Compare AudioCodes SBC INI Files 🔎

The Challenge with AudioCodes SBC Configurations

If you’ve worked with AudioCodes Session Border Controllers (SBCs), you know that comparing INI configuration files can be tricky. These files are packed with sections like IP Profiles, where endless strings of 0s and 1s which will make spotting differences feel like searching for needles in a haystack. Manual reviews sometimes miss subtle changes in parameters that could lead to issues in call handling. This is especially true when you have multiple SBCs in an “active-active-cluster” setup. The challenge is to quickly identify what’s changed, what’s missing, and what could potentially cause problems.

PowerShell to the Rescue

I’ve developed a PowerShell script to simplify comparisons of AudioCodes SBC INI files. It parses the structured format, identifies variances in sections like IP-Profiles and generates a clean HTML report if there are differences.

🛠️ SBC-Focused compare:

General settings
Table based settings like IP Profiles
- Drifted settings
- Missing Rows

📋 HTML Report Features

Customizable displayname for each SBC
Clear section-by-section comparison
Highlighted differences for easy spotting

Sample Output

Here’s a screenshot of the HTML report generated by the script, showing differences between two SBC INI files (click to enlarge):

Getting Started with the Script

Clone or download from the repo.
Launch PowerShell and move to the script folder.
Compare with:

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.\Compare-ACSBCIniFiles.ps1  `
    -SBCIniFilePath1 "C:\Temp\SBC1.ini"  `
    -SBCName1 "Old Config File" `
    -SBCIniFilePath2 "C:\Temp\SBC2.ini" `
    -SBCName2 "New Config File" `
    -ReportFilePath "C:\Temp\SBC-Comparison.html"

Open the generated HTML report in your browser.

GitHub Repository

You can find the script in the GitHub repository: AudioCodes SBC INI File Comparison

Current Limitations

One current limitation is (at least for now 😉) the handling of missmatching indexes but with the same content. For example, if both INI files have an IP Profile with the profile name “Teams” with the same settings, but on the first SBC it’s listed as index 0 and on the second SBC as index 1, the script could not match them correctly and will show them as different.