[rancid] Re: 3Com Switches

[Andrew Brennan]

While 3Com's older switches are menu driven, I believe the 3300s and 4xxx 
models all permit you to "overload" the command - effectively using it as 
though there was a standard CLI.  You can't dump the config to text where 
RANCID would then parse it, but you can script up a rather simple wrapper 
and run a TFTP daemon to collect the configs (which are text files, so if 
RANCID were then reading the files from the dump directory ...)

If you're familiar with Expect and the "autoexpect" script, either SSH or 
Telnet into one of your switches, then issue this:

    system backupConfig save <tftpd-ip> <filename> <notes-field>

... and you'll have your configs (mostly) backed up.  The backup process 
leaves out a few security related bit of data (ssh keys, etc.) so you may
need to include those later before you restore a config to a switch.  The
autoexpect script builds a script to run exactly what you have typed.  If 
you modify that script to read a few arguments when you start it, you'll
be 95% done with your 4400 backup project.

andrew.

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Steve Ousley wrote:

> Many thanks for the quick response Jethro, this is not the answer I wanted
> (We use 3Com 4400's) but I'll have to live with it.  I can see why it's not
> possible, and it's not too much of a problem, we will have to investigate
> some other method of doing this.
>
> Cheers again.
>
> Steve
>