Looking Glass Notes
Just a few straight forward notes on our implementation of
Ed Kern's looking glass (which was http://nitrous.digex.net).
- If there is something which you feel is missing, feel free to ask
and/or send comments to
rancid@shrubbery.net. No guarantees.
- Only one query per router allowed at any given time. This is to avoid
resource deprivation on the looking glass host or the router. The
looking glass will attempt to serialize queries.
- Login failures can be intermittent or permanent, either due to the
router being inaccessible from the looking glass machine,
or authorization failure(s). Contact your local network engineering
folks to resolve login failures.
- Queries followed by <something> require an argument(s) in the text
window below the query list. Some queries take optional arguments
denoted by [something]. Multiple arguments should be separated by a
space.
- Note that output from certain queries is cached by the server and may
be slightly out of date. These queries will be noted as such in the
output. This is limited to queries which could produce lots of output,
such as 'sh ip bgp dampened-paths'.
- Note that some queries have potential to produce great load on the router
and produce lots of output, such as 'sh ip bgp' or 'sh ip bgp reg '^3561'.
The looking glass attempts to deny such commands.
Some useful hints:
- Show interfaces can take arguments other than an interface name, assuming
the router is running an O/S version with the capability. For example; a
cisco can take 'descriptions' or 'brief' and 'terse' for the juniper.
- Show ip bgp neighbor can take additional arguments (if configured to allow
it), such as 'advertised routes', 'flap-statistics', 'received-routes',
and 'routes'. The argument will be converted for the platform.