hi Andy and all,
----- Original Message ----
From: Andy Davidson andy@nosignal.org On 11 Oct 2010, at 19:34, Stanislav Sinyagin ssinyagin@yahoo.com wrote:
I'm currently working on a new open-source project. Many of you know the imperfections of RANCID software, and this project is made to dramatically change this.
Please do preserve the best features of rancid, the main is that configuration
is backed up into a version control system, so inspecting former config dating
back months or years is possible. Using svn rather than cvs would be nice so that we can run it alongside our codebase. A choice of version control back ends would make a lot of people happy I think. :-) Also, make sure there is an
option to 'blank out' passwords in the stored configuration.
There's already a way to filter out lines of configuration,based on regular expressions. I will also add a possibility to do search-and-replace, so that passwords would be blanked out (starred out?).
In regards to SVN, I don't see any problems already: in your cron job, just do: svn add * svn commit -m `date`
I don't foresee much need to add some special SVN handling to Gerty, but that may change :)
Some way to import the former rancid cvs database might be a neat feature, but
we can probably survive without this by running rancid in parallel with your software for six months or a year.
the main sponsor for this project does not have RANCID at all, so I'm afraid it's
a low priority task. The main purpose is to run some telnet automation, and I came
up with a proposal for a generic framework which would eventually replace RANCID.
It's really important that a community grows around this software, so that we
can both contribute and download plugins for many vendors and config dialects.
I'd be delighted to volunteer mailing list hosting. I also would really like to
follow development in an rss format so that I can tune our noc guys in and we can start to help with testing and building the community when the features we
really need are in the software.
Re. mailing list - probably I'll set it up at Google Groups, as soon as there is
enough material to share.
RSS feed is already available: http://github.com/ssinyagin/gerty/commits/master
Actually the cool thing about Git and Github.com is the new way of collaboration: you can clone the main project at any time, add your changes, and invite the project owner to merge the changes back into the mainline.
The only drawback, one has to forget his SVN experience and read a book: http://progit.org/ Without a book, it's really uneasy to start understanding how Git works.
Congratulations on getting this far, good luck, and ask for help before you need it :-)
thanks, so far I'm good. It's a financed project, so I can dedicate my most productive daytime to it.
cheers, stan