Kiwi Cattools
by David Sudjiman ~ April 1st, 2009. Filed under: Networking.If you are looking for an application that can pushes config for many of your Cisco devices, Kiwi Cattools will be the perfect one.
It has been around for a while and recently was bought by Solarwinds in January 5th, 2009. But fear not, the freeware version will still be available for download and can use up to 20 devices while for $550 you can get the Enterprise Edition which provides unlimited devices.
I began to play with Kiwi Cattools with 3 devices running under Dynamips.
Starting with registering 3 3640-routers, I needed to define the model, name, and IP Address. The first registration could be cumbersome yet later you can just copy the entry and change the name and IP address assuming the device model and the rest are the same.
After you registered the devices, then you are provided with several built-in activities and it’s just enough to carry on your work.
I tried to push some configuration entries and it went very well. It also reported the activity and show whether it encountered errors.
Besides playing with push-config feature I also played with config comparison. This is a very good feature when you need to find what went wrong with your Change. I know some people swear by his life it can only be done via Excel yet now I found there is a better way to compare your config.
The comparison can also exported to HTML so you can view it on your browser. This is just so great.
I haven’t really try to use it extensively for work but Kiwi Cattools looks really promising.
PS. Yes, I also tried NetworkAuthority Inventory on Linux, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my 3640. Also, when I tried to install it in Windows, even until I finished writing this post, I still need to download the ActiveState Perl to get it working. I’ll try to post it some time.