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:

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….

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.