lg_intro - introduction to the looking glass

The looking glass offers a web based interface to routers to users without their needing permission to login to the router. This may be a perfect interface for customer support or less savvy folks, and many ISPs have given public access to such an interface as a "route server."

The looking glass consists of two CGI perl(1) scripts, lg.cgi and lgform.cgi, and the lg.conf(5) configuration file.

Both of these scripts begin with reading the configuration file. If there is an error in the file's syntax or if the file can not be found, error messages will be displayed on standard-error. The Apache http server redirects standard-error to its error log file by default.

lgform.cgi displays a html form consisting of a list of possible router commands that can be run and a scrolling list of routers that these commands may be run on. When the form is submitted, lg.cgi is run.

lg.cgi begins by performing some basic checks on the arguments passed to it. If these checks pass, lg.cgi either displays cached data from a previous invocation, if that data exists and is within the cache interval, or uses clogin(1) to login to the device and execute the command. The results of the command are cached if applicable and displayed for the user.

Besides lg.conf(5), additional instructions for setting up the looking glass can be found in the README file under /usr//../var/lib/rancid/README.lg.

Note that the looking glass scripts require a few perl modules not included with rancid. Rancid's configure process does not check for these. See the README file.

cloginrc(5), clogin(1), lg.conf(5)

Rancid's looking glass is based on Ed Kern's (included by permission, thanks Ed!), which could once be found on http://nitrous.digex.net/ but has apparently been removed. Support for Juniper and Foundry devices, use of rancid's device login scripts, and additional commands and checks have been added to the original.