[rancid] Menu-only and/or TFTP-only equipment

[Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)]

I'm evaluating Rancid's suitability for our purposes and have a few
questions:

Some equipment (e.g. some HP equipment as far as I remember and
definitely some Nortel/BayStack equipment) only supports ncurses menus
where one has to send arrow-up, arrow-down, "Enter" etc and sift through
the ncurses output.

We're ok to expand RANCID's functionality (and send patches back! :-)
but we need menu navigation to be possible. Are there any of the
existing equipment types that succesfully navigate a menu?

It doesn't look to me like RANCID's split into a Tcl/expect based *login
and a perl based *rancid is well suited for scripting this sort of
interaction. (In fact hpuifilter seems to have been written exactly to
avoid this nastiness)

Also, we have some equipment that only supports getting the
configuration via a TFTP server:
* Telnet to equipment
* Navigate through menus to send config to TFTP server
* exit telnet
* Retreive info via TFTP
Has anybody succesfully needed/done that?

Peter

[john heasley]

Post by Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)
I'm evaluating Rancid's suitability for our purposes and have a few
Some equipment (e.g. some HP equipment as far as I remember and
definitely some Nortel/BayStack equipment) only supports ncurses menus
where one has to send arrow-up, arrow-down, "Enter" etc and sift through
the ncurses output.
We're ok to expand RANCID's functionality (and send patches back! :-)
but we need menu navigation to be possible. Are there any of the
existing equipment types that succesfully navigate a menu?

the screen manipulation stuff really creates some headaches. the hp
procurves are a good example of that and is the reason for the hpuifilter
program that attempts to strip that junk. hpuifilter MIGHT would work
for your device; it used for a few besides the procurves.

Post by Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)
It doesn't look to me like RANCID's split into a Tcl/expect based *login
and a perl based *rancid is well suited for scripting this sort of
interaction. (In fact hpuifilter seems to have been written exactly to
avoid this nastiness)

nothing prevents the perl side from calling the expect side multiple
times, though that takes wall-clock time.

Post by Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)
Also, we have some equipment that only supports getting the
* Telnet to equipment
* Navigate through menus to send config to TFTP server
* exit telnet
* Retreive info via TFTP
Has anybody succesfully needed/done that?

no, but its not beyond possibility. maybe add a tftpboot base dir
variable to rancid.conf, use a subdir of that to receive files
($tftp/rancid/$hostconf), parse the config from there. or $tftp/rancid/
$rancidgroup/$hostconf to avoid locking/contention.

the perl side could recurse on itself; ie: if the -f option is not
supplied, collect the config to the tftp dir, just proceed as the
other rancid-perl scripts do - process the config.

there is certainly a degree of ugliness to this.