GERTY

a proper way of doing things that RANCID does... and much more

Project status: preparing for a release.

Originally GERTY was a robot character in the film "Moon" (2009) by Duncan Jones, with Kevin Spacey's voice.

Gerty is the automation tool for network operation tasks, like:

• Collecting status and configuration data
• Executing remote commands
• Parallel, massive execution

Various management access interfaces are available:

• Telnet/SSH command line
• SNMP
• NETCONF
• TL/1

Usage examples

• Device configuration backup

• VPLS MAC counts on Juniper MX platform: per-instance and per-VLAN counts for every routing instance, stored in SQL DB

• 15-minute HDSL line quality statistics (ES, SES, CRCA, LOSWS, UAS) collected every few hours and stored in SQL DB

• Chassis hardware types, serial numbers, IOS versions for Cisco devices, stored in SQL, with change history

• Port status, CDP neighbours, UDLD status for Cisco devices, stored in SQL, with change history

Vendor-specific plugins

The core Gerty package contains only vendor-independent features. All vendor-specific features are packaged in plugins. Vurrently plugins for Cisco, Juniper, and some xDSL equipment are available:

https://github.com/ssinyagin/gerty-plugins

DOCUMENTATION

User guide: doc/gerty_userguide.markdown

Architecture and design: doc/gerty_architecture.markdown

Software documentation: doc/gerty_job_configuration.markdown doc/gerty_siteconfig_configuration.markdown doc/gerty_devclass_configuration.markdown doc/gerty_device_attributes.markdown

Installing from sources:

Pre-requisites: autoconf, automake, and a number of Perl modules

git clone https://github.com/ssinyagin/gerty.git cd gerty autoreconf ./configure --prefix=/opt/gerty make make install

later on, "git pull" would refresh your copy with the latest updates

Installing documentation

apt-get install pandoc sh mkhtml.sh ~/public_html/gerty/ pandoc -s doc/gerty_manpage.markdown --to=man -o /usr/local/man/man1/gerty.1

Ubuntu and Debian pre-requisites:

apt-get install make libtool autoconf git-core
libconfig-tiny-perl libconfig-any-perl
liblog-handler-perl libexpect-perl
libxml-libxml-perl libnet-snmp-perl
libdbi-perl

Mailing list

http://chilli.nosignal.org/mailman/listinfo/gerty-users (thanks to Andy Davidson)

TO DO

• automate backup for Cisco files, like "vlan.dat" (suggested by Viktor Steinmann [email protected])
• write "Gerty Developer Guide"
• update documentation on Netconf, SNMP, TL1
• update documentation on DBLink and action postprocessing

Author:

Stanislav Sinyagin CCIE #5478 [email protected] +41 79 407 0224