RANCID VS Unimus

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

I recently found out about unimus. It really works well to push configs and gather configs - you can see the changes for each config pull even across different devices. It runs as .exe or on a vm Check it out! Not even expensive - 1device 4,5€ a year or 7500€ a year unlimited. Source: 11 months ago

Unimus would handle this nicely for you. It will build a versioned configuration history for your devices, and you can then see changepoints - when something changed, and what changed (including nice graphical diffs). Source: 12 months ago

Take a look at Unimus. It will generate a configuration timeline for your devices, you can generate diffs, and it will send config change notifications (including full graphical diffs in the change notification emails / Slack notifications). Also many other useful config management features in there. Source: about 1 year ago

I forgot also Unimus. They are amazing 🤩. https://unimus.net. Source: about 1 year ago

If you have zero netops experience (eg ansible) this will work: https://unimus.net/. Source: about 1 year ago