Along those same lines, we've been using alias exec for the same thing for a while: Alias exec NTP 6500_NTP_V1.0.1 Alias exec bgp 6500_peer_V2.0.0 Thanks, Chuck -----Original Message----- From: Tim Durack [mailto:tdurack@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:50 AM To: Ryan Shea Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Managing IOS Configuration Snippets On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Ryan Shea <ryanshea@google.com> wrote:
A couple more thoughts, regarding
Network => DB
I completely agree that trying to use the network config itself as the authority for what we intend to be on a device is not the right long-term approach. There is still a problem with Network => DB that I see. Assuming you have *many* devices, that may or may not be up at a given time, or may be in various stages of turn-up / burn-in / decom it is expected that a config change will not successfully make it to all devices. There are other timing issues, like a config built for a device being turned up, followed by a push of an update to all devices that "succeeds", followed by the final turn-up of this device. Even if you have a fancy config pushing engine, let's just take as a given that you'll need to scrub through your rancid-git backups to determine what needs to be updated.
Regarding the MD5 approach, let's also think that configlets could have "no" commands in them. In the NTP example I had before, if we wanted to remove an NTP server the configlet would need the "no" version, but the rancid backup obviously would not have this. I'm not trying to work a unit test assertion framework here either. Some vendors have more robust commenting, and this can be quite convenient for explicitly stating what was pushed to the device. What are you using in your network... banner, snmp-location, hope, prayer?
We don't do this, but the only flexible commenting in IOS style configs is ACLs. You could have an ACL that contains remarks only, and include version information: ip access-list CFG-VER remark CFG-VER-NTP 1.0.3 remark CFG-VER-VTY 4.3.2 end You could break this into individual ACLs if you prefer: ip access-list CFG-VER-NTP remark CFG-VER-NTP 1.0.3 end ip access-list CFG-VER-VTY remark CFG-VER-VTY 4.3.2 end Seems ridiculous, but that is the sorry state of the network OS. -- Tim:>