This is just a quick note that will hopefully save you a headache. I have made this mistake the last two times I have installed RANCID for clients.

As you are probably aware, RANCID uses CVS to maintain versions of your network device configuration files. With CVS, RANCID generates a diff that it emails you.

During the RANCID intallation, you have to run rancid-cvs to set up the CVS repository for your device groups. If CVS is not installed on your system and you run rancid-cvs, you'll get a bunch of errors about cvs not being installed.

Take note: Simply installing CVS is not enough!

Running rancid-cvs without cvs created all the RANCID directory structure, but none of the cvs check-ins occurred. The easiest thing to do at this early stage is remove the directories from $BASEDIR and re-run rancid-cvs. Don't forget $BASEDIR is defined in rancid.conf.

Photo by shyle zacharias.