Welcome to part 4 of my series on demonstrating SharePoint’s usefulness for storing Cisco configuration backups. What a hard slog it’s been! The last article (part 3) of this series focused on how to modify an open source C# TFTP server to upload files into a SharePoint document library using the SharePoint SDK.

Here is the quick recap on what we have covered so far

• Part 1 illustrated how it it possible to use SNMP to tell a Cisco IOS device to dump its configuration to TFTP. We talked about the version control feature of SharePoint and why it makes sense to TFTP your configs to a SharePoint document library. We covered the WEBDAV network provider supplied with XP and Win2003 and finished off with a basic example using the TFTP server TFTPD32.
• Part 2 went into more detail about the issues you can face when using the WEBDAV network provider. It also went into more detail on 3 TFTP server products (WinAgents TFTP, SolarWinds TFTP Server and TFTPD32 and why TFTPD32 ended up being the best choice for this purpose.
• Part 3 then looked at a wonderful open source TFTP server written in C# called TFTPUtil. We modified the source code of this TFTP server to use the SharePoint SDK and upload files to a SharePoint document library.

Now both the WEBDAV and SDK methods had some issues. The WEBDAV method was obviously easy to set up because pretty much any application (theoretically anyway) can be made to work with it. I, however, had reliability issues with this method as part 2 detailed. The SDK method was much more reliable, but had its own problems. Many people would be uncomfortable with having to perform custom modification of an existing open source TFTP server, but more importantly, there are security implications with this method too.

So we have one remaining method that we can explore. This method is still based around modifications to the TFTPUtil source code but instead of using the SharePoint SDK, we instead use the SharePoint web services.

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and more developers) – Part 4”

As I write this series, it is getting less and less about Cisco and more and more about SharePoint. This article is definitely developer centric, but since Cisco guys tend to be interested in the guts of the detail, I decided to keep going :-).

If you read my articles I tend to take the piss out of IT role stereotypes just to make it more entertaining reading. Sales guys and IT Managers tend to cop it the most, but I also like to have a dig at the expense of the nerds too. Cisco nerds on the whole are a great bunch, but I have to say, the scariest nerd I have ever met drank Cisco kool-aid in jumbo size!

If you have gotten to this article after reading the first two and you are scoffing at my audacity to suggest you TFTP your configs into SharePoint, chances are most people think you’re scary! If you are hitting this series of articles for the first time, go back and read part 1 and part 2 before being scary!

Seriously now, I thought that this would be a 2 part set of articles, but I got all bogged down in the methods of getting files into SharePoint. The WEBDAV based methods described in the previous article is easy to do, but ultimately is not the recommended method. So now, we will look at the ‘proper’ ways to do it and see if they are worth the effort. They work okay, but are more complex and I’m not convinced that the governance issues are necessarily worth it for many readers.

Degree of difficulty for this article is varied.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for an application developer):  

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a non developer):    

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and developers) -Part 3”