[rancid] xrrancid vs. IOS-XR on Cisco ASR9000 (ASR9K)

[Buchan Milne]

We have been using rancid successfully with IOS- and IOS-XE-based
devices for some time, and we haven't had any real problems.

However, we have replaced some of these devices with Cisco ASR9000s, and
have had trouble with rancid on these. At present we are running IOS-XR
4.3.1 on most, but we have a few running 5.1.2.

The problem seems to be that xrrancid doesn't realise it has retrieved
all the results of the commands, and thus times out waiting for more
data.

If I manually run xrrancid, this still happens:

$ time xrrancid -d $device
executing clogin -t 90 -c"terminal no-timestamp;terminal exec prompt
no-timestamp;admin show version;admin show install summary;admin show
license;admin show variables boot;show redundancy secondary;show install
active;admin show env all;dir /all nvram:;dir /all bootflash:;dir /all
compactflash:;dir /all compactflasha:;dir /all slot0:;dir /all
disk0:;dir /all disk0a:;dir /all slot1:;dir /all disk1:;dir /all
disk1a:;dir /all slot2:;dir /all disk2:;dir /all harddisk:;dir /all
harddiska:;dir /all harddiskb:;dir /all slavenvram:;dir /all
slavebootflash:;dir /all slaveslot0:;dir /all slavedisk0:;dir /all
slaveslot1:;dir /all slavedisk1:;dir /all slaveslot2:;dir /all
slavedisk2:;dir /all sec-nvram:;dir /all sec-bootflash:;dir /all
sec-slot0:;dir /all sec-disk0:;dir /all sec-slot1:;dir /all
sec-disk1:;dir /all sec-slot2:;dir /all sec-disk2:;show
controllers;admin show running;admin show diag;admin show inventory
raw;show vlan;show debug;show rpl maximum;show running-config" $device

...

$device: missed cmd(s): show running-config,dir /all slot0:,admin show
env all,show debug,show vlan,show rpl maximum
$device: missed cmd(s): show running-config,dir /all slot0:,admin show
env all,show debug,show vlan,show rpl maximum
$device: End of run not found
$device: End of run not found
!

real    3m46.481s
user    0m0.900s
sys     0m0.120s


Naturally, if I use clogin and run the commands manually, they complete.

How can I troubleshoot this further?

This far I have been using the distro-supplied tcl/expect packages in
production, but I have applied the patches on my workstation, but they
made no difference.

On my workstation I am using the 2.3.8-1 package I created for Mageia:
http://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/cauldron/rancid/current/

(I have a 3.1 build, but need to consider whether I should add
post-upgrade scripts to change : to ; in router.db files - the behaviour
above was the same with this package)

Incidentally, I have in the past done some terminal-scraping with
IPC::Run, is there a reason why rancid still uses expect, when it might
be more reliable to handle this in the rancid perl script?

Regards,
Buchan