61252', 'banner motd', {u'input': u'aaaa', u'cmd': u'comment'}, 'EOF'], and the object referenced by ret[s+1:e] is a list of dictionaries (not a list of strings).

@bewing I recall you've been working on this, would you recall any details and wondering if on other EOS versions pyeapi returns a list of strings as the code would suggest? I am running pyeapi 0.8.1.

[mirceaulinic]

It appears that there's the same behaviour on a real device running 4.17.4M, which makes me wonder whether there's a pyeapi versioning issue whatsoever.

[bewing]

Per slack discussion, I believe this is occurring because napalm.eos.EOSDriver::_mode_comment_covert() is being called prior to napalm.eos.EOSDriver::_multiline_convert() inside napalm.eos.EOSDriver::_load_config()

The former reformats block-mode comments (which appear in configs as multi-line comments, all starting with !!), while the latter reformats multi-line commands (banners, https certificates, etc) which do not have prelimiters.

If we re-order these two operations (so the banner is converted, and then we check for mode-level comments), it should work as intended, I hope.

[mirceaulinic]

Confirmed that the issue was caused only by the !! at the beginning of the lines. @bewing suggestion to reorder the operations might help.
Either way, I've added the documentation label, as the documentation can be enhanced a little.

[bewing]

@mirceaulinic can you checkout PR #738 and see if that resolves your issue?