You will need to enter the device (router, switch etc) IP and login credentials so the tool can connect and compare the two configs (running and startup). The tool runs directly on the target device and compares the currently running configuration with the stored “startup configuration”. The Config Compare Tool is part of the SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset which is a package of several useful tools for networking and IT.
Solarwinds is a well know vendor of networking and IT management software. This tool can also compare binary files, image files, PDF, word, excel etc. It can be downloaded from the official site: įor text files, it will present the two configuration texts side-by-side with differences shown in colors and sections for easy visualization.
Then you can import this text configuration file into a specialized comparison tool such as the ones below: Compare It by GrigsoftĪ free program available on the Internet to compare text files is Compare It 4. The easiest way to export a configuration file in text format is to execute the command “ show run” or “ show startup“, press the “space bar” key several times until the end of the configuration and then copy and paste the lines from the Terminal screen to a text editor.
TEXT FILE COMPARISON TOOL ONLINE SOFTWARE
One option to help us compare Cisco configuration files is to export the config files in text format and then use a software tool to perform line by line comparison for us between different files.
TEXT FILE COMPARISON TOOL ONLINE FULL
Or maybe your support vendor or technician has made recently some configuration changes on your main ASA firewall device and you want to check what they changed compared to previous configs.įor these reasons it would be useful to present some methods and tools that allow us to perform such config comparison tasks with full automation. Imagine a situation whereby you have stored several different router configurations somewhere and you want to compare the differences. In our day to day work as network administrators it is often necessary to compare configuration files of Cisco routers, switches, firewalls etc.Īs we know, a characteristic of Cisco IOS is that the configuration files are stored in text format, but still a line by line comparison of different config files is tedious and in many cases almost impossible.