RARE user and assistance email list

[Tim Chown <>]

Hi Alex,

Many thanks, that’s all very helpful. 

Tim

> On 12 Jun 2023, at 17:03, Alexander Gall <> wrote:
> 
> 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