I was called out to a customer location yesterday afternoon for an emergency. The customer was in the process of doing some routine maintenance on their power system. They were prepared to lose power on their servers. However, the network gear did not have the configuration saved (for quite a while). So, when the lost power, some of the Cisco network equipment reverted back to an older configuration.
This caused a number of issues with their building interconnects (which were set to access-ports, not trunk ports) and most of their servers. The servers were all in the wrong VLAN making DHCP / DNS / AD services unavailable. Of course, the customer did not have any documentation on the way things were supposed to be configured, nor was the main LAN administrator available to help out.
A nice feature for Cisco to add to devices is a notification on log-on / log-off that the configuration is not saved. At a minimum, it would be nice if the devices would auto-save the running configuration periodically or on the generation of the configuration change log message. This auto-save would not auto-save to the startup-configuration but to an archive configuration file.
To help with this process, I am going to start working on an embedded event manager (EEM) script to look for syslog messages with the configuration change message and then copy the running-config to the archive-config file. This should help with this situation in the future.
Stay tuned for an updated post regarding the script.
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