[rancid] Question and potential feature request

[Matthew Twomey]

Greetings,

I have been a long time user of Rancid and I've always thought it was a
fantastic tool. Recently I've been revamping our backups and that has gotten
me to thinking about a couple of things:

1. We backup literally hundred of devices with Rancid and due to
inconsistency across Cisco IOS releases we are struggling to keep ahead of
the curve when it comes to specifying autoenable 1 or autoenable 0. I don't
always manage the routers I backup, so an updated IOS often reverses this
requirement (e.g. used to work with autoenable on and now it needs it off).
This also often happens when router administrators enable/disable/make
certain changes to tacacs. In any event I'm wondering if anyone has thought
of a way to autodetect the autoenable state of a device?

2. I'm guessing this has been asked before, but I find myself often wishing
there was a grouping feature in the .cloginrc file so that you could define
a group of routers or globs and then apply commands to the group. Something
like:

add group tacacs_ios_cisco_routers r1.aaa.com, r2.aaa.com s3.bbb.com,
s4.bbb.com

add autoenable tacacs_ios_cisco_routers 1
add password tacacs_ios_cisco_routers mypasswd

Has this idea been considered or is there something else which might get me
closer to this?

Thanks!

-Matt