Hi, We're trying to assemble a small herd of script hackers in Eugene in the form of a BOF. If anybody has interesting tools they use to wrangle routers (or interesting problems that can currently only be solved by hand, for which automated solutions would be useful), want to drop me a line and tell me about them? Maybe I can spot some common requests and match them up with some neat solutions, and give the BOF a little kick start. [Note! this is not a sales forum for anybody selling network management software. People selling management software are overwhelmingly welcome to come along and listen, though, if they want to find out how people use software to manage networks in real life] Replies off-list would be good. Thanks :) http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0210/ableybof.html

The software engineering process lends itself well to large, well-managed, multi-disciplinary teams producing well-defined products in response to detailed requirements analysis. As much fun as that sounds, sometimes what you really need is a short and simple answer to a short and simple question, preferably now.

The business of daily operations at almost every service provider depends on the existence of a herd of small, single-use scripts designed to emulate in a few seconds work that a human operator might take a couple of hours to do. The focus of these tools is usefulness in the hands of a network operator over engineering purity or elegance in design.

Questions that are readily answered by the judicious application of a small pile of scripts include:

# What BGP sessions have gone down in the last hour? # What routers rebooted in the last five minutes? # What filters are defined, but not used? # What filters are used, but not defined? # What interfaces have been admin shutdown for over a month? # Who just tripped their maximum-prefix limits?

This BOF is a place for toolmakers to meet other toolmakers, and to exchange ideas, code, and horror stories.