[rancid] support for D-Link switches, where to start?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 02 Feb 2011, Gavin McCullagh wrote:

> we have a lot of D-Link switches which we'd like to use Rancid to version
> the config of.  It appears that D-Link is not supported at the moment, but
> I'm hoping I might be able to work on that a little.

I've spent some time on this and have moreorless working dlrancid and
dllogin scripts which login to the switches (over ssh only just now) and
run:
	show switch   			for getSystem
	show config current_config	for getConf

This generally works, but there are a few problems which I wonder if people
might have come across in other models and already have strategies for
dealing with.

1. Some of the switches seem very slow to respond.  I've had to up $timeo
   in dlrancid to 300 seconds as the configs were getting truncated.  The
   dllogin timeout is set at 45 seconds.

2. Occasionally, I'm getting a truncated config, like this:

  config igmp_snooping querier management last_member_query_interval 1 state disable
  config igmp_snooping staff host_timeout 260 router_timeout 260 leave_timer 2 state enable                                                                               
- config igmp_snooping querier staff query_iConnection to sw-w106-3 closed by remote host.                                                                      
- Connection to sw-w106-3 closed

3. We're having some intermittent network issues which might be explained
   by switches dropping frames.   I can't really pinpoint it as being due
   to rancid, but we've cut it back to running once overnight for now
   instead of hourly. It appears our problems have cleared up since.

4. One model of D-Link switch (DES-3250TG) appears not to have a single
   getConf command.  I can probably constuct a config from 30 commands, but
   I'm not keen on that.  The switch is capable of uploading the config to
   a TFTP server though.


Obviously ssh has much greater CPU requirements than telnet or tftp would
so I guess switching to telnet is my main plan for now.  Has anyone else
noted issues like this, or is it just these D-Links?  Is there another
possible explanation?

Where there isn't a getConf() command available, do people have a solution,
eg maybe run command to put config to a tftp server, then have rancid
download from the tftp server.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Gavin