Peter Van Eeckhoutte's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘configuration’

A couple of days ago, I have released a small perl script to back up Cisco IOS based switches via telnet.

I know there are a couple of similar scripts available on the internet, but most of them either use the “expect” functionality (which does not work all the time), or use SendKeys (which only works when the application has the ‘focus’, and thus cannot be safely scripted.), or are commercial tools.

So I decided to write a quick and dirty (free) script myself, which is purely based on a basic tcp socket connection.

I know, this script only works with telnet (clear text), but at least you can backup your switches (and if you have a dedicated management network, it may be ok to use telnet after all). Furthermore, you can safely schedule the script to run in the background, lean back, …

Introduction In this blog post, I’ll show the easy steps to set up a screenOS based active/passive cluster. I’m not going to discuss the configuration of active/active clusters because, in my opinion, this configuration is only needed in rare circumstances and may introduce some weird behaviour issues.  Furthermore, active/passive clusters have been working quite well for me. These are the main requirements to set up a cluster : The 2 devices need to be the same model The 2 devices need to run exactly the same screenOS version (Or you’ll get “configuration out of sync” messages because the checksums will fail) The 2 devices need to be connected to each other : You need to have at least one free interface on each device to interconnect …