My focus has long been more geared towards managing large
server infrastructures. I've only been doing any significant
work on networking devices for the past couple of years.
Brent's starting of this list was very well-timed for me.
I've got kickstart/jumpstart, cfengine/Pikt/ISConf down somewhat
well at this point. I'm lacking a good base to start from on
all the network devices I manage.
I've recently discovered RANCID, and have found it to be a useful
tool, and am rather familiar with setting up the more popular
opensource monitoring systems (opennms, cricket, cacti, ntop, ossim). I
see OSSIM as being a good potential for culminating the mass amount of
monitoring data.
What I'm finding to be missing from my networking knowledge is network
device best practices. Maybe some of you can enlighten me.
For example, what are the best ways to manage IOS images and
configurations. I run several dozen switches/routers/pix's (ignoring
all of the non-cisco gear we maintain) at this point, and have developed
a kludgy, but effective template system with perl for maintaining
the different configurations.
As for applying changes, it's still a far more manual process than I
would like to apply new IOS updates, make broad sweeping network config
changes, etc.
What would be nice, and is probably common place, would be network
booting all of our devices via tftp & dhcp/bootp. Is everybody rolling
their own systems for this type of device management, or are their some
more common open-source tools for this more basic process of network
management?
|
|
