really aweful naming convention I dislike

[Bruce]

FWIW I've reviewed a number of commercial network configuration products
and none have fully succeeded in implementing a cross vendor/model
normalization language. It seems to require too much heavy lifting. And
as far as wizard's go they all have one, but each tells me that their
customers avoid using them. Instead they interface with the CLI or their
production control system interfaces with the CLI. I'm all for
improvement, but one of the things I like about RANCID (besides the
name) is it's straight forward functionality. 

Bruce Boardman, Network Computing Magazine
bboardman at nwc.com 
206 Hines Hall, Syracuse University
Syracuse NY 13244


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net
[mailto:owner-rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net] On Behalf Of Saku Ytti
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 2:23 AM
To: rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net
Subject: Re: really aweful naming convention I dislike

On (2006-01-12 23:19 -0500), Hank Kilmer wrote:

> Hey, I'm open to suggestions.  It is an outdated and sometimes "odd" 
> name.  For those interested in history: I picked the name many moons
ago 
> because I knew it would solve 80% of my problem and therefore the 
> "right" solution to my problem at that time would never get done.
Just 
> for the record, the "right" solution at the time was to have a
database 
> that could generate my router configurations and have the database be 
> authoritative...not the routers.  So I wanted a toxic name.

 This is indeed the holy grail of networking, master configuration
in routers/switches has quite few issues. I've been pondering
about such system myself, and it would be quite challenging 
to implement.
 What I'd personally want is some router/switch independent description
language of features which would interfacexs with several parser
scripts that turn it to vendor spesific configuration. Of course
it should be able to reasonably gracefully support unknown
portitions of the code.

 Now combine that with wizard functionality where poller first
gets the configurations, tosses them to parser, tosses them
to backend system, which would then either directly put them
to database or then suggest unifications/sanitazation to the
configurations
:)

> -Hank
> 
> Robin Mordasiewicz wrote:
> >I really love what rancid is doing for me, but I just cannot tell the

> >company that I am contracting for that I have installed a program
called 
> >rancid that logs into all their routers regulary and gathers config
files.
> >
> >I have changed the user that rancid runs as to "NetConfig"
> >
> >my .02$
> >
> >keep up the good work. mebbe one day someone will think of a better 
> >acronym.
> 

-- 
  ++ytti