Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

CrashPlan for Home v4.5.2 – not backed up

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As you can imagine there are a large number of computers in my house and like most households we’ve had more than our fair share of hard drive failures so backing up our files (and pictures) has become an important task. About 18 months ago I setup CrashPlan (now called CrashPlan for Home) to backup my desktop computer and my wife’s to a third hard drive connected to my primary desktop. It’s been working great for the past 18 months or so until this morning when I received two emails from Code42, the makers of CrashPlan, advising that neither computer had been backed up in 3 days. I restarted both computers and found that CrashPlan had lost my user credentials on my primary desktop the destination device. I provided my credentials to the CrashPlan application but then I was left with a “waiting for network connection” error on both the source and destination computers. I launched the CrashPlan application on the source and found two destinations with the same computer name, one marked green (online) and one marked grey (offline). I had to select the computer marked green to get the backups to start running. I then had to deactivate the offline computer to remove it from the list.

There was an upgrade back on January 12, 2016 to v4.5.2 for CrashPlan for Home. I’m guessing that something went wrong in that update. I can’t really complain though since I’m essentially using the service for free since I’m not backing up to the cloud and it’s been working fairly well for the past 18 months.

What are you doing to backup your files on your home desktop/laptop?

Cheers!

ASCII Configuration Generator (ACG) for Nortel Switches

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I wrote a Perl script a long time ago to backup the binary configuration files for all our Nortel Ethernet and Ethernet Routing Switches (including BayStack 350 and 450s, Ethernet Switch 460 and 470s, Ethernet Routing Switch 4500s and Ethernet Routing Switch 5500s, Ethernet Routing Switch 1600 and 8600s along with Motoroal WS5100 and RFS7000s and HP GbE2s). The Perl script was very simple and straightforward. The problem was that the Nortel configuraiton files were binary files that we as engineers were unable to review or analyze. There were no tools (at least not that I’m aware of) that could allow us to review those configurations. If we had a question about the configuration stored in the binary file we had to restore the configuration to a mock up switch(s) in our testlab in order to be able to review the actually configuration. It seems that Nortel finally heard our cries for help and added a new feature in v3.7.x (ES460/ES470) and v5.1.x (ERS5500) software that would allow us to TFTP upload the ASCII configuration from the ACG.

There was one problem though… the SNMP OID has yet to be documented in the Nortel SNMP MIBS. I had to run a packet trace against Nortel’s Device Manager to determine the OID that Device Manager was using to initiate the manual config upload. I found that the OID was ”
1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0″

I took my existing script and created a new subroutine and had everything working within about 30 minutes.

Here’s some of the code I wrote;

############################################################################
# Subroutine baystack_tftp_config_ascii
#
# Purpose: use SNMP to instruct BayStack switches to TFTP upload their
# ASCII configuration file to the central TFTP server
############################################################################
sub baystack_tftp_config_ascii {

#s5AgSysTftpServerAddress
#s5AgSysAsciiConfigFilename
#s5AgSysAsciiConfigManualUpload (NOT IN THE MIBS) USE 1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0
# snmpset -v2c -cprivate 10.1.1.100 1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0 i 4

   # Declare Local Variables
   my $setresult;

   $filename = "ascii/".$filename;

   my $sess = new SNMP::Session (  DestHost  => $snmphost,
                                   Community => $community,
                                   Version   => SNMPVER );

   my $vars = new SNMP::VarList(
                        ['s5AgSysTftpServerAddress', 0, "10.1.1.20",],
                        ['s5AgSysAsciiConfigFilename', 0, $filename,] );

   my $go = new SNMP::VarList(
                        ['.1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19', 0, 4, 'INTEGER'] );

   &check_filename($filename);

   # Set TFTP source and destination strings
   $setresult = $sess->set($vars);
   if ( $sess->{ErrorStr} ) {
      print "ERROR: {BayStack} problem setting the TFTP parameters (TFTP IP, FILENAME) for $snmphost\n";
      print "ERROR: {BayStack} sess->{ErrorStr} = $sess->{ErrorStr}\n";
   }

