[c-nsp] Config management

[Phil Mayers]

On 10/26/2012 08:51 PM, Dan Letkeman wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Curious as to what everyone is using for config management for
> switches.  I have a few hundred 2960's and 3560's to manage on a
> regular basis, and I would like to have something that can make mass
> config changes.

One thing that's particularly handy for this is the SCP server in IOS, 
which allows you to copy to "running-config":

cat >CFG <<EOF
no vlan 10
vlan 20
...
end
EOF

scp CFG admin at switch:running-config

Generally when I want to make mass changes, I write a small python 
script to walk over the IOS configs and output the changes I need to a 
per-switch config file, inspect all (or a representative portion if 
there are a lot) for sanity, then fire off a parallel SCP of the files.

This is really just a snazzier version of loading a config fragment from 
TFTP, but ends up being quite a bit more usable.

Of course, if Cisco weren't a bunch of halfwits, we'd have Netconf 
support on all the platforms, and if they *really* wanted to push the 
boat out, the Netconf implementation would hook into the actual 
parser/NVGEN and "show" command *backends* - as opposed to the current 
implementation, which uses a separate "grammar" file to transform the 
line-based data (config and show commands) into and from XML. Then you 
wouldn't have the "hilarious" situation of a Netconf implementation that 
can't actually operate the CLI on the box, because the one guy who wrote 
it has left or moved on, and the grammar file is out of sync...

</rant>

For all their faults, the one thing Juniper *own* is a structured way to 
talk to the box. It's 2012, Cisco - man up and get this crap sorted.