Backup of Appliances: Login and Download

February 5, 2008

I have sometimes the problem that I want to backup a device which has only a web interface (e.g. an appliance). Most of them provide a possibility for this, after a successful login you need only to click in the browser onto the backup link/button to get a file with the backup. So why I’m writing a whole post about this topic?

It is because I don’t want to do it by myself, I want it automatically done every night – now it is not that trivial anymore. Why should I want a backup every night? You say, I just could make a backup every time I change something. I don’t think that this is a good idea, beside that I’m too lazy for this.

I use normally cURL for this task, which I will illustrate with a backup script for a Vlines appliance (an Asterisk server appliance). Take a look at the source:


#!/bin/bash
url=https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
cookieFile=/tmp/vlines_cookie.jar
configFile=accessvoip.vlines
#-----------
curl -d "username=XXX&passwort=XXXX" -c $cookieFile $url/index.php
curl -s -S -b $cookieFile $url/save.php > $configFile
curl -s -S -b $cookieFile $url/logout.php
rm $cookieFile


As you see, it is really easy. cURL has the ability to store cookies which is used by this appliance to store a user session and the login credentials are provided as parameters to the server. After a successful login we just want to get the backup file and log out.

As you see I use a fixed filename for storage – this is because this script is called by rsnapshot which does compare the output of the script with the last run and provides hardlink based snapshots. rsnapshot also sends me a mail if anything within the script provided an output (= indicating an error).

This script should be easily adapted to your device/appliance like access point, router, environment monitor, …. have fund and be secure.

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Δ

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>