Netscaler Knowledgebase

Not sure how you guys backup your NetScaler config.
Maybe you know RANCID? http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/

I used rancid in the past for my Cisco Switches. But it comes also with support for NetScaler.
rancid runs periodically, logs in to devices, runs some commands and stores the output in CVS. If there is a diff to the last run it emails the diff to a defined address.
You can see the diffs and the versions of the whole config also on the cvsweb webinterface.

But unfortunately I noticed that the NetScaler scripts that are shipped with rancid does not work with the latest firmwares. I tried it on version 8.0.
So I modified the scripts and created two patches to get it working.
You will find my 2 patches as well as a RPM package on my server. http://people.ogilvy.de/~mschirrmeister/linux/rancid/
Email examples are also there.

A webinterface example is here. http://wotan.ogilvy.de/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/netscaler/

( I created the examples with some spare IPs on one of my test units. So no worry about the content. It's no longer existent. )

One question for our smart Oracle.
I guess the old NetScaler rancid scripts were created for NetScaler version below version 5. But I'm not sure about this.
In the script were the following 2 commands.

'cat /etc/ns.conf'
'get log settings'

Even in version 5 of the NetScaler command reference guide I did not found anything about a "get" command.
Was this a valid command in earlier versions? If yes, what was it and what are the new alternatives?

Right now I only included in my patch the command 'show ns ns.conf'. But maybe there is more useful stuff that we can write to our backups?


Just thought that maybe some of you will find this useful.


Marco