[rancid] Opengear console servers and RANCID

[Toby Smith]

For those interested, I've managed to get this to work without having to
add a new device type for cisco devices via an opengear console servers.

What I've done for now is add an expect wrapper around ssh (that can be
configured as an "sshcmd" for the devices) that handles the
idiosyncrasies that I ran into before.

This should also open up a door to using an RANCID to monitor a whole
range of devices (not just cisco ones) via an opengear console server.

--Toby

On 06/06/12 12:32, Toby Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been working with doing some stuff with RANCID and the Opengear
> range of console servers.
> 
> I've got basic device support for monitoring Opengear console servers
> themselves from RANCID going, that was pretty straight forward.
> 
> However, I was also interested in providing capability for devices
> connected to an Opengear via a serial console cable to be monitored via
> RANCID. The Opengear exposes the management console of all the serially
> connected devices via the network in a bunch of ways (different SSH
> ports, different SSH usernames etc).
> 
> I've got RANCID support for Ciscos behind an Opengear going at the
> moment, but I've had to add a new device type (which I've awkwardly
> called cisco-via-opengear).
> 
> Ideally I wouldn't have had to do this, but I ran into some differences
> between real network device ports and Opengear-exposed serial console
> ports. Really it's just a different clogin script, but I had to also add
> a different rancid script (c-via-ograncid) to get it to call my
> c-via-oglogin.
> 
> The simple difficulties I had to work around were:
> 
> - Initial connections didn't present a prompt after login until a "\r"
> was sent down.
> - When connected via an Opengear network-to-serial port, typing "quit"
> or "exit" didn't close the connection.
> 
> The trickiest thing though was that RANCID had the idea of one router
> per IP. When using the Opengear as a console server, you have serveral
> different devices available from the one IP, but accessed with different
> usernames or ssh ports.
> 
> What I've done is use a % symbol as a delimiter in router.db and in
> .cloginrc to specify multiple hosts behind an Opengear. E.g.
> 
> router.db:
> 192.168.0.250%ciscoASA:cisco-via-og:up
> 192.168.0.250%cisco17xx:cisco-via-og:up
> 
> .clogin.rc:
> add password 192.168.0.250%cisco17xx opengearpassword ciscopassword
> add user 192.168.0.250%cisco17xx root:port3
> add password 192.168.0.250%ciscoasa opengearpassword ciscopassword
> add user 192.168.0.250%ciscoasa root:port2
> 
> And then in my c-via-oglogin script, I strip the bit after the % from
> the router name before connecting.
> 
> This all seems to be working nicely and I've got it monitoring a couple
> of cisco devices in my test lab. As I've said though, I've have liked to
> not have had to add a new device type for this (to avoid duplicating so
> much of the functionality).
> 
> I've got patches for all this sitting in my home directory at the
> moment, but I thought I'd ask around if anyone else has any experience
> with RANCID via console servers or if there's any other interest for
> this before I tidy what I've got.
> 
> Cheers,
> --Toby
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