Re: Knowledge tracking tools

["Kevin Oberman" <oberman () es net>]

> Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 10:52:15 -0800 (PST)
> From: Steve Gibbard <scg () gibbard org>
> Sender: owner-nanog () merit edu
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Steve Francis wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for a better (preferably open source) way to track change
> > plans, event resolutions, etc.
> >
> > e.g. an easy way to dig up what the changes that occured on a system
> > were for, who did them, etc.
> > Obviously rancid et al shows us what changed when, but not the change
> > plan that was responsbile or what problem it solved.
>
> I like RCS better than RANCID for config change tracking, although an
> ideal system would probably involve both.
>
> RANCID is great for alerting you to changes people "forgot" to report, or
> to unauthorized network changes, since it goes and diffs the configs
> whether a change has happened or not.
>
> Tracking config changes in RCS the way I've done it and seen it done
> elsewhere involves manually checking the config out before making changes,
> and manually copying the config to the TFTP server and checking it back in
> whenever a change has been made.  It's a bit more work, but it prompts the
> user for an explanation of the changes whenever a config is checked back
> in.
>
> This isn't a good defense against somebody who doesn't want their config
> changes to be known about, but if people are serious about using it you
> get a "this person did this because of this as reported in this ticket
> number"  notation to go along with every configuration change.

You can use RANCID by manually calling control_rancid to update a single
router in the archive and I have written some trivial mods to save a log
message of why the change took place and who made it. CVS is a big win
over RCS IMHO and the expect scripts in RANCID ame life much easier.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman () es net                       Phone: +1 510 486-8634