How to Install RANCID on Arch Linux

RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is an open source tool that is used to monitor and back up network router configurations. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the installation of RANCID on Arch Linux.

Prerequisites

Before installing RANCID, you should have:

  • Root access to an Arch Linux server or virtual machine
  • Basic command line skills

Step 1: Update Packages

Before installing any new software, it’s a good idea to update the package list and upgrade any existing packages.

sudo pacman -Syu

Step 2: Install RANCID Dependencies

To install RANCID on Arch Linux, you will need to install the dependencies. Run the following command to install the required packages.

sudo pacman -S rancid git expect

Step 3: Configure RANCID

To configure RANCID, we first need to create the directory where RANCID will store its configurations.

sudo mkdir /var/lib/rancid
sudo chown rancid:rancid /var/lib/rancid

Next, we create the RANCID configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/rancid/rancid.conf

Here, we will add the following lines:

LIST_OF_GROUPS="group1 group2"
LIST_OF_USERS="user1 user2"

Replace 'group1' and 'group2' with the router groups you want to back up, and replace 'user1' and 'user2' with the email addresses of the users who will receive the notifications.

Step 4: Generate SSH Key

RANCID uses SSH to connect to network devices, so we need to create an SSH key for RANCID to use.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

This will create an RSA key pair in the default location of ~/.ssh/id_rsa. We need to copy the public key to the network devices we want to back up.

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub router1.example.com

This will add the SSH key to the authorized_keys file on the router.

Step 5: Test RANCID

Now that we have configured RANCID, we can test it by running the following command:

sudo /usr/bin/rancid-run

This will fetch the router configuration and save it to the RANCID directory /var/lib/rancid. To verify that RANCID is working correctly, check the RANCID log file:

cat /var/log/rancid/rancid-router.log

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we walked you through the installation and configuration of RANCID on Arch Linux. By following these steps, you should now have a working instance of RANCID to monitor and back up your network router configurations.