In my last post I talked about Installing Rancid on Centos 7 so be sure to check that out. In this post we now want to actually use Rancid so I’ll walk through on how to setup Rancid to login into network equipment and get configurations.
In this post I want to walk though the steps to install Rancid on CentOS 7 minimal. Rancid is a great tool to help monitor a device configuration for any changes. It also keeps track of them by using CVS (Concurrent Version System) for backups, so you can go back and compare versions or revert to a previous configuration. Rancid supports multiple hardware from Cisco, HP, Dell, Juniper and more. This is all open-source so you can create custom scripts or add commands to really make this a personal repository that fits your company. During this install guide several things are required when we install Rancid, I have tired to make this as simple as possible but its not just a type and watch it install. You have to customize some of the scripts to make Rancid work like it should. Read it though and follow along.
Just wanted to put this up has Cisco has recently released VIRL. This is a network simulation platform that you can run Cisco operating systems on which are the same operating systems that run on Cisco hardware so anything you do in this simulation environment would be realistic if it was running on dedicated hardware. You would be able to test your changes before throwing them in production. Some things that are different between VIRL and CML (Cisco Modeling Labs)
It's only been a week since GNS3 1.0 was released and it's already been updated to 1.1 so in this post I have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest updates and its time to set up GNS3.
Get your IOS, IOU, XRV, 1000v, HP, Juniper, Arista, and other images ready because that's the beauty of GNS3, it's here and ready to download. I'm excited for this release although the last post I did was In May of 2014, which was about getting GNS3 Alpha 3 working on Windows, you can see the full post here: GNS3 Alpha – Install and Setup. I have followed the GNS3 releases throughout the six months of them releasing Alpha and beta releases, as well as looking at changlogs of each release.
So I've played around with two Cisco Nexus 5672UP switches which will be in production soon but before that I wanted to see what it took to get enhanced vPC online. Along the way I was into some new territory as I never stood up vPC before, so in this post I have posted some things to keep in mind and running-config examples, all of which I hope is helpful for a reference.
When I started taking classes from the Cisco CCNA Discover books years ago, I remember for the first part of the book it talked about QoS and the theory behind it. To me QoS was a very interesting but after a chapter or two we never mentioned it again or really knew how to configure it. It seemed like it disappeared but it always something being tested on so we know it was there, somewhere… QoS can be a little boring and it does get a reputation of being difficult to understand, like where and how do I implement QoS? Most of the time QoS is not configured which causes applications to suffer in the end have an impact of end user performance.
Just waiting for CML, (Cisco Modeling Labs) it’s been little over a month since going to Cisco Live in San Francisco and with all the information of next-generation hardware and security with Source Fire I was pretty beat with a lot of note taking and PowerPoint slides. However the last session on the last day of the Cisco Live talked about Cisco’s Modeling Lab program. I also tried it out in the Cisco DevNet area earlier in the week during Cisco Live and I was impressed with the product. When does CML release? Well during the session it was said to wait for about 60 days, which would put this release towards the end of July/August time frame hopefully. ;)
![](/ciscoskills/images/2014/06/rsyslog-loganalyzer.png")
I am looking at rsyslog which is fast syslog system and Loganalyzer as an upfront web GUI for those logs. The Loganalyzer application offers searching of various syslogs, all of which is open source and available to download. In this guide I will go through the steps to get these two applications to work together and in the end of this tutorial we should have a working syslog system ready to take logs! The operating system I am using is the latest CentOS 6.5 minimal. Let's get started.
So Alpha 3 came out last week with a bunch updates and I decided to give it run this week. I'm not doing anything that difficult with the program so maybe I'm not breaking it in all the way but I also was looking at some installation notes for Ubuntu and other Linux flavors, I figured I’ll try to install it on a Windows machine and not Linux (call me lazy) feel free to follow this guide. To install GNS3, here is what I had: