Cisco Meraki VS RANCID

Interestingly - I work in IT - I’d be very surprised if Cisco didn’t put up a fight to another company using the same name - https://meraki.cisco.com - unlike the mlms products, ciscos is actually pretty good, if a little pricey. Source: over 1 year ago

Cisco - https://meraki.cisco.com/ - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/small-business/networking/routers.html - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/small-business.html. Source: over 1 year ago

Forgive me that this is exact opposite of their wishes to manage it locally. Meraki is cloud-based admin panel, but man, it's easy to take care of. It has its critics, naturally, usually by comparing it to Palo Alto or Fortinet. But those require real expertise to manage, that takes time and lots of training. Yet it's light years better than Ubiquiti. If they can handle the price, it's quite nice. Source: over 1 year ago

Meraki is a popular brand name - will that cause any problems? https://meraki.cisco.com/ I wonder if you would need to change it. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw your title. Source: about 2 years ago

Network & Telephony - These are some other areas you'll probably have to wrangle at some point. Depending on your budget, skills, and time, Meraki might be the best "Easy button" for your network needs -- a top to bottom Meraki network (Firewall, Switches, APs) will make for very easy management, but it doesn't come super cheap either. If you're looking for something more affordable, but still intuitive,... Source: about 2 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: almost 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: almost 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: about 2 years ago