rancid – Matt's Blog

RANCID: Backing up Juniper EX switches

As part of my drive to backup all my switch/firewall configs I have been trying to get RANCID to backup the remaining devices on my network. The latest devices we added to the network were a pair of Juniper EX switches that are part of an iSCSI network and until now I have not had a backup of the configs. Looking at the documentation there is a set of commands to backup other JunOS devices so thought I would give it a go.

RANCID is running on an Ubuntu 10.04 server and is running version 2.3.3. and has the jlogin scripts in place. After adding the device information to the .cloginrc file I tested jlogin to check that it could connect as root to the device – it did. When I performed rancid_run however the device did not backup as expected and Rancid hung until it timed out. Upon closer inspection the issue came down to the fact that the root account will ssh to the BSD shell on the switch and not directly to the JunOS command line. To get around this I needed to setup a new user on the switches with the correct permissions and then get this to perform the backup of the switches. The command to add the config is as follows:

set system login user adminusername class super-user authentication plain-text-password

1	set system login user adminusername class super-user authentication plain-text-password

You will be prompted to choose a password and then confirm it before writing it to configuration

commit and-quit

1	commit and-quit

Now you can specify the details in RANCID:

add user ip_address {username}
add password ip_address {password}
add method ip_address {ssh}

add user ip_address {username}

add password ip_address {password}

add method ip_address {ssh}

The last thing that I did was to take a copy of jlogin and jrancid from an installation of RANCID 2.3.6 and everything seems to be working as expected.

RANCID: Issue backing up Cisco Aironet access points

I have had RANCID setup to backup switch and firewall config for a while now but not I had always had issues with backups of my Cisco access points which I had thought was an issue with the version of RANCID or the slight differences in IOS run on the WAPs versus the Switches. Turns out after revisiting it yesterday it was more a PEBKAC or ID-10-T error on my part!

What I had in my .cloginrc file was:

add user ip_address {username}
add password ip_address {password}
add method ip_address {ssh}
add noenable ip_address 1

add user ip_address {username}

add password ip_address {password}

add method ip_address {ssh}

add noenable ip_address 1

when I ran bin/clogin ip_address the device would login and get me to the enable prompt as expected but when run as part of rancid_run nothing was coming back for the config. After a bit of reading and searching the solution was simple enough and it wasnt a problem with RANCID or the Aironets….

add autoenable ip_address 1

1	add autoenable ip_address 1

should have been used instead of the noenable line.

I also managed to get RANCID to backup the config on my Juniper EX switches but that is a story for another post

Rancid email notification issues

Just spent a few days getting RANCID setup on one of my monitoring servers to backup my device configs on a daily basis. Whilst setting it up I followed a number of guides to get my config files setup and checked. The one thing I couldnt get to work however was the email when RACID detected a config change on one of the network devices.

Scouring the Internet I couldnt find what I had missed. Postfix was setup correctly and I could use the aliases I setup in /etc/alises if i “telnet localhost 25” and mail was delivered. In the end looking at the update logs I could see a line saying it couldnt find sendmail.

A quick look at racnid_control and I updated the lines that referenced sendmail to include a full path to /usr/sbin/sendmail and low and behold my inbox was full of config changes this morning.

I’m sure that if I was able to get the money to buy Opsview Enterprise I would make full use of the RANCID module within this but for the moment this works well enough for me.

My next goal is to get SNMP Trap processing setup so that if the appropriate trap is received from a monitored device it will pull the latest config down and we will always have the latest config.