Shrubbery Networks, Inc. – RANCID

RANCID is one of those tools that will bubble up in my mind every now and then for some purpose.  I’ve tinkered with it a time or two but it never quite seems to “just work” in the situations I’ve put it in.  Probably because most of them are nonstandard.

Once again I’ve been trying to get it working in a less than typical scenario (under Cygwin, and with HP switches rather than Cisco gear).  Encountered some problems with it not properly retrieving configuration from the HP’s, and just kinda hanging the process.  I didn’t really do a whole lot of investigation on it.  I’ve written some Expect before, but I don’t have the time to dig into it right now just for some statistical information.  So, instead I’ll just make some notes on what I did find in case I ever get a chance to get back to it.

Several people mentioned having problems with terminal length, but that didn’t appear to be the source of my problems.  Tested with rancid-run, clogin, and hlogin all to no avail.  I was able to log in interactively with hlogin, but on logout it left the hpuifilter process running in the background looking like it couldn’t find its parent process to talk to.  Below are a few of the articles I ran across while troubleshooting and still have open in tabs  (tabs I would like to close out, which is my primary reason for making these notes).

• http://blog.humanmodem.com/?p=11 linked to this quick setup post
• Post regarding problems with terminal length directives on HP
• Post regarding problems with splash screen on HP