Michael Grinnell wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
Erick Perez wrote:
Currently we manage several switches,firewalls and MS LDAP and Centos OpenLDAP installations. We are looking for a "man in the middle" or "framework" to manage change on our network devices and LDAP-based servers.
We are looking into a similar solution (Quest Software does not have that for devices) to perform change and control on the routers, switches and firewalls.
There was a tool called pancho (http://www.pancho.org/) that claimed to to do automated router and switch management, but it seems to no longer be supported, and personally, I'd trust a person more than a script with that sort of job. On the other hand, maintaining backup copies of configurations before/after changes is something very worthwhile and not difficult for anything that has text based configurations. Just make sure that changes are copied back and committed to a central version control system like cvs or svn (which you can wrap with viewvc for easy display of history and changes). A tool called rancid (http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/) will automate this for many routers, switches and firewalls, and will also pick up any unexpected changes.
Rancid is a great tool, and has worked well for us as a configuration monitor and config repository. Another new alternative that is similar is ZipTie, now called NetworkAuthority Inventory (http://inventory.alterpoint.com/). For a pay solution, I believe SolarWinds has some products.
If you are also doing SNMP monitoring of these resources, I believe OpenNMS has some degree of integration with ziptie and some is currently being added for rancid.