Often using VMware Workstation platform we need to quickly create new virtual machine. reasons for that might be different. For example additional machine for our Lab environment or just quick test without affecting other machines we have setup in our virtual environment.

Installing whole operating system with all applications we used to have in our setup might be time consuming process. That is why it is worth to consider creating and using templates to be able quickly generate virtual machines we need.

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Some time ago I received request to automate file transfer between FTP server and Development systems. Both, FTP server and Development system, are Windows-based. FTP server was running FTP over SSL only, so that automatically eliminated built-in Windows FTP command-line app. As I was using WinSCP in the past decided to do quick check if it is possible to use it in batch mode, so I can create script and run it on Windows Task Scheduler to automate whole process.

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/etc/rancid/rancid.conf

In this article you can find description of parameters in rancid.conf. By changing parameters in this file you can impact the way RANCID will behave, collect and process collected information. You can also define type of version control repository and email notifications as well as many other option.

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RANCID is a great automation tool which allows you to collect configuration from network devices and store in repository with version control (CVS or SVN). In this article I will show you how to install RANCID and prepare to work on openSUSE 11.4 with subversion as repository for configs.

Having repository with network devices configuration might be also part of disaster recovery planning as in case of failure it will be easy to pull recent configuration from repository and apply on replacement router or switch.

To demonstrate commands I’m using copy&paste from PuTTY while executing step-by-step what is described in this article.

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If you need to capture configuration of Windows-based DHCP server for documentation or review purposes, this might be handy:

netsh -r lab-dc-01 dhcp server dump > C:\dhcp-lab-dc-01.txt

NOTE: lab-dc-01 in example command is name of the Windows server which has DHCP installed.

Example DHCP server dump from Windows Server 2008 R2 you can see here. It contains one scope for subnet 172.16.90.0/24, option for DNS and default gateway defined.