Network Configuration Management Introduction
Network Configuration Management Introduction
Great
An exploration of the reasons why you should be interested in network configuration management. An outline is also presented of the available tools.
Network configuration management is intended to simplify the job of managing medium to large networks. The aim of network configuration management is to save you time & reduce errors on your network due to misconfiguration of network devices. Even if your network changes do cause errors, network configuration management allows you to fix the errors faster. Ive often been in the situation where I wished that I could move a systems configuration back in time to when the device worked properly. Having a network configuration management system means that you can change a devices configuration with a much reduced risk of downtime. If you make a mistake, simply roll back your changes to a version of the configuration that you know works. When a fault has been identified on your network it can be invaluable to have an audit trail of all configuration changes of your network devices. Not only will you quickly be able to identify which devices have changed, but also what the changes were, when the changes were made & by whom.
Open Source
The open source world doesnt have anything that can go toe to toe with any of the major commercial vendors. This is unfortunate, though perhaps understandable. The development of a major network configuration management tool requires access to a wide range of equipment that is unlikely to be available to many open source developers. High end network equipment can be very expensive. Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ (Rancid) Whilst Rancid isnt a full blown network configuration management system it does provide some useful features. Rancids goal is to make it easy to spot changes to device configurations. Rancid can be executed periodically and any changes to device configuration can then be emailed to one or more network managers. The changes are then stored in CVS (a software configuration management system). Rancid supports a number of vendors equipment including: Cisco routers and Catalyst switches, as well as equipment from Alteon, Bay Networks, Extreme, Force 10 Networks, Foundry, HP, Juniper and Redback. Rancid runs on most flavors of UNIX including Linux & *BSD. It does not work on Microsoft Windows.
Commercial
A number of vendors like Relicore & Voyence supply network configuration management systems. Though, many position their products as application configuration management systems ie managing changes to application configurations like Apache & SQL Server.
Alterpoint just does network configuration management. The Alterpoint solution is made up of three main components: an auditing/change management module, a device update module and a server to tie the two together in a central server.
Conclusion
If you are currently grappling with a number of network devices, managed by a team of people then network configuration management may well be worth investigating. If most of your network downtime is caused by people changing configuration of one or more devices, then again network configuration management may well be worth a look. Network configuration management provides the tools to give you an audit trail of changes to your network. It can also make enforcing corporate policy for device configuration much easier.