Captchas aren't everywhere because it's well known that they make fuck all difference when fighting against bots. There are services out there that can solve Captchas far better than you or I for basically no cost - they don't actually help the problem at all. Source: about 3 years ago

They literally pay a couple of USD per 1000 solved Captcha's to a company that solves the Captchas for them. Example: Auto Captcha Solver Service and Cheap Captcha Bypass Service Provider - AZcaptcha. There are plenty more. Assuming they started botting AW early and got some good gear for cheap money, the return on this investment is insane. Say 5 - 20 TLM per mining session for a cost of fractions of a cent. Source: about 3 years ago

A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago

Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ 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), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago

If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago

Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago