The Notch system is made up of two components. There is an Agent (server) process, run on one or more computers that will make connections to your network equipment. Human users and automated tasks employ client applications that instruct the Agents to perform work for them and return any results of that work.
For a basic installation, install an Agent, the Notch Client library, and one or more Client applications.
In an advanced installation, one installs the Agent on multiple machines, install the Client library and applications on computers where they need to receive the results (such as their workstation, or a server used for periodic maintenance). The Client library can be configured to use specific Agents for particular network devices to geographically distribute the work on the devices. In addition, the client can load balance work between appropriate Agents to scale horizontally. This approach has been used to scale to a global network with tens of thousands of devices.
Note
If you have an existing Notch or Notch Client installation, you will need to perform some additional work to remove the old versions before proceeding with the following notes:
$ pip uninstall notch
$ pip uninstall notch.client
$ pip uninstall notch.agent
You should check your Python site-packages directories after this is completed to ensure you do not have any notch related files lying around.
First of all, Notch requires Python 2.6 or 2.7 (it is not expected to work with Python 3).
Notch is compatible with virtualenv, should you wish to install it into that. If so, switch into your desired virtual environment now.
If you do not use virtualenv, you will need to run the following commands as root.
Use pip to install Notch, if it’s available on your system. If it’s not, use easy_install to install pip:
$ easy_install pip
To install the Notch Agent (server which connects to routers, but has no client utilities):
$ pip install notch.agent
To install the Notch client library, used by tools like MrCLI to connect to the Notch Agent (and your network equipment):
$ pip install notch.client
Once you have completed this step, there is one final required library that has to be installed manually. Run this command:
$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/joshmarshall/tornadorpc.git@fda3e0e4#egg=tornadorpc-dev
You should now find the notch-agent binary installed in your PATH, and your Python interpreter should find the necessary modules:
$ python
Python 2.6.3 (r263:75183, Nov 6 2009, 15:46:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import notch.agent
>>>
>>> # If you installed the notch.client package also,
>>> import notch.client
This merely checks that the files are installed correctly.
Next, you’ll want to configure your agent with information about your network devices and the authentication information used to log into them. See the Notch Agent page for more.
If you’re an existing RANCID user, you’ll want to see the Quickstart for RANCID users page.