Netonix FULL backup

General discussion of anything Unimus
Post Reply
User avatar
lweidig
Posts: 31
Joined: Fri Jan 12, 2018 4:43 pm

Mon Jan 22, 2018 5:50 pm

I have read the other posts regarding this and feel that the backup being made currently is not really in usable format. Why not just have the Unimus server perform the needed steps automatically so that you can download a working .ncfg file and then place it on the server? My guess is that when it is needed for restoring you are not at a time when you want to be messing around what the correct format is, you just want something that can be restored.

Also, you are not really backing up this system as there are a number of other files that are being missed. A complete .ncfg file has the following structure (at least for 1.4.9):

Code: Select all

www
  - config.json         (this is what you backup)
etc
  - dropbear
    - dropbear_rsa_host_key
    - dropbear_dss_host_key
    - authorized_keys
  -  config
    - lighttpd.pem
  - passwd
  - lighttpd.htpasswd
There manager application is successfully grabbing this as a Node.js application, so there definitely should be ways of easily getting this into here as of course we want all configuration management in a single location and not spread over TONS of applications. For "inspiration" you might want to look at the code for the manager app:
http://forum.netonix.com/netonix-manager/

Also appears there is a basic API that could likely get the desired file as well, see:
https://forum.netonix.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1726

Thanks as always!
User avatar
Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:04 pm

Hi,

This is a bit more far-reaching problem than just Netonix.
Currently, all platforms that require multiple config files packed into a binary as a backup need to be handled a bit better.
(Netonix, IgniteNet MetroLinq, etc.)

Basically, we really want to still have the text config in Unimus (which is the config.json for Netonix).
This is so you can do diffs, you can use "Config search", etc.
Also into the future, we are planning a feature when if a config is changed on a device, you get a notification.

Without having text configs, none of these features would work (since those can't really be done on a binary).
So if we only took the binary files, those features of Unimus would be useless for such vendors.

At the same time, like you say, we want to also keep the binary config file, so users can easily recover the devices.

We already have tickets for this:
https://tracker.unimus.net/browse/UN-235
https://tracker.unimus.net/browse/UN-238
https://tracker.unimus.net/browse/UN-281

So in the future, for vendors like Netonix, Unimus will take both text and binary backup.
(so all Unimus features are still useful, but user can also easily recover such devices)

As you can imagine, this will take some implementation time.

I would estimate the things described in the tickets should be ready by the end of Q3 this year.
At that point, support for vendors like Netonix will improve :)
User avatar
lweidig
Posts: 31
Joined: Fri Jan 12, 2018 4:43 pm

Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:47 pm

Thanks for the quick response and links to the ticketing system items. I completely agree that BOTH the text and binary configurations need to be managed for all of the reasons given and look forward to the enhancements in the future to support this.
Post Reply