[rancid] missed cmds, but only when run from cron

[Paul Gear]

On 08/14/2013 10:14 PM, Michael W. Lucas wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 12:20:11PM +0800, James Andrewartha wrote:
>> On 14/08/13 12:05, Paul Gear wrote:
>>> I'm seeing something very similar with one Mikrotik device out of 17 on
>>> our network.  If run from the command line, it works fine.  If run from
>>> cron, one router in the group fails, giving the following error log:
>>
>> I had the same problem with a script I'd adapted, the solution was to
>> increase the timeout, as the device was quite slow to generate its config.
>
> Oooh, I have a blog post on exactly this, with Mikrotiks.
>
> http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/1336
>
> I've also found that switching mtlogin to always do "export compact"
> can help.

Hi Michael and James,

Changing to "export compact" was the first thing I did when configuring 
RANCID for our Mikrotiks.

I tried doubling the timeout (although it doesn't look like the patch 
that you mentioned in your blog post is included with 2.3.8) but that 
didn't solve the problem.  It also doesn't explain why the system works 
from the command line but not from cron, nor does it explain why only 
this one out of 17 Mikrotiks is doing it.  We have others that are the 
same model and further away behind slower links and they all work fine.

(Apologies also to Brent for distracting from his original thread topic 
- hopefully they are very similar bugs and what we discuss here will be 
applicable to your F5 problem!)

Regards,
Paul