[rancid] Re: plus in the prompt?

[Austin Schutz]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 12:00:38PM -0400, Ed Ravin wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 11:34:27AM -0400, Andrew Brennan wrote:
> > Isn't the hostname + domain name used in setting up a SSH key in IOS?
> 
> And other things, like setting up LAT names for Appletalk.  But IOS
> accepts it and many other strange chars in the "hostname" command,
> and I'm not going to argue with Cisco.  In the case of the LAT name,
> Cisco issues a warning and works around it.
> 
> > You could always sell it as "+" isn't a valid character in a FQDN, so you
> > can run into trouble later with some SSH clients having trouble connecting?
> 
> I could, but I would rather wait until it actually causes a problem
> and then I can give the customer a real reason why it needs to be
> changed.
> 

	Because rancid doesn't support it works for me. I have it set up so
the name of the configured device (router.db) has to match what's in the
prompt, nicely allowing for case insensitivity. As our company has absorbed
other networks, it's been handy to force a bare minimum of organization to
get things manageable.
	It has been my experience that it's just easier to have users fix
their oddities (which I non-judgementally tend to privately refer to as
stupid fu***ng bu****it) rather than deal later with the inevitable annoying
repurcussions, such as users configuring the same host to be polled twice,
incorrectly renamed hosts, etc.  Some people may think the tools should allow
for every dumbass thing a user can think to do to their network, I guess I
disagree.
	If they're doing stupid things like having +s in the prompt it's
most assuredly only the tip of a very large iceberg. Yeah.. but you know
that already, you're there trying to melt it. Good luck.

	I guess that qualifies as a rant, sorry.

	Austin