Svn

Git is yet another open source version control, and seems to be the tool of choice for contemporary coding mavericks. I still prefer svn and cvs, for centralised version control, but can appreciate why some projects may require distributed repositories as afforded by git.

Setting up a central git repository on a server is easy. You basically setup a user, whose home directory is used to store the repositories, and allow access to people using keys, where the user retain their private key and their public key is saved as an authorised key for the git user account.

RANCID stands for really awesome new cisco configuration differ[1] and polls Cisco devices to get a copy of the configuration and an inventory of the hardware and commits the details to a version control system such a CVS or SVN. The version control is used to maintain a history of the changes, and any changes to the configuration are reported. There are a number of guides available for installing RANCID[2,4,5], but I’ve documented the steps I took here for my reference.