Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Foreman VS RANCID

Compare Foreman VS RANCID and see what are their differences

Foreman logo Foreman

Foreman is an open source project that helps system administrators manage servers throughout their...

RANCID logo RANCID

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
  • Foreman Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29
  • RANCID Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-08

Foreman videos

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RANCID videos

Puppet Perspectives - Rancid "Troublemaker" Album Review (feat. Dan)

More videos:

  • Review - Rancid Life Won't Wait Album Review
  • Review - Review: Rancid “Trouble Maker”

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Foreman and RANCID)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Network Automation
0 0%
100% 100
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Configuration Auditing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Foreman and RANCID

Foreman Reviews

12 Open Source/Commercial Software for Data Center Infrastructure Management
Foreman is an open-source and perfect life-cycle management application for physical and virtual servers, that give Linux system administrators the capability to easily automate repetitive jobs, rapidly deploy applications, and proactively manage servers, on-premise or in the cloud.
Source: www.tecmint.com

RANCID Reviews

We have no reviews of RANCID yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Foreman should be more popular than RANCID. It has been mentiond 19 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Foreman mentions (19)

  • From Dotenv to Dotenvx: Next Generation Config Management
    Not to be confused with the larger foreman[0] also written in ruby. [0] https://theforeman.org. - Source: Hacker News / 3 days ago
  • Deploying 100+ windows 10 devices per week. Need to automate.
    In case you're unable to use intune, a free approach might be https://theforeman.org/ That works well for provisioning baremetal windows (with discovery image or pxe boot) once you've set it up. It supports script access as well as a nice hierarchy for configurations. But it's really not as well documented as it should be. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Configuration Management Tools for 20-30 servers
    I use the foreman with puppet and pxe/kickstart scripts to automate VM/baremetal provisioning etc. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Server management tool with GUI
    Might want to look into https://theforeman.org/ if it's not too complex for you. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Stockpiling Linux ISOs?
    The iso images are typically locked at a certain verison. The update repositories sounds like what you are looking for to cache updates. Look into theforeman.org and specifically the plugin Katello. This is an upstream for Red Hat's Satellite product. Another option would be Canonical's MAAS. Both of these options Sound like what you are headed for unless you really just mean synchronize into a folder and store... Source: over 1 year ago
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RANCID mentions (9)

  • Cisco switch backup/restore?
    A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Version control for network configs
    Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Management Software for Cisco Devices?
    RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What all are you doing with Ansible?
    If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Starting with python at 30
    Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Foreman and RANCID, you can also consider the following products

Ansible - Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.

NetBox - NetBox is an open source web application designed to help manage and document computer networks. NetBox was developed specifically to address the needs of network and infrastructure engineers.

Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid

DCImanager - DCImanager is a platform for managing physical equipment. Connect any physical equipment to a single platform. Use the platform to manage your servers, switches, PDU as well as physical and virtual networks.

GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)