[j-nsp] Steel-Belted RADIUS backups

[Dale Shaw]

Hi all,

Does anyone out there use SBR?

We have the Global Enterprise Edition (GEE) version v6.1.7 running on Linux.

I'm putting something in place to back up SBR itself; currently we
just tar up /opt/JNPRsbr/radius (after stopping sbrd) but it's
occurred to me that we have never tested a recovery using this method.

JTAC are telling me there is no automated way to perform the XML
export function normally performed in the GUI. The product docs don't
make it clear whether taking a copy of everything in
/opt/JNPRsbr/radius/ is enough, or whether the XML export is also
required.

Looking at what the supplied install/upgrade scripts do, it's just a
recursive 'cp' with some unnecessary folders excluded.

We also take backups of the VM guest that's running SBR but I'm not
familiar enough with SBR's back-end databases to know whether that
results in a recoverable data set; there'll be open files for sure
(hence the stop;tar;start method described above).

What do you do?  "use FreeRADIUS instead" is a valid but unwelcome response :-))

Cheers,
Dale