Mailing List Archive: Cisco Mobility Express (WLC) woes (garbage in config...)

Hello,

I see this thread:

https://shrubbery.net/pipermail/rancid-discuss/2019-October/010838.html <https://shrubbery.net/pipermail/rancid-discuss/2019-October/010838.html>

Looks like pretty much what I am experiencing. (Almost) Every time rancid runs for me - I get a “change” and some garbage characters in the config. Here is an example diff email showing the strings flipping around:

—
Index: configs/ap-me
===================================================================
retrieving revision 1.6
diff -u -4 -r1.6 ap-me
@@ -478,9 +478,9 @@
wlan radio 1 802.11a-only
wlan session-timeout 1 disable
wlan flexconnect local-switching 1 enable
wlan flexconnect learn-ipaddr 1 enable
- ø4ø4
+ >à4>à4
wlan wmm require 1
wlan avc 1 visibility enable
wlan wgb broadcast-tagging disable 1
wlan wgb prp disable 1
—

Looks like in that thread, there were two solutions - making some changes to wlogin or ciscowlc.pm. I’ve put these in manually as a test, but rancid is still detecting a change (almost) every time it runs.

I’m running rancid 3.9 on Debian 9 (running Debian’s packages, pulling from stretch-backports to get me from 3.6.x previously to 3.9). “WLC” is really Mobility Express running on an 1832i - running latest stable 8.10.121.0

Did I misunderstand that thread ? Anyone else has ran into this and has a fix ?

Many thanks in advance - I don’t want to remove this from rancid, but I can’t have the diff’s and emails filling up every hour either...

> On Jun 9, 2020, at 12:50 PM, vom513 <vom513@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I see this thread:
>
> https://shrubbery.net/pipermail/rancid-discuss/2019-October/010838.html <https://shrubbery.net/pipermail/rancid-discuss/2019-October/010838.html>
>
> Looks like pretty much what I am experiencing. (Almost) Every time rancid runs for me - I get a “change” and some garbage characters in the config. Here is an example diff email showing the strings flipping around:

<snip>

Sorry to self reply - but I took some more time and read through what Bjarne was saying in his post. He had also made a change in the base types file for the cisco-wlc8. Doing this does seem to have gotten rid of the garbage characters (fingers crossed).

However, an unfortunate side effect is that now a CDP neighbor line is coming in with the current hold timer (which changes every second)… So back to registering a diff every time we run…

This is absolutely not an elegant solution, but I put another line into the same spot Bjarne was talking about in ciscowlc.pm to ignore “wired0”. That seems to be the only line in the config that otherwise references “wired0". Rancid runs now and doesn’t register a config change every time.

Neverthless, I’m not a huge fan of hand hacking code like this. I’d still love to hear from anyone that has a Cisco WLC version 8.x humming along nice in RANCID. If part of my issue is that I’m actually on Mobility Express then fair enough. Just want to see if there’s something I could be doing better to handle this particular device.

Thanks.