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: over 2 years ago

Looking for collaboration and advanced features? Most decent ones cost money ... Start with replit.com, also look at codeanywhere.com, and also codetogether.com (requires download, free+paid plans). Source: over 2 years ago

Are you using the right tools? Screen sharing isn't great for longer sessions, and you need a code focused tool like Live Share, or one we make - CodeTogether, especially if you need to work across IDEs. Source: about 3 years ago

Just addressing the pair programming aspect of this - if you were doing this remotely, you could use something like codetogether.com Each of you would have your own machines and screens, but be looking at the same piece of code (if you want) or investigate / code in different areas of the project too. Source: about 3 years ago

If any of you are looking for a pair/mob programming solution that works across IDEs, do try codetogether.com. Host in IntelliJ, join from VS Code or Eclipse if you want. We just added the support for writeable shared terminals. Video covering all the features is here: https://youtu.be/OgCWc3hTBc0. Source: about 3 years ago