   # Start TFTP copy
   $setresult = $sess->set($go);
   if ( $sess->{ErrorStr} ) {
      print "ERROR: {BayStack} problem setting the TFTP action bit for $snmphost\n";
      print "ERROR: {BayStack} sess->{ErrorStr} = $sess->{ErrorStr}\n";
   }

   # Pause while the TFTP copy completes
   sleep $PAUSE;

   # Check to see if the TFTP copy completed
   $setresult = $sess->get('.1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0');
   if ( $sess->{ErrorStr} ) {
      print "ERROR: problem checking the TFTP result for $snmphost\n";
      print "ERROR: sess->{ErrorStr} = $sess->{ErrorStr}\n";
   }

   # If TFTP failed output error message
   if ($setresult != 1) {
        while ($setresult == 2) {
           print "DEBUG: config upload status = $setresult (waiting)\n" if (DEBUG);
           sleep $PAUSE;
           $setresult = $sess->get('.1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0');
        } #end while
   } #end if $test ne "success"

   # If the upload command failed let's try again
   if ($setresult == 3) {

      print "DEBUG: initial command returned $setresult\n" if (DEBUG);
      print "DEBUG: lets try the upload command again\n" if (DEBUG);

      # Let's pause here for a few seconds since the previous command failed
      sleep $PAUSE;

      # Start TFTP copy
      $setresult = $sess->set($go);
      if ( $sess->{ErrorStr} ) {
         print "ERROR: problem setting the TFTP action bit for $snmphost\n";
         print "ERROR: sess->{ErrorStr} = $sess->{ErrorStr}\n";
      }

      # Pause while the TFTP copy completes
      sleep $PAUSE;

      # Check to see if the TFTP copy completed
      $setresult = $sess->get('.1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0');
         if ( $sess->{ErrorStr} ) {
            print "ERROR: problem checking the TFTP result for $snmphost\n";
            print "ERROR: sess->{ErrorStr} = $sess->{ErrorStr}\n";
      }

      # If TFTP failed output error message
      if ($setresult != 1) {
         while ($setresult == 2) {
            print "DEBUG: config upload status = $setresult (waiting)\n" if (DEBUG);
            sleep $PAUSE;
            $setresult = $sess->get('.1.3.6.1.4.1.45.1.6.4.4.19.0');
         } #end while
      } #end if
   } #end if

   if ($setresult != 1) {
      print "DEBUG: $snmphost config upload *FAILED*!\n";
      print SENDMAIL "ERROR:$snmphost ($sysObjectID) config (ASCII) upload *FAILED*!
\n";
   } elsif ($setresult == 1) {
      print SENDMAIL "$snmphost ($sysObjectID) was successful (ASCII)
\n";
      print "DEBUG: $snmphost ($sysObjectID) was successful (ASCII)\n";
   } else {
      print "DEBUG: unknown error return = $setresult (ASCII)" if (DEBUG);
   } #end if

   print "DEBUG: upload config file results = $setresult (ASCII)\n" if (DEBUG);

   return 1;

} #end sub baystack_tftp_config_ascii

Cheers!
Update: Friday April 10, 2009

I’ve discovered a small issue using the MIB “s5AgSysAsciiConfigFilename”. While the MIB says the value can be between 0..128 characters long I’ve actually found that the value can’t be an longer than 30 characters. If you try to use a filename that is greater than 30 characters you’ll get an SNMP set error. I actually had quite a few switches failing to backup properly because I was prepending “ascii/” to the filename. I tested this with software v3.7.2.x and v3.7.3.x on a Ethernet Switch 470.

s5AgSysAsciiConfigFilename OBJECT-TYPE
        SYNTAX  DisplayString (SIZE (0..128))
        MAX-ACCESS      read-write
        STATUS  current
        DESCRIPTION
                "Name of the ascii configuration file that will be
             downloaded/uploaded either at boot time when the
             s5AgSysAsciiConfigAutoDownload object is set to
             useConfig(3), or when the s5AgSysAsciiConfigDownloadStatus
             object is set to startDownload(4).  When not used, the
             value is a zero length string."
        ::= { s5AgentSystem 6 }

Cheers!

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