[Infrastructures] Cisco Enhanced Device Interface

[Andrew Fort]

On 01/07/2005, at 1:48 AM, Brian Scanlan wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking a close look at this very recent product:
>
> http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/rtrmgmt/progint/ 
> e_di/2_0/index.htm
>
> It's a device management application that runs from a custom Linux
> distribution, and appears to have an excellent APIs, a nice command
> line and cool discovery tools.
>
> I am already involved in the building of a provisioning system that
> generates configs for a few thousand client routers and related
> monitoring applications, it seems that this tool will fit in very well
> beside it. Does anybody have any experience with it or similar tools?
> I'm evaluating it, and interested in what people make of it.
>
> Brian.


Brian, I'm presently looking a similar Cisco product, CNS  
Configuration Engine, for what sounds like exactly the same job.   
(see http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/rtrmgmt/cns/ce/ 
index.htm).  CNS CE is an older product, taking advantage of an  
embedded TIBCO agent inside IOS for initial rollout and ongoing  
configuration management.

I'm very interested to hear what your experience has been with the  
EDI, since NETCONF is presumably 'the way to go' with these things,  
being standards based.  CNS CE (plus the router agent) has all the  
functionality we need, but the Tomcat UI provided is terrible and  
we've been really wanting just to get at the back-end (LDAP + DB2 +  
text files + m4, by the looks of it).

Thanks for the pointer, by the way, I'll speak to our account reps  
about trialling EDI (possibly instead of CNS CE).

cheers,
-andrew