Frequently Asked/Answered Questions

Paramiko doesn’t work with my Cisco, Windows or other non-Unix system!

In an ideal world, the developers would love to support every possible target system. Unfortunately, volunteer development time and access to non-mainstream platforms are limited, meaning that we can only fully support standard OpenSSH implementations such as those found on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS.

Because of this, we typically close bug reports for nonstandard SSH implementations or host systems. However, closed does not imply locked - affected users can still post comments on such tickets, and we will consider actual patch submissions for these issues, provided they can get +1s from similarly affected users and are proven to not break existing functionality.

For interacting with managed networking equipment from Cisco/Juniper/Arista/HP/etc over SSH, try using netmiko.

I’m having strange issues with my code hanging at shutdown!

Make sure you explicitly .close() your connection objects (usually SSHClient) if you’re having any sort of hang/freeze at shutdown time!

Doing so isn’t strictly necessary 100% of the time, but it is almost always the right solution if you run into the various corner cases that cause race conditions, etc.