[c-nsp] Restoring switch config to floating spare

[Joshua Riesenweber]

Hi all,
I'm looking for a bit of advice on a system/process that will allow an end user to restore a switch config.



I have a customer with a 24/7 site running a number of Catalyst switches. Due to the nature of the operation, we have a 'warm' spare switch ready to replace any failures. 
Traditionally we have a standardised configuration across all devices (all the same model as well), but I need to start having unique configurations on the switches. (Getting too many wasted ports due to multiple VLANs etc.)The users on site are electricians, so they're not 'untechnical', but they're certainly not familiar with networking.
I'm wondering if anyone has come across this before, and has any ideas?At the moment I'm leaning towards having the spare switch running on the network with an IP address and not much else, then having a script that will prompt the user for the switch that's failed, and then copy it to the startup config and reboot. It's not particularly nice or foolproof...


Cheers,Josh