Network configuration archiving

Fri Oct 25 07:07:49 UTC 2013

On (2013-10-24 23:05 -0400), Erik Muller wrote:

> Rancid certainly has its warts, but other than needing to test, pull
> hair, and patch things for new OS/platform deployments, it still
> generally Just Works once you have it installed, IME... and
> references like

For us problem with rancid is that we're quite married to configuration
backups, provisioning depends on them. And we have good number of devices in
rancid and rancid runs take several hours.
Now we may need refreshed configuration backup to satisfy some dependencies to
complete some work, but if rancid is running we cannot, in worst case, we may
need to postpone some work to next working day.

We have 'one off' hack script for rancid, which fetches just one device right
now, but we cannot run it if rancid proper is currently running.

Other than that, rancid works very reliably and is highly robust. For style
rancid does not get points as there is terrible amount of code duplication for
different platforms.

Philosophically speaking, configuration backups should be completely useless,
full configuration to network should be generated from central place in
fully automated manner.
-- 
  ++ytti