Re: OT (to the max) easy eays of doing Cisco router inventory ?

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Here is a summary of the replies about the matter of 'inventorising
Cisco routers by remote control' (nothing whatsover to do with
Netsaint/Nagios, but probably of interest to some readers)

1 There is no way known to get the chassis serial number apart from
inspection. Bummer.

However, as noted by Gary Quinn, there is an OID that the clever admin
can set before shipping the chassis, thus making it available to
inspection through the 'standard mib'.

However to deal with getting the router

 - interface modules
 - IOS
 - flash
 - DRAM
 - config

and perhaps storing it somewhere useful there are a number of approaches
:-

RANCID
Stanislav Sinyagins NMS.

These seem similar in ambit in that they use Telnet to access the router
and save the answers to enabled mode commands, but RANCID uses
Expect/TCL while NMS is a set of Perl modules that employs the Perl
Expect module.

I would guess that NMS is more adaptable if you want to fiddle (from
this little black ducks point of view, Perl is much easier to maintain
than TCL) by perhaps tying passwords to a Perl program that decrypts
them, otherwise RANCID if you want only what's in the box.

RANCID is a slick product. If you are happy with sticking your passwords
in a plain text file (with suitable file permissions), it extracts the
config and the answers to commands like 'show flash', saving them in a
CVS repo.

And let's face it, unless you have got SNMP v3 agents, you are probably
almost already doing this with community strings.

It works fast and effectively and meets my needs.

Other approaches use SNMP. They range from commercial, in which the
SolarWinds approach was the most poular (http://www.solarwinds.net/) to
free.

The free SNMP based options are

 SNMP Browser (for KDE)
 gSNMP
 gxsnmp

I haven't tried these.

A site that is a useful collection of SNMP stuff is

http://www.somix.com/software/mibs/.

Yours sincerely.

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft



LENNY BRUCE
(Words and Music by Bob Dylan)

Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on
Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon.
He was an outlaw, that's for sure,
More of an outlaw than you ever were.
Lenny Bruce is gone but his spirit's livin' on and on.

Maybe he had some problems, maybe some things that he couldn't work out
But he sure was funny and he sure told the truth and he knew what he was talkin
' about.
Never robbed any churches nor cut off any babies' heads,
He just took the folks in high places and he shined a light in their beds.
He's on some other shore, he didn't wanna live anymore.

Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn't commit any crime
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time.
I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half,
Seemed like it took a couple of months.
Lenny Bruce moved on and like the ones that killed him, gone.

They said that he was sick 'cause he didn't play by the rules
He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools.
They stamped him and they labeled him like they do with pants and shirts,
He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts.
Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.



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