[c-nsp] ASR9k Too Frequent Update on Rancid

[Nick Hilliard]

On 22/05/2013 15:45, Jared Mauch wrote:
> Cisco doesn't do any testing with RANCID and summarily rejects any
> reports related to this problem, requiring you to either report it to
> the RANCID maintainers to pray that Cisco will accept it as a
> bug/problem.

This is very annoying.  There is an outstanding buglet on 4.2.3/asr9001
with the "admin show env all" command:

> RP/0/RSP0/CPU0:Router#admin show env all
[...]
> Altitude Information
> ---------------------------------------------
> 
> Altitude: RP/0/RSP0/CPU0:Router#

Even a single QA run through rancid would throw this up as an error because
rancid fails to recognise the command prompt.  As it stands, there is an
entire stable branch of XR out there which causes me to have to comment out
bits of code in my config mgmt system because of a silly cosmetic buglet.
Annoying.

This is fixed on 4.3.0, so no point in filing a PR.

I don't it's reasonable for Cisco to formally support rancid, but on the
other hand it's probably of some value for them to ensure that running it
through rancid doesn't cause gratuitous breakage because of an IOX or IOS
problem.

Incidentally, https://github.com/ytti/oxidized doesn't have this problem
with recognising command prompts because it uses ssh channels instead of
screen scraping.  Then again, ssh channels don't work on vanilla IOS, sigh.

Nick