rancid-git by dotwaffle

RANCID is a network configuration backup utility that stores away old configurations for (predominantly) routers and switches. It can also email out those differences, so that people know what has been changed when. This patch-set, started by Matthew Walster (myself) in January 2009 adds git-scm support and utilised colored HTML in the mailouts.

git patch taken from git tree at: git://fedorapeople.org/home/fedora/jcollie/public_git/rancid.git and applied to rancid-2.3.2a9 - mostly kept the same when merging in versions up to including rancid-2.3.4

"rancid" taken from original source at shrubbery.net/rancid

Additional coding as logged.

FOR GOD'S SAKE, do not use this fork if you have never installed RANCID before. It is currently being merged with the upstream version and there are likely to be changes and breakages during this period. It should be safe to upgrade to if you currently use the fork... But consider migrating to upstream at some point!

Dependencies

expect
build-essential (for configure/make in debian build environments)
An MTA, such as [ exim4 | postfix | qmail | sendmail | ssmtp ]

Install

For Debian users that are feeling adventurous, try running:

git clone git://github.com/dotwaffle/rancid-git
cd rancid-git
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -rfakeroot
cd ..
dpkg -i rancid*.deb

There is an rpm specfile, but I haven't had too much experience with RedHat packaging, so YMMV!

Otherwise, try:

adduser --home=/home/rancid rancid
autoreconf (or aclocal && autoconf)
./configure --prefix=/home/rancid
sudo checkinstall (or make && make install)
sudo chown -R rancid:rancid /home/rancid

Usage

I'm writing documentation at the moment, which should hopefully be better than that supplied upstream. However, to get started, let's give you a couple of pointers!

$EDITOR /etc/rancid/rancid.conf (edit, make sure to set LIST_OF_GROUPS)

cd /var/lib/rancid

sudo -u rancid bin/rancid-cvs

Create a .cloginrc and $group/router.db

sudo -u rancid rancid-run

Read the logs in /var/lib/rancid/logs/ to find out what you did wrong ;)

Authors

• Rancid Developers (rancid@shrubbery.net)
• Jeffrey C. Ollie for his git patch to 2.3.2a7 (and slightly amended to make it work with later versions by Matthew Walster). As well as “CVS” and “SVN”, you now have the option of using git, including potentially the use of “post-hooks” to do funky things with the configs once they have been stored.
• Matthew Walster for the color-html patch, which converts the emails into HTML format and colorizes them. As many MUAs don’t use fixed-width fonts, this forces that font and presents the same coloring you would expect when using “git log” with auto color turned on. Makes it far easier to spot changes and mark out where one config ends and another begins
• ansi2html from https://github.com/pixelb/scripts/blob/master/scripts/ansi2html.sh
• cristim for his work on debian support, and keeping it all up to date when I miss a release!
• Stefan Kublik for his work in various areas, not just with debian support, but also for adding various additional features. German users may find his article very interesting reading: http://kublik.net/blog/rancid/
• Countless other developers who have submitted patches. Thank you all!

Contact

Matthew Walster (matthew@walster.org)

However, please think before you email -- if you want to raise an issue or add some code, please use the Github Issue Tracker, or raise a Pull Request.

I'm not able to provide support for RANCID installs, if you have a question please direct it to rancid-discuss, though they're only likely to provide help for people using the mainline install and not this patchset.

Download

You can download this project in either zip or tar formats.

You can also clone the project with Git by running:

$ git clone git://github.com/dotwaffle/rancid-git