RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is a popular open source tool that automates the collection and management of network device configurations. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing RANCID on Elementary OS Latest.
Before we start, please make sure you have the following prerequisites:
To install RANCID on Elementary OS Latest, we will first need to install some required packages. Open a terminal and enter the following command to update the system package lists and install the necessary packages:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rancid git-core
RANCID requires some configuration before we can use it. To configure RANCID, open the configuration file located at /etc/rancid/rancid.conf using your preferred text editor:
sudo nano /etc/rancid/rancid.conf
In the configuration file, you will see a section for directories where RANCID will save and store configurations. If you want to change these directories, update the lines accordingly.
After configuring RANCID, we need to add devices to the RANCID configuration. To do this, we'll need to create a file with the device information.
Create a file named rancid.types.conf in the /etc/rancid/ directory:
sudo nano /etc/rancid/rancid.types.conf
Add device information to the file in the following format:
<device_type>:<rancid_group>:<rancid_user>:<rancid_password>:<device_ip>
Make sure to replace <device_type>, <rancid_group>, <rancid_user>, <rancid_password>, and <device_ip> placeholders with your device's respective values. For example:
cisco:networking:cisco:password1:192.168.1.1
Save and close the file.
Now that everything is set up, we can use RANCID to retrieve device configurations. Run the following command to test RANCID and download configurations for all devices in the RANCID configuration:
sudo /usr/lib/rancid/bin/rancid-run
If successful, RANCID will download the device configuration and save it to the specified directory.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed and configured RANCID on Elementary OS Latest. You can now use RANCID to automate configuration backups and version control for your network devices.
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