Automatic backup of Netscreen configuration

I spent some time earlier automating the backups of our appliance configuration to a restricted network share and thought I’d share a simple batch script to backup the configuration from multiple Juniper Netscreen (ScreenOS) firewalls.

@echo off
REM ================================================================
REM CONFIGURATION INFO
REM ================================================================
set USERNAME=backupAccount
set PASSWORD=superSecretPassword
set CFGFILE=BackupList.txt
set DESTDIR=C:\Backups\

REM ================================================================
REM STOP CHANGING HERE OR YOU'LL BREAK SOMETHING
REM ================================================================
SET TIMESTAMP=%date:~-4,4%.%date:~-7,2%.%date:~-10,2%
for /F "tokens=1,2 delims=," %%A in (%CFGFILE%) do (
	IF NOT EXIST "%DESTDIR%%TIMESTAMP%" mkdir "%DESTDIR%%TIMESTAMP%"
	pscp -q -scp -pw %PASSWORD% %USERNAME%@%%B:ns_sys_config "%DESTDIR%%TIMESTAMP%\%%A.cfg"
)

The above will read the details of the firewalls from a CSV file (BackupList.txt) in hostname,ip address format. PSCP is then used to SCP the configuration from the firewall to the location specified in DESTDIR.

You’ll need to make sure SSH + SCP is enabled on your firewalls and that pscp is in the same directory as the script. You can find the latest version of Putty and PSCP here.