Rancid and Cisco WLC

As I've blogged before, I'm using RANCID to backup and version configuration files of various network equipment. Unfortunatley it does not support Cisco's Wireless LAN Controller platform out of the box. But luckily it's rather easy to add support to RANCID....

rancid and relays using usercmd patch

As I've blogged before, rancid is a really awesome new cisco config differ.

I monitor about 100 devices, and all was well so far.
Now I've come across a device that I can't reach directly from my rancid host. It's not possible to create a direct network connection, or to use ssh tunnels or netcat to forward those ports using a relay host.
Instead I found a much simpler and more elegant solution. Albeit this involves patching rancid.

rancid updates

I'm still happy about rancid, that I blogged about previously. I used one more change by Stefan Kublik that is also present in rancid-git:
Remove memory addresses from "show controllers" to avoid unnecessary change notifications


This is done by changing a line in bin/rancid from 

ProcessHistory("INT","","","!Interface: $INT$1\n") && next;

to

ProcessHistory("INT","","","!Interface: $INT\n") && next;

In other words, just remove the $1 and you will change these lines:

!Interface: FastEthernet0/0, GT96K FE ADDR: 63F52098, FASTSEND: 62084C3C, MCI_INDEX: 0

into these:

!Interface: FastEthernet0/0,

In other news, it turned out to be tricky to have rancid automatically updating a trac repository with post-commit hooks. Trac is very picky when it comes to permissions, and you need write access to the trac environment and to the trac logfile to do that. Try out the "trac-admin changeset" command works before debugging svn-hooks, ok?