[rancid] Re: hourly polling

[Allen Tsang]

For those that didn't understand the explanation (I found it a little 
too terse and lacking), the idea to to separate your routers and devices 
into groups based on your polling interval.

So for example, you have four groups: general, testing, monitor_weekly 
and monitor_daily, such that general is updated every 15 minutes, a 
testing group is never updated automatically (for testing all those 
fancy netscaler hacks you've picked up on this mailing-list ;p), 
monitor_weekly gets polled once every Saturday at 2am and monitor_daily 
is polled every day at 4am.

You would set up three crontab entries (you don't need testing, because 
well, it's only for testing, right?):

*/15 * * * * rancid-run general
0 4 * * * rancid-run monitor_daily
0 2 * * sat rancid-run monitor_weekly

You would never want to run rancid-run, since that would cycle through 
the whole list of groups defined in your rancid.conf.

Note that now you would have to set up mail aliases for all these new 
groups, if you want to still receive notifications from them.  This is 
the one major minus about partitioning all your stuff into separate 
groups; if your infrastructure's mail configuration is ... complicated 
... like mine is, it's a real PITA.

This is the sort of stuff that belongs on the wiki, which I may get 
around to doing this weekend (I just had a pretty bad on-call week; 
sysadmining is hard :/ )

- allen tsang


Saku Ytti wrote:
>>> I have rancid polling all my routers once every hour. There is one device 
>>> that I would prefer to not poll that often. is there an easy way to do that? 
>>>       
>> What I do, to accomplish same:
>> 0 0,6,12,18 * * * nice -n19 rancid-run
>> 00 23 * * sat nice -n19 rancid-run CPE
>>     
>
> Forgot to mention, that you should also remove 'CPE' from $LIST_OF_GROUPS
> in rancid.conf.
>
>