Rancid

Motivation In migrating our NOC website to from a traditional Apache server to a serverless architecture, I’ve needed to update or replace any dynamic components. For example, replacing a Wordpress installation with Hugo to publish static content to a S3 bucket served by CloudFront. In this particular case, it was a CGI script that reads our firewall configurations and presents a web page for visualizing and searching the many object-groups and access-lists. I chose to migrate this to run as a Lambda. ...

Motivation and Design I have a bunch of “audit scripts” that run against the network configurations (and other data sources, such as DNS and DHCP) to check for common problems, mistakes, and inconsistencies. They run on a centralized server that periodically fetches the latest data from all these sources, runs the scripts, and emails about any discrepancies. This data sources are kept in git repositories, either updated by operations staff, or automatically. In the case of networking gear, by a tool called RANCID that collects the text configuration and output of many useful “show” commands and pushes any changes a git repository for the role/group of the device. ...