Splint VS RANCID

Whenever I see people talk about the portability or compatibility advantages of C, I'm reminded of how "even C isn't compatible with C", because you typically aren't talking about up-to-date GCC or LLVM on these niche platforms... you're talking about some weird or archaic vendor-provided compiler... Possibly with syntax extensions that static analyzers like splint will choke on. (Splint can't even understand near... Source: about 1 year ago

Huh. I think I actually needed to use the equivalent position for certain splint annotations in my C retro-hobby project. Source: about 1 year ago

I often like to say that Rust's bindings are a way to trick people into writing the compile-time safety annotations that they didn't want to write for things like splint. (Seriously. Look into how much splint is capable of checking with the correct annotations.). Source: over 1 year ago

Linters like Splint [0] can do that for C. I’m not saying that Rust’s built-in approach isn’t better, but please be careful about what exactly you claim. [0] http://splint.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

(Sort of like how, for my DOS hobby project, I use splint to require explicit casts between typedefs so I can use the newtype pattern without having to manually reach into wrapper struct fields in places that don't do conversions.). Source: almost 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