[sdnog] Common problem in sudan | Duplex mismatch

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 28 Jan 2015, at 21:08, Scott Weeks <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:
> --- nishal at controlfreak.co.za wrote:
> From: Nishal Goburdhan <nishal at controlfreak.co.za>
> 
> ... mention RANCID...
> -------------------------------------
> Yes, RANCID is really awesome.  ;-)  RANCID is a funny 
> name that stands for "Really Awesome New Cisco confIg 
> Differ", but it works on more than just cisco.
> 
> http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid
> 
> It's a great tool that many, many networks have used for
> a very long time, so it works well.


(for me) one of the great strengths to RANCID is its simplicity.  it's capable of capturing information about your entire network into a single directory full of plain text files.  which means, that it's super-easy for a non-coder like me, to "grep -i <serial-number>" to find out where that last piece of equipment was installed.  of course, if you want to get fancy, you can dump this into a database, but ... then you're already much smarter than i am ... 
so, it becomes really simple to figure out which interfaces are mis-configured as well (ie.  half-duplex instead of full-duplex) but looking through this sort of data as well.

as an aside:  one of the best presentations i've ever read was: Managing IP Networks with Free Software
https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog26/presentations/stephen.pdf
i'd encourage you to spend the time reading this too;  not because of the tools that's mentioned (that's just btw...)
but because of the thinking processes that's mentioned.  and hopefully that will open up the floor for more discussion ... :-)

--n.