HN3BC7ARUXHE This past week I had to update selected edge ports on a set of Cisco Catalyst 4507 and 4510 switches. Two things forced me to take the time to use NetMRI's Configuration Command Scripting (CCS) language to automate the process. The first was an inconsistent deployment and the second...

I've been doing a configuration change on over 500 devices of a customer's network, and using NetMRI to install the change was extremely easy. Below is the script that I used, and I thought it would be useful to describe how it works. The overview of the process is that the script connects to...

This week I was part of a panel at the Satellite 2010 conference in Washington, DC. Our panel was titled "Securing Your Network: Protecting your Operations, Content and Assets." Your first thought upon seeing the session title was probably "encryption." While encrypting the data being...

As I write this, we're going through another "snow event", with a forecast of high winds and 10-20 inches of snow to top the 24-36 inches that fell a few days ago - over 67 inches so far this year, which has broken all snowfall records for Maryland. One of the network operations team sent...

Have you ever lost a device configuration because you forgot to save it to NVRAM and the device later rebooted, perhaps due to a power outage? More than likely some feature or function that had been operating correctly since the last change suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. The clue is...

I've written before in Subsystem Configuration Policy Check about incorporating operational data with configurations for performing configuration compliance validation. Another example, with a different twist to it, occurred last week while creating an NTP policy check on a customer's network...

Networks use the same devices in many different roles, so configuration validation based on device type isn't sufficient. There are some configuration things that can be checked across all the devices of a certain type in your network, such as checking the syslog and NTP configuration, or verifying...

My previous post talked about the basics of verifying a configuration prior to deployment as a way to minimize the number of incorrect configurations that are fielded. The second topic, which is closer to the original NANOG posting comments, is with respect to auditing existing configurations to make...

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) email list just had an interesting exchange about configuration management. Someone asked: For auditing, is there any Cisco Router/Switch configuration analysis tool? Someone else replied: Depends on your goal. Trying to identify and fix configuration...

I'm working on a network that requires configuration checks be performed. For some of the subsystems, that's pretty easy because the configuration is done per device and there are no external dependencies. For example, the desired SNMP, logging, VTY, or NTP configurations are well known and only...