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Joe Harris, CCIE No. 6200 (R&S, Security & SP) is a Systems Engineer with Cisco Systems® specializing in Security. In addition to authoring Cisco Network Security Little Black Book, Joe has also been a technical reviewer for several Cisco Press publications and written articles, white papers, and presentations on various security technologies. He also assists various Certification Partners by beta testing their newest CCIE certification workbooks and has been recognized by Cisco as an SE Wall of Fame award winner.

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RANCID

November 14th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

No it’s not a acid rock band; it stands for Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ. RANCID monitors a router’s (or more generally a device’s) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System) or Subversion to maintain history of changes.  RANCID does this by the very simple process summarized here:  

  • login to each device in the router table (router.db),
  • run various commands to get the information that will be saved,
  • cook the output; re-format, remove oscillating or incrementing data,
  • email any differences (sample) from the previous collection to a mail list,
  • and finally commit those changes to the revision control system

RANCID also includes looking glass software. It is based on Ed Kern’s looking glass which was once used for http://nitrous.digex.net/, for the old-school folks who remember it. Our version has added functions, supports cisco, juniper, and foundry and uses the login scripts that come with rancid; so it can use telnet or ssh to connect to your devices(s). It currently supports Cisco routers, Juniper routers, Catalyst switches, Foundry switches, Redback NASs, ADC EZT3 muxes, MRTd (and thus likely IRRd), Alteon switches, and HP Procurve switches and a host of others. Download RANCID from its homepage: RANCID

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