Rancid stands for Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ. It’s produced by Shrubbery Networks (http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/). Basically it’s sole purpose is to make backups of your networking gear. And it can email you of any changes as well. This documentation is a work in progress – I had attempted to setup a rancid server one other time, but ran out of courage shortly after the beginning. And I’m compiling based on a few other internet sources.

Started with a 10.04.3 LTS server with LAMP/Mail(postfix) installed. x86 for those who care. For those who don’t care, it’s still on an x86 system.

I started installation, like all of my other projects, by switching to root:

su

I also created the rancid user with a password:

adduser rancid

Install the Rancid Base:

apt-get install rancid
y

Edit the Rancid Configuration by adding groups:

nano /etc/rancid/rancid.conf
LIST_OF_GROUPS="Group1 Group2 ... Group18"
Save and Quit

Edit the Mail Aliases:

nano /etc/aliases
rancid-Group1: root
rancid-admin-Group1: root
rancid-Group18: root
rancid-admin-Group18: root
Save and Quit

Restart Your Mail Services:

/etc/init.d/postfix restart

Run rancid CVS Groups:

sudo su -c /var/lib/rancid/bin/rancid-cvs -s /bin/bash -l rancid
You should now see a few new directories created in /var/lib/rancid:
/Group1
/Group2
…
/Group18

We want to edit the configuration files in each of these groups to reflect the devices. We’ll start with /Group1:

cd /var/lib/rancid/Group1
nano router.db
IPADDRESS_OR_HOSTNAME:brand:up_or_down
If you select down, rancid will not actively check this device.
Example:
10.10.0.1:cisco:up
10.15.0.1:cisco:up
10.20.0.20:cisco:up

At one time, whilst setting this up for the first time, I thought that you could only have one login/enable for the entire system. I found that quite “uncool”. Luckily for everyone reading this, I found out that I was incorrect with my assumption. It’s actually quite easy now that I look back on the configuration.

Create A Password File:

The installation of rancid on ubuntu will attempt to create a user called “rancid” with a home directory of /var/lib/rancid, but a login point of /dev/null. But, since we already created the “rancid” user, we must create a cloginrc file to house the passwords for your cisco gear in this user’s home directory. If you run this as root, it’ll be in /root/.clogin.rc
nano /home/rancid/.cloginrc
add method * telnet
add password IPADDRESS_OR_HOSTNAME LOGINPASSWORD ENABLEPASSWORD
add password OTHERIP_OR_HOSTNAME LOGINPASSWORD ENABLEPASSWORD
Save and exit

For SSH:

add autoenable * 1
add method IPADDRESS ssh
add user IPADDRESS USERNAME
add userpassword IPADDRESS PASSWORD
add password IPADDRESS PASSWORD ENABLEPASSWORD

Change permissions of the password file (isn't necessary now that I created the user to begin with):

chmod 640 /var/lib/rancid/.cloginrc
chown rancid /home/rancid/cloginrc

Run the rancid server:

sudo su -c /var/lib/rancid/bin/rancid-run -s /bin/bash -l rancid

View the Log Files:

nano /var/log/rancid/GROUPNAME.DATE.TIME

Where Are The Configuration Files?

/var/lib/rancid/CVS/GROUPNAME/configs/IP_OR_HOSTNAME,v

Too Much Information:

If you feel like you only want to have the configuration files and not the proc info/mem info etc, just edit the following file:
nano /var/lib/rancid/bin/rancid
Search for "# Mail"
Comment out lines you no longer wish to document
Save and Quit

Add the Web GUI:

apt-get install cvsweb
nano /etc/cvsweb/cvsweb.conf
Find "@CVSrepositories"
Add:
'rancid' => ['Rancid', '/var/lib/rancid/CVS'],
Save and Quit
Restart apache
apache2ctl restart
sudo ~rancid/bin/rancid-run (or, if in as root, rancid-run)
You can now open a web browser to http://IPOFSERVER/cgi-bin/cvsweb

EMail testing
I am having a few issues with email aliases - you're supposed to be able to utilize "rancid-NAMEOFDEVICE: real email" or the like for it to forward. I was getting NDRs as it was trying to send locally. So I temporarily changed the NDR to all send to the email address I wanted to send anyway.

Cron job
I cron this for every 10 minutes - but it takes longer and longer to check all the devices on the network when I keep adding more and more to the configuration.

Sample Configuration (/home/rancid/.cloginrc):

add method 10.15.1.245 telnet
add method 10.15.1.246 telnet
add method 10.11.0.2 ssh
add user 10.11.0.2 rancid
add userpassword 10.5.0.2 P@SSw0rd
add password 10.15.1.246 P@55 3n@bL3
add password 10.15.1.245 P@55 3n@bL3
add password 10.11.0.2 P@SSw0rd 3n@bL3

***EDIT***
Sometimes I'm a little slow when it comes to problems with workarounds - I mean, why fix something when it's only halfway broken?
I forgot that when you edit the /etc/aliases file that you have to run the command newaliases to update the /etc/aliases.db file. Otherwise you'll see "warning: database /etc/aliases.db is older than source file /etc/aliases" in your /var/log/mail.info file. And away we go!