Auditing Your Gear with Nipper

Let’s talk [tag]audit[/tag]ing for a bit. It’s important to have an outside person look over your [tag]configuration[/tag]s every so often to be sure you didn’t do something stupid, so, every quarter or so (mostly so), I bring in someone to…wait a minute. It would cost about $3000 for someone to do that, and the company surely isn’t going to pay for that. The wonderful people from “The Internet” know this, though, and have released a whole bunch of tools to audit gear like that. One of those is called [tag]Nipper[/tag].

Nipper was the dog in the RCA logo, but that has nothing to do with this. What I´m talking about is the Network Infrastructure Parser. It´s a very nice tool for parsing the configs of your [tag]IOS[/tag] [tag]routers[/tag], IOS [tag]switch[/tag]es, CatOS switches, PIXes, ASAs, FWSM, and a whole mess of other gear. It´s ultra-fast and spits out a great report in HTML by default.

It’s very easy to use, so I won’t get into that, but check it out. It’s worth running your config through this guy every once in a while to make sure you didn’t miss something stupid. Check it out!

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Note: You shouldn’t just trust one app to do all your auditing. There’s no way that just a single app can cover everything, so download a bunch of them and run them all when you do your audit.