Long time, no write. Been busy moving countries, as you do.
Started a new job too. Been setting up RANCID and wanted to pull together all the pieces here:
RANCID
Let’s start in the obvious place, www.shrubbery.net/rancid/. I prefer my own, slightly different, expansion of the acronym. Really Awesome Network ConfIg Differ. If you are not backing up or versioning the configuration of your networking equipment you really should take a look at it.
Patches for RANCID to use BZR
RANCID only offers CVS and SVN support out of the box. I’ve been using BZR for a while and strongly prefer it. Thankfully someone has provided patches to add BZR support.
Patches for RANCID to do multihop
One of the other things I needed to add was support to reach a device via another device. I used the instructions from here and the updated patch from here. My config looks a little something like:
add user HOSTNAME {USER}
add password HOSTNAME {PASSWORD}
add autoenable HOSTNAME 1
add method HOSTNAME usercmd
add usercmd HOSTNAME {/usr/local/rancid/bin/clogin} {VIA_HOSTNAME}
add usercmd_chat HOSTNAME {#} {telnet IP_ADDRESS\r} {User Access Verification} {}
Note that the host we are going via is already defined so we can reuse it’s clogin details to reach it (though I did need to provide the full path to clogin).
Loggerhead
To serve the BZR repo via a web interface I turned to Loggerhead. The only issue I have is trying to hide the RANCID log directory because I am serving it as a “directory of branches” straight out of rancid/var.