[rancid] Trouble grabbing configs from a Foundry FesX

[Jethro R Binks]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2014, heasley wrote:

> Thu, Jul 03, 2014 at 10:05:57PM +0100, Jethro R Binks:
> > All that may or may not be a valid view :), but doesn't have anything to 
> > do with the problem, which is that the same hardware is faster using 
> > clogin than flogin.
> 
> you may have missed that clogin actually doesnt work for him per-se.  
> term length 0 on the box he has does not work, so it skips that 
> altogether and the pager will appear in the longer command output.  but 
> ...

I was looking specifically at the timings of the sending of password and 
skip-page-display, regardless of whatever happens after that:

Jul 03 08:23:11
Jul 03 08:23:15 Please Enter Password:
Jul 03 08:23:15
Jul 03 08:23:15 User login successful.
Jul 03 08:23:15
Jul 03 08:23:22 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy>enable
Jul 03 08:23:31 Password:
Jul 03 08:23:31 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy#
Jul 03 08:23:43 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy#skip-page-display
Jul 03 08:23:43 Disable page display mode
Jul 03 08:23:47 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy#show run
Jul 03 08:23:47 Current configuration:

Not familiar with ts from moreutils, but my reading of the above is that 
line:

Jul 03 08:23:22 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy>enable

is issued after "enable" has been (slowly) sent and the whole line echoed 
once complete for timestamping.  Same for:

Jul 03 08:23:43 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy#skip-page-display

which is 12 seconds after the previous line: echoed after all those 
characters have been slowly sent.

> >  The reason appears to be simply that flogin uses a 
> > lot more "send -h" for human-ish speed tping than clogin (now?) does.  
> > Historic reason?
> 
> you may be onto something there, but i doubt it'd amount to much.  it
> just affects sends, which is limited and the timeout is on reads.  his
> box may just be slow.

I see you are rewinding back to the original report about timeouts with 
clogin after changing to ssh from telnet; using flogin was slow.  If we 
can get rid of the flogin slow but, whatever goes wrong when using clogin 
is irrelevant.

Well anyway, I do know that throwing the -h away makes flogin about as 
fast as clogin for me.  So if that solves Scott's problem and doesn't 
introduce another then that's good enough for me :).

Scott:

Jul 03 08:24:38 BR-telnet at FESX-Needy#terminal length 0
Jul 03 08:24:38 Invalid input -> length 0

suggests "terminal length 0" doesn't work for you here.  I don't see it 
working on various of my older boxes; does on MLX though.

> I do not recall why -h was used more heavily in flogin.
> 
> > Experimentally, I modified my local flogin (which is roughly similar 
> > to that from v2.3.8) to remove all instances of -h, except where they 
> > match with those in clogin (around "exit" and "quit" it seems).  
> > We'll see tomorrow if that breaks any of my (varied antiquity 
> > Foundry/Brocade) kit, but testing randomly seems OK.
> > 
> > Scott, maybe you'd like to try the same and see how you get on (remove 
> > the "-h" and "-h --" parts where you find them in flogin).
> 
> do not remove the --'s, that has nothing to do with -h.

Why does clogin not need them in the places that flogin apparently does 
(with "-h")?

> > Actually John, while we're at it, while looking at my flogin I found I'd 
> > made this addition in run_comands, which perhaps you'd like to add:
> > 
> >     ...
> >     send "skip-page-display\r"
> >     expect -re "$prompt" {}
> 
> would you rework that to only send term length 0 if skip-page fails?

That would be sensible.  I obviously just hacked this in at some point!

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks, Network Manager,
Information Services Directorate, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, number SC015263.