I read some of your wiki/files to see the project and it looks promising to me.
I fully support andy's statement ,-) What I missed in Rancid was the option to extend commands per chassis / type. Especially new devices such as ASR1k & Co. are not known and therefore some stuff is missing. Other stuff has to be excluded (e.g. tracelogs & foo.bar files which are generated daily) for specific models. What is also important is the option to use the tools to do some mass-updates (like with 'clogin'), maybe this can be improved with some intelligent feedback options (e.g. task: "update interface" -> was is ok or did it failed? or IOS upgrades - maybe with some options to do rollbacks?). Sometimes we update ~4k CPE's with clogin and parsing / checking the output can be painful ,-) But to come back to needed features for at least me to replace rancid: - CVS storage of configs (--> cvsweb.cgi to see / compare them) - threaded / parallel collection --> must be speedy ,) (we have ~5-6k devices in rancid; working fine today) - optional mail notification of diff's (e.g. by some categories? like a change in interface ip's trigger an update? but then ignore configuration changes for VRF's to trigger a mail - but keep them in config-CVS ,-)) - toolset to access / massupdate devices - configuration with wildcard syntax (we use "vpn-*" as hostname with separate login for CPE's than core devices - different policies must be configurable -> see .cloginrc ) - must support more than one vendor - and be flexible (we hacked in something for Quagga, some differt cisco policies, etc.) - should exist as a FreeBSD Port *smile* if you need any help in modules (especially cisco modules) let me know. -steven -----Original Message----- From: swinog-boun...@lists.swinog.ch [mailto:swinog-boun...@lists.swinog.ch] On Behalf Of Andy Davidson Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 12:02 PM To: Stanislav Sinyagin Cc: swinog@lists.swinog.ch Subject: Re: [swinog] RANCID alternative Hi, Stanislav, everyone -- On 11 Oct 2010, at 19:34, Stanislav Sinyagin <ssinya...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I'm currently working on a new open-source project. Many of you > know the imperfections of RANCID software, and this project is made to > dramatically change this. This is great news, we use rancid all of the time, and find that adding functionality and bespoke behaviour is quite hard work, further when we deviate our custom changes to the scripts it makes it harder to track mainline rancid releases. I love your idea to make the custom behaviour work as pure configuration and via a plugin architecture. Please do preserve the best features of rancid, the main is that configuration is backed up into a version control system, so inspecting former config dating back months or years is possible. Using svn rather than cvs would be nice so that we can run it alongside our codebase. A choice of version control back ends would make a lot of people happy I think. :-) Also, make sure there is an option to 'blank out' passwords in the stored configuration. Some way to import the former rancid cvs database might be a neat feature, but we can probably survive without this by running rancid in parallel with your software for six months or a year. It's really important that a community grows around this software, so that we can both contribute and download plugins for many vendors and config dialects. I'd be delighted to volunteer mailing list hosting. I also would really like to follow development in an rss format so that I can tune our noc guys in and we can start to help with testing and building the community when the features we really need are in the software. Congratulations on getting this far, good luck, and ask for help before you need it :-) Andy _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog
