[rancid] Using RANCID with an SSH tunnel

[John Phelps]

Hello,

I am trying to find a way to retrieve a config from a router that is on a network that our RANCID box does not have a route to.  Unfortunately, in this situation, I can't add a route to allow the networks to talk to each other.  The only way that the 2 networks have access to each other is through a dual-homed server that has a NIC on each network.  Below is a simple diagram of the network:

RANCID server--------------------Dual-homed server-----------------------Router
10.0.0.1                       10.0.0.2   192.168.0.2                   192.168.0.1

Both servers in question are running RHEL.  Now I am no Linux expert, but I have been playing around with SSH port forwarding and I am thinking the best way to accomplish this is to create a shell script to open a tunnel to the 192.168.0.0 network before the RANCID job executes.  A coworker suggested creating a perl script that RANCID would call to open the tunnel then grab the config, but I am not familiar with perl and having trouble finding examples of how to integrate a perl script into RANCID.

If anyone has a better idea of how to pull this off or can point me towards examples of perl scripts for RANCID I'd appreciate it!

Thanks,

-- 
John F. Phelps, CCNA