On the Sunday before NANOG, 17 February, an old acquaintance, Tom Pusateri stopped me and told me he had a start-up doing a new network device management appl,ication and did I want to be in the alpha test crew. As Tom had done such a great job on the Juniper configuration system, and done the netconf XML stuff in the IETF, I could not resist. Unfortunately, it was only going to run on the Macintosh, at least initially. So Monday, Joel drove me to the Apple Store a few miles away, and I got a 15″ MacBookPro to run Tom’s software.
I spent much of my spare time on Monday and Monday evening learning how to deal with the Mac. Why did they have to ‘add value’ to FreeBSD? I did manage to get enough tools installed that I could survive. A gang of Internet2 folk at NANOG were very helpful, as was Joel as usual.
Tuesday, I installed NetCannery, Tom’s application, and Tom got me started. Think of RANCID with an analytic back end. But it was clearly early in the development cycle.
The config fetcher has open source front ends for common devices, e.g. Cisco, Juniper, etc. So you can add strange new devices. And it is smart about bastion hosts, where you need to log into a control host to get to the device. But it did not have a bulk loader, which will be very necessary for any non-trivial networks. When I suggested this, Tom understood immediately and promised it for the near future.
I managed to fetch from a Cisco 7206 and some 2511s, but failed on a 1750 with VoIP. It worked for Juniper M5s, but not for a Procket 8801 or for HP ProCurve or SMC switches. Of course, Tom will fix that.
It lacked ways to group devices, e.g. North America, New York, PoP X, and type of device, e.g. infrastructure, backbone, customer-facing, etc. When I pointed this out, Tom and his friends discussed and came back with the idea of ‘smart’ folders. Not being a recent Mac person, I am not sure I understand the metaphor. So we’ll see how that turns out.