Backup Cisco Configs Automatically

[MDKza]

Hello Everyone,

We have a few clients that have a Unix Rancid server on site to do TACACS+ and Config backups.

Now the guy who used to work at my company left a few months ago and now none of us know how to maintain/fix the server if something breaks.

We want to decom the unix box and use NPS (radius) for the logins - which is the easy part.

The hard part is finding software that isn't as heavily priced as Cisco's (obviously something free would be nice)

I was think getting a powershell script to telnet to all the devices and save it to a win server manually, but my powershell skills are quite below par.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[roadcat]

Kiwi Cattools is perfect

http://www.solarwinds.com/kiwi-cattools.aspx

 

[MDKza]

Doesnt the free version have a device limit? some of our clients have a few hundred devices.

I will take a look into this

 

[roadcat]

Doesnt the free version have a device limit? some of our clients have a few hundred devices.

I will take a look into this

Some of our largest clients use this - and they are large enterprise networks. Can do 1000's of devices

 

[ponder]

We just used snmp from a openview box to backup to the tftp server. We did this for over a thousand of devices.

Here's one example http://bodgitandscarper.co.uk/networks/using-snmp-to-trigger-cisco-tftp-backups/

 

[Tinuva]

rancid is still amazing. I suggest you look into setting up a test rancid yourself, just to see how easy and amazing it is.

The greatest part of rancid is, that it does svn for the configs, meaning you can go back in time, and look how configs changed over time.

Now if you also use Observium to monitor network devices, you will see that rancid can integrate with Observium, meaning you will have a web interface to look at the configs, the same interface you use to monitor the network devices. Both free and amazing to use.

 

[syntax]

rancid is still amazing. I suggest you look into setting up a test rancid yourself, just to see how easy and amazing it is.

The greatest part of rancid is, that it does svn for the configs, meaning you can go back in time, and look how configs changed over time.

Now if you also use Observium to monitor network devices, you will see that rancid can integrate with Observium, meaning you will have a web interface to look at the configs, the same interface you use to monitor the network devices. Both free and amazing to use.

exactly this. Rancid is very cool, free and relatively easy to use.
SVN can be done via a web interface which provides config comparison and change logs up until the start of time itself.

You can also use email notifications from rancid to let you know when there are config changes

 

[Treschen]

Easiest way using KRON jobs on your cisco devices, configure the the processes on your Cisco devices and ensure that your tftp server allows proper write access to it from your Cisco devices, Done. On a side note don't use TFTP over the internet its not secure and your entire config could be sniffed. Anyways here is a link that will help you do this. Oh and all this is free

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/schedule-commands-with-cisco-ios-kron/

 

[MDKza]

So what i ended up doing was making a powershell script that SSH's to every device and copys the config to text file and emails that to sharepoint and the people who want to keep the configs.