McAfee Firewall Backup Script- Free Tool to Restore Firewall Configuration

McAfee / Secure Computing Firewall (Sidewinder) Backup Script (MFBS) enables you to quickly create a script that can be used to restore your firewall configuration. Older SecureOS versions enabled you to backup the configuration to an XML file, however recent versions create encrypted archives. This prevents you from manually modifying, scripting changes or any other analysis.

To download this free tool go to www.titania-security.com/labs/mfbs

Requirements

All you need is the ability to copy files to and from your firewall, plus the ability to run scripts. There are multiple ways that you can do this, but you could use the edit file facility in the management software.

Running

Download and transfer the script to your firewall and then logon to the command line interface. You can execute the script using the following commands:

• srole (to perform administration tasks)
• ./mcafee-backup-v1.3.script (to execute the script)

You then simply transfer the "firewall.config" file to a secure location, this is your backup. It is worth noting that the system will replace some passwords during this, so you may want to edit those specific lines.

License

Copyright Titania Ltd 2009. You are free to copy and distribute this script. If you make modifications to the script, these must be sent back to Titania for integration and potentially made available within future publicly available releases.

To download this tool for free go to www.titania-security.com/labs/mfbs

Extracting Config Files from McAfee Enterprise Firewalls & Secure Computing Firewalls (SecureOS 7+)

The configuration file provided by these versions of the operating system are now encrypted and therefore no longer usable by Nipper Studio. However, there is an alternative method of extracting the configuration which is still fairly simple but involves command line access to the device.

To obtain this configuration you will need the "McAfee Firewall Backup Script" provided on the Titania Labs section of the Titania web site (www.titania-security.com). Download this script to your local computer and then follow the instructions below.

1. Log into the device using the graphical administration tool.
2. Using the file editor tool provided in the administration interface, open the "McAfee Firewall Backup Script" that you downloaded to your local computer.
3. Save the file to the firewall itself.
4. Open a SSH session to the firewall. You can use Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) to do this on Windows or the SSH command line tool under GNU/Linux or Mac OS-X. For Windows run Putty, then enter the IP address of the server and connect to the device. Under the other platforms use "ssh -l <firewall-user-name> <ip-address>".
5. Enter the privileged mode by entering the command "srole".
6. Execute the script using the command "sh <path-to-script>/mcafee-backup-v1.1.script", which will then generate the file "firewall.backup".
7. Transfer the "firewall.backup" file back to your PC for use with Nipper Studio. You can do this using the text editor and is probably located in the "/home/<your-user-name>" directory.