[rancid] Reverse RANCID

[James Bensley]

Hi All,

I am think about writing a web interface that uses RANCID in the
background to make configuration changes on devices. Since RANCID has
a bunch of scripts for various device types my thinking is a
simple-ish web interface in which I can paste in some config and then
use RANCID to log into the device and input the config, also though I
can specify some commands and RANCID will run though them and capture
output which can be passed to Bash/PERL/Python scripts to interogate
the output and check that the BGP sessions have come back up or that
the number of routes in a VRF is still the same etc.

The goal is: Anything I do on the CLI when making changes to devices
can be automated.

I know I can push config using the RANCID CLI wrapper scripts but I'm
wondering if anyone has done this before to extend RANCID to also run
"show" style commands and interogated the output to make checks to
valid the success of the change, and also if anyone has made a web
interface already (other than the CVS types for RANCID's normal
purpose of backing up rather than pushing config) ?

Kind regards,
James.