9.2.1 Backup / Restore

[sky-knight]

I just backed up one of my larger appliances, and restored it to one of my smaller appliances this morning. The larger unit had 7 interfaces, the smaller had 6. In the past this would cause issues, however with 9.2.1 the usual restore issues never happened.

I did everything from the physical console of the destination Untangle server, downloading ung.backup from the current production server to the desktop of the Kiosk user and restoring from the local console browser.

I got a JSON error as the restore process started, left the box alone for a few minutes and the browser bounced to a page cannot be displayed error. A minute or so later I was getting the "service unavailable" message. Sometime afterward I was able to log into the UVM again, and refresh the interfaces. After the refresh I've got connectivity on External and Internal interfaces, and module configurations appear to have come along for the ride.

I'll find out later this week if the transition was fully successful, but the usual UT is useless until I reboot after a restore issue is nicely gone. Interface reconfiguration happened without a reboot between restore and reconfig. I rebooted Untangle after the interface refresh for good measure, but only after verifying Internal and External actually light up. While the JSON error starting the restore is a bit of a mess, the restore process appears to be fully functional and may be workable as a configuration migration between hardware in some cases again.

Both Internal and External are responding to pings for devices configured to communicate with them. So far so good, looks like all that DB work is paying off!

[sky-knight]

Possible bug?

All interfaces DMZ and upward are "static" with no address information defined in the UI. On the command line ifconfig shows eth0 and eth1 and no other interfaces. These interfaces were not configured to do anything on the other server, and are sitting with the default bridge to external configuration.

Reconfiguring each interface to bridge to External to match default Untangle configuration has put each interface back into ifconfig, and built the appropriate br.eth0 interface.

[dmorris]

Backup/Restore has not changed so I doubt anything was fixed.

Those interfaces are unconfigured because they didn't exist in the backup.

[sky-knight]

So a device with 7 interfaces, with DMZ forward configured to bridge to External. That backup, when restored now has "unconfigured" DMZ + interfaces?

I just went through a process in December with a client that had a static DMZ that didn't come along for the ride. This warrants more testing I think...

[dmorris]

So a device with 7 interfaces, with DMZ forward configured to bridge to External. That backup, when restored now has "unconfigured" DMZ + interfaces?

But you restored on a different device. Did you move those 7 NICs over to the new device?

[sky-knight]

Virtual interface configuration is not Physical interface configuration.

I have a backup that lists DMZ, Eth3, eth4, and eth5 as virtual interfaces, bridged to external. But upon restore, that configuration is lost.

This is something Untangle really needs to work on. Internal, External, DMZ, Interface 4, Interface 5 etc are virtual interfaces. They have IP configurations and settings associated with them that do stuff.

The virtual interface to physical interface map determines what physical interface actually gets those configuration details. If Untangle didn't "restore" over the top of an existing server's physical interfaces, and instead simply assigned the configuration of the virtual interfaces to the interfaces in the box in question, I think we'd be a long way toward having a platform agnostic backup / restore process that would allow customers to recover from hardware failure, as well as migrate to new hardware more efficiently.

I admit what I'm doing here isn't "supported". And I'm going to have to setup a VM later and backup the device, pave it, and restore it and see if things move.

[dmorris]

The interface configuration is linked to the MAC address.
If the NIC does not exist on the restore machine the configuration for that NIC will not be restored.

[sky-knight]

Then why was Internal and External restored?

And that MAC address link shouldn't exist. Restore External's configuration to external, internal to internal, etc. What physical interface those virtual interfaces are attached to is irrelevant.

[dmorris]

I agree, but I'm telling you how it works not how I wish it worked.

I could tell you the latter, but it won't help.

[sky-knight]

That's ok, something is still "different" here because the last series of attempts I've thrown at this had the restore process basically hanging up the server until I reset it.

In the end the restore "worked" but this go around it went very smoothly. At least comparative to before.

I do find it fascinating however that the restore process isn't supposed to restore any NICs configurations that aren't listed via MAC in the backup, yet in every case I've done this Internal and External are restored. It's DMZ and up that manage to vanish. From what you're saying none of the networking features should be restored, at least in terms of the NIC configurations themselves.