So in our network we will have these devices: You want to use RANCID to handle all of these devices. In each of the branch offices you have one router, one access-switch and two access-points. In the headquarter there is one router, one distributions switch, three access switches and six stand-alone access-points. Our test networkįor the purpose of testing let’s say you are installing RANCID in a network where you have a headquarter and four branch offices. CatTools is similar to RANCID in many ways and most of what you want to do works in both products. However if you are a native Windows user I can recommend CatTools instead. I would still recommend you to install a Linux machine. You might have some luck running it through Cygwin. Should you choose that route you can still use this guide to help you setup RANCID. If you need or want this you can install RANCID from the source tarballs instead. It is however functional.Īs usual when you are using packages from a distribution you won’t always have access to the latest version.

You will note if you install the Debian or Ubuntu packages you will be presented with an informational text which says it is an early release of the package. On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or Debian 7.4 you use apt to install: sudo apt-get install rancid You can install it on CentOS 6.4 by running: sudo rpm -Uvh -replacepkgs There are packages for a range of different Linux distributions. If you don’t have anything like it RANCID will be a great tool for you. Though RANCID might not be perfect, it’s really simple to use. Taking it a step further you can use it to change configurations, so if you need to change an access list on all firewalls or routers you can use RANCID to do so.

Though great for collecting device configurations you can also use RANCID to get specific information from your devices by sending a command to several nodes, such as “show ip route” or “show crypto pki certificates”. Having all your configurations stored on the RANCID server also works as a backup. So if you hade been using RANCID for three years it could show you all the changes on all your network devices since that time. Aside from showing you what changed during last night RANCID shows you all the changes since it was introduced. If you had it installed RANCID could have told you exactly what configuration the technicians changed. The technicians who worked during the night are sleeping and they seemed to have forgotten to document what they did. End users have started to complain about systems which have stopped working. However picture this you’ve just arrived at the office after a maintenance window. In itself that’s just as boring as it sounds.

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