[rancid] Rancid output "Binary files differ"

[Árni Birgisson]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if anybody has seen this problem before.
This mail is going to be a bit long, starting with a simple description of the problem,
and then my diagnosis of it.

From time to time I'm getting a strange output from RANCID:

-----

Index: configs/router-x
===================================================================
retrieving revision 1.88
diff -U 4 -r1.88 router-x
Binary files /tmp/cvsQSyJ8S and router-x differ

-----

As I noticed that the revision number was quite high I looked around and it seems that this
does happen for more than one router - but happens very often to this one.
Most of the network equipment has had about 30-40 revisions since RANCID was installed
but this one has 88 revisions.

If I check a few versions of the config out of CVS I can see that indeed some of the files are weird.

-bash-4.0$ cvs diff -r1.86 -r1.89
--normal diff output showing config changes--
-bash-4.0$ cvs diff -r1.86 -r1.87
--normal diff output showing config changes--
-bash-4.0$ cvs diff -r1.86 -r1.88
cvs diff: Diffing pe
cvs diff: Diffing pe/configs
Index: pe/configs/router-x
===================================================================
RCS file: /var/rancid/CVS/pe/configs/router-x,v
retrieving revision 1.86
retrieving revision 1.88
diff -r1.86 -r1.88
Binary files /tmp/cvsCqpVfB and /tmp/cvsp09kv5 differ

Okay, looks like version 1.88 is the weird one.

Let's fetch 1.88 and 1.89
-bash-4.0$ cvs co -r1.88 pe/configs/router-x
U pe/configs/router-x
-bash-4.0$ cp pe/configs/router-x v1.88
-bash-4.0$ cvs co -r1.89 pe/configs/router-x
U pe/configs/router-x
-bash-4.0$ cp pe/configs/router-x v1.89

-bash-4.0$ ls -al v1.8*
-rw-r--r-x 1 rancid rancid 70556 2009-11-25 05:28 v1.88
-rw-r--r-x 1 rancid rancid 70556 2009-11-25 05:28 v1.89
-bash-4.0$ diff v1.88 v1.89
Binary files v1.88 and v1.89 differ
-bash-4.0$ 

--- same size of the files, but diff won't compare them because they are (or one of them is) a binary file.

-bash-4.0$ strings v1.88 | wc -l
1387
-bash-4.0$ strings v1.89 | wc -l
1542

Now when I have a look at the files it seems that the smaller file (v1.88 and "binary") starts with a lot of \0 bytes,
it would seem one for each character that is missing - and then continues exactly like the other one.
Or should I say the files are exactly the same - but it's as if the first (1542 - 1387) bytes of v1.88 are 0-byte instead
of the character that should be there.

Diff --text on them shows that v1.89 includes all the lines from v1.88 and more and there has been no real
change to the config.

I'm running rancid version 2.3.2, with a slight change to jrancid:
The change to jrancid is to make it backup a "show configuration | display set" version of the config as well as the
normal "show configuration" and is done by adding one function:

sub ShowConfigurationDisplaySet {
    print STDERR "    In ShowConfigurationDisplaySet: $_" if ($debug);

    s/^[a-z]+@//;
    ProcessHistory("","","","# $_");
    while (<INPUT>) {
        tr/\015//d;
        last if (/^$prompt/);
        next if (/^system (shutdown message from|going down )/i);
        next if (/^\{(master|backup)}/);

        /Unrecognized command/ && return;
        /command is not valid/ && return;
        /^\s+\^/ && return;
        /syntax error/ && return;

        ProcessHistory("","","","$_");
    }
    return(0);
}


and one item to @commandtable:
        {'show configuration | display set'     => 'ShowConfigurationDisplaySet'},

It could very well be that the errors are introduced because of my addition,
but I fail to see how.

For those that have read through all of this - thank you,
hopefully somebody can spot what's wrong!

- Arni















Arni Birgisson	
Network Engineer
FATTOC Iceland