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Running VS Startup Accurate?

Hello,

 I was looking through our NCM web interface and saw the startup vs running config pie chart.  I noticed that there were a small portion of the devices that did not match so I started looking into them.  About half of them matched but were still reported as not matching.  I checked both through the web interface and through the console and there were no differences.  Has anyone else seen this?

 I know for sure there were a couple changes that I made to the devices that I did a "write mem" after I did them and one of those devices showed up on the list.

 Thanks!

  • If this is a bug, I'd like to see if we can fix this in our next release.   Can you both please create support tickets for this issue? 

  • Support Case # 80811 opened...

  • I've been having a similar issue, and I have a support ticket opened for this.

     

    In my case, I'm seeing it mostly with Cisco CSS's and tech support indicated that the startup config contained extra spaces that the running config didn't have. I think they are still working through a way around it. This might be the same thing you are running into.

  • 75% of my Cisco IOS devices are reported as different from the startup configuration.

    There are some *really* silly bugs: One of my CatOS downloads thinks that the precommands used by NCM are part of the config:

    Here we have 'set length 0' and the output of this command included as part of the startup config, but there's no similar command on the running config download.

    001  001  set length 0
    002  002 Screen length for this session set to 0.

    My IOS "comparison" pie chart is including this line as *consistently* different on *every* IOS device comparing startup and running.  This should be excluded from the configuration criteria.

      ! Last configuration change at 16:09:56 MDT Tue Mar 31 2009 by jp

    I investigated the NCM option for configuration criteria, and found the regular expression entries "Cisco '! Last Updated' line (Part 1)" and "Cisco '! Last Updated' line (Part 2)" commented out.  I don't remember if I made these "ignores" or if NCM v5 disabled them from v4.  I've just re-enabled these.

    I will update the thread tomorrow with the results since this post.

  • When I opened my ticket I was basically told that this was expected behavior.  The Config Compairison criteria are not used by the pie charts.   The funny part is that line you mentioned will *never* be the same.  As soon as someone logs in and goes to the config it changes.   I gave a few suggestions on how I thought things would work better and they seemed to take them.

  • After checking off the config comparison criteria options, checking my report today, I've given up on the pie charts... =(

  • Can you please check out the following post to see if this helps?

    There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding these charts.   Most of it stems from the fact that they're not based on real-time system state.  

    I'd like to propose moving to a real-time option by default.   So, Running vs. Startup would based on the last diff cache update (taking into account comparison criteria) for each node.   So, this would effectively compare against the most recently downloaded running config against the most recently downloaded startup config.

    Any objections?

  • Thanks for the reply, Chris.

    Reading your post & the linked post above, I see that I could change the time on my running vs config downloads.  I changed this to the minimum "last hour" option.  This caused an unexplainable 100% conflict chart, so I changed it to "today" - much better, but it still complained about nodes that weren't downloaded in the 'last day' to the current running config.

    If a real-time option just specified "compare the last downloaded running config to the last downloaded startup config" - period, I'd be one happy guy =)

  • I'm having the exact same issue.  Only it is consistently giving me these false positive 'mismatches' on 90-100% of my Cisco infrastructure.

    I have opened support case #89402

    Some observations:

    There really seems to be a problem with the IOS 'lite' used by ASA devices.  I have nearly 40 ASA 5505s, and I get startup and running config comparison failures on blank lines versus "!" used as a spacer, I see groups of lines within one section being reversed (eg: top-to-bottom, Line 38 A, Line 39 B, Line 40 C in Startup-Config is reported as changed from Line 38 C, Line 39 B, Line 40 A in the Running-Config).