RANCID
RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
This page is designed to help you find out whether RANCID is good and if it is the right choice for you.
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Version Control
RANCID automatically collects and stores device configurations in version control systems, providing an audit trail and making it easy to track changes over time.
Automated Backups
The tool automates the process of regularly backing up network device configurations, reducing the risk of configuration loss due to human error or device failure.
Change Detection
RANCID can notify administrators of configuration changes via email alerts, helping to maintain network integrity and quickly spot unauthorized changes.
Multi-Vendor Support
It supports a wide range of network devices from different vendors, making it versatile for environments with diverse equipment.
Open Source
Being open-source software, RANCID is free to use and can be customized to fit specific organizational needs without licensing costs.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if RANCID is good.
Check the traffic stats of RANCID on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of RANCID on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of RANCID's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of RANCID on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about RANCID on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
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: almost 4 years 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: over 4 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: over 4 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: over 4 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 4 years ago
First, map your network. Forget about the user-ports, know where your trunks are, where they go, what connects to what. Make sure you have configs being backed up into our source control management system. If you don't have one, use RANCID. Source: about 5 years ago
By trade I am a network engineer, and part of my role is network management and change control. We currently use RANCID by Shrubbery. Currently the management of this ‘software’ is all CLI and pretty much down to me so I am pretty much learning while doing 🙂. I currently plan to use a bash script on a cron job for the file level stuff in the os itself, and python with mongodb. Im just unsure on the web front end... Source: about 5 years ago
Back when I used to deal with Cisco devices, we used RANCID for this kind of thing. It connects to your networking devices, dumps a text-based config, and saves it in a version-control-like system. Not only do you have backups but you can see what changed and when it changed. It saved us more than once. (Someone changed a random setting that they shouldn’t have, device died an no one had a config backup, etc.). Source: about 5 years ago
Install Rancid (https://shrubbery.net/rancid/). Then you can not only accomplish this task, but all the future config checks. Source: about 5 years ago
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Is RANCID good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss RANCID here. The primary details have not been verified within the last quarter, and they might be outdated. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
