RME 3.5: Using DEE to identify config versions on devices

[marcjone]

Hi all

Does anyone know whether a 'cwexport' of configuration files using Data Extraction Engine (DEE) includes details of the version of the configuration file running on the devices or whether the configuration is displayed without a version label ?

Many thanks in advance for any help

Kind regards

Marcus Jones

[nhabib]

Hello Marcus,

only versions I see are the XML one and the IOS one

Cheers.

[mfreeman451]

We store our version information in the description fields either for interface Vlan1 or module 1 depending on the type of device, and then use DEE to suck out the data and generate a report telling us what device is running what version of what template..Not sure if this is what you're asking or not, sorry If I'm off topic.

[marcjone]

I've also seen a technique used where an access-list is created, so that it can be used to place a 'remark' in the configuration describing the configuration revision running on the device

RME does things a bit differently though. If you go into Config Editor and select File > Open > By Device and Version ..., you can see that RME will have a number of configuration files, with a revision number for each - This was the information which I was trying to extract

This has come about from a request from our Change Management Team who would like to link this into their database

The files in the 'config' directory on the server do not give an indication of the revision number in their filename. For example, the file /CSCOpx/files/archive/config/800/20040309112846.fcg, shows the config for the device with device_id = 800, taken at 11:28:46 on March 9th, 2004

The only way I have found to get the configuration revision number is by running SQL statements directly on the database. However, this is not a 'supported' way of doing things, so i was wondering whether their was a more conventional way of doing things

I don't think there is another way though !

Thanks for your help :)

Kind regards

Marcus Jones

[mfreeman451]

Ahh I see what you mean. I tried to make sense of that /var/adm/CSCOpx/files/archive.. dir and couldn't. What SQL statement are you doing?

Perhaps there is some cw* command that you could use?

[marcjone]

Well, my understanding of the archive directory is that each device is given a 'device_id' which in the example above is '800'. The configurations for this device are then held in the '800' directory and the config files are the given names with the following convention:

year,month,day,hour,minutes,seconds.cfg, hence the file name above is 20040309112846.cfg

Using SQL you can identify the configuration files with the following 2 statements:

1) select * from dev_fqn where device_name like 'RouterA'

This gives us the arbitrary 'device_id' for RouterA. In this case, 800

2) select * from cfg_archive_log where device_id like 800

This gives us the contents of the archive for device_id 800, and crucially, this also gives me the Version Number !

Again, I have to say - THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED! This way of accessing the database is usually only used when troubleshooting the application, so it's not really an ideal way to achieve my objective :)