NCM Config Download Protocol

sirpaw

Hi,

I'd just like to ask, what protocol does NCM use to perform the download config jobs?It uses telnet right?Because we're having errors where when we run scheduled jobs that download the config for backup where it says connection refused or bad password. But when we log in to that router manually, the password just works fine. 

Did anyone encounter the same problem with NCM? Hope someone could share their experience.

Thanks so much.

- Paulo

rschroeder

NCM will download device configurations either via the Global Transfer Protocol you've selected, or via the protocol you've chosen for an individual device.  It can be SSH Auto, TFTP, SCP, Telnet--whatever you find works, and whatever meets your security needs.

Either set the Global Config Transfer Protocol and use it as the default for all your devices, or choose to override it for individual devices.  To set the Global Config Transfer Protocol, Click File > Settings, find the Global Macro Settings and expand them.  Select Transfer Protocols, and you'll find the current one chosen on the third drop down window on the right.  Click on the drop-down and choose the one you want.

To change the Transfer Protocol for a single device, edit the device, open up the Communication area, and go to "Transfer Configs Using".  Click the pulldown in the box to choose a specific method.

I found that some of my older devices using SSH did not get along 100% with NCM's SSH for downloading configs.  When using SSH, some of these older switches (Nortel Bay Business Policy Switch 2000's) would hang and need to be rebooted before SSH could be used again.  When I confirmed NCM was causing the hang, I changed the NCM's Transfer protocol for them to Telnet, and stopped having problems with these switches.

Like you, I occasionally had issues with some scheduled jobs.  By reviewing the info contained in \NCM\Session-Trace I eventually determined part of the problem seemed to be associated with the number of devices in each job, the number of simultaneous jobs I'd allowed, and scheduled jobs that were overlapping.

Also, NCM's TFTP server would occasionally hang when I used TFTP as the transfer method, which caused those devices' backups to fail.  The workaround was to either restart the TFTP and test, or reboot the NCM server.  The long-term solution proved a little tougher to discover, but I took it as a personal challenge.

To simplify, I broke the jobs down by hardware type (Nortel switches, Nortel routers, Cisco devices, F5 devices, etc.).  Then I found how long each individual job took to run, and scheduled them so the jobs would not overlap.  That includes the scheduled Daily Config Change Report.

Finally, I changed the Settings > Configs > Config Transfers Simultaneous Downloads to 6 simultaneous sessions, with a 5 minute SNMP transfer timout and 5 Lines minumum Config Length.

This eliminated all errors in all of my scheduled downloads, and life is good.