Network configuration archiving

Fri Oct 25 12:32:58 UTC 2013

On (2013-10-25 10:43 +0200), Martin Pels wrote:

> The diff-ed backups that rancid provides serve another purpose: verifying that
> what your NMS says should be configured matches the actual device
> configurations.

Diffing one rancid config to another rancid config would not help with this at
all.
You'd need to diff provisiong system config to rancid config which is
extremely complex problem, as your provisioning system is not creating 'post
parser' config, it's creating config in completely different way than what it
will be after parser.

The hard/wrong solution the problem is to have per-platform parsing
intelligence reimplemented in your provisioning system.

The two easy solutions are

a) when your provisioning system pushes change out, it saves the config it
sends, and then it views what route stored and makes note of them being the
same. If it has this logic, then rancid is not needed.

b) before your provisioning system pushes change out, it checks timestamp on
config, if timestamp is newer than its latest config push, it regenerates full
configuration. In this scenario also, rancid is not needed.

However going 100% of config is in systems is not really something many
target, nor have I seen good products for it. It's not actually hard problem,
not even when targeting multiple platforms. As platform specific intelligence
can be kept very low with some design choices.

-- 
  ++ytti