RARE user and assistance email list

[Alexander Gall <>]

Hi Tim

On Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:25:39 +0000, Tim Chown <> said:

> Hi, we have a 100G Wedge running RARE hosting your 100G test facility in 
> London, which is now being managed by our NOC, and they have a couple of 
> queries.  Answers here or pointers to existing documentation would be 
> welcome.

> a) SNMP access. We’d like to have regular SNMP monitoring of the upstream 
> and possibly other 100G interfaces on the device, as we do for our 
> (largely) Juniper estate. (And in the future we’re also interested in 
> streaming telemetry, which we have on Juniper.)

SNMP is running by default but is restricted to queries from
localhost.  You can simply add a community and prefix to
/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf, e.g.

rocommunity foo 192.168.0.0/16
rocommunity6 foo 2001:db8::/48

then restart the daemon with "systemctl restart snmpd". Please let me
know if there are any problems with that. The system provides the
ifTable and ifXTable MIBs for all configured Tofino ports.

> b) RARE/FreeRtr upgrades. Csaba has suggested we should update to a more 
> recent version of the software. What’s now the recommended process to do 
> this, and for version controlling the installation to for example roll back 
> if necessary?

With the Nix-based installation, you can use the following commands
from the freertr prompt (these "aliases" are translated to a utility
called "release-manager" that can also be executed directly from a
Linux shell, see /etc/freerouter/rtr-hw.txt)

tna-install-latest

  Install the latest version of all components according to the
  rare-nix Git repo. This includes a specific version of freertr.

tna-install-experimental

  Identical to tna-install-latest but replace freertr with the latest
  version (tip of the master branch of the freertr repo at the time
  the command is executed). Note that this can lead to a
  non-functional system, hence "experimental".

tna-list-installed

  Show all installed versions. Each version has a uique "generation" number.

tna-switch-to-generation

  Switch to a specific generation. This stops the freerouter service,
  activates the given version and re-starts the service.

A rollback is simply a switch to the previous generation after
tna-install-latest or tna-install-experimental. The install commands
do not change the running service and are 100% non-destructive.

Pleas do *NOT* use the freertr "flash upgrade" mechanism with the
Nix-based installation (no matter what Csaba tells you :)

Also note that Internet access is required for the install commands to
work.

> c) We also have increasing use of automation for our router estate, e.g. 
> Ansible for our Juniper SRX CPE devices; what’s the philosophy and approach 
> for automation of RARE installations?

I leave that for others to answer :)

-- 
Alex