[rancid] Restore a Palo Alto Firewall from a Rancid bacup

[Erik Muller]

On 7/19/19 22:32 , john heasley wrote:
> Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 10:30:42PM +0000, Gauthier, Chris:
>> The only way in CLI to do a "show run" type of output in XML format is to execute the following commands.  This holds true for both Panorama and Pan-OS (not managed by Panorama):
>>
>> User at Palo-Alto-FW> set cli config-output-format xml
>> User at Palo-Alto-FW> configure
>> Entering configuration mode
>> [edit]
>> User at Palo-Alto-FW# show
>> <response status="success" code="19">
>>    <result total-count="1" count="1">
>>      <device-group>
>> ****Truncated to hide my config****
>>
>> --Chris
> 
> I am confused; please help me understand so that we wrap-up this issue.
> 
> There are two configs, the normal one in show config run, and one that
> comes from panorama config (if in use) that is visible on the "panorama
> clients" (my term) with show config merged.

Correct.  Each PANOS device that's managed via Panorama has a local 
persistent configuration that includes device-specific things like local 
management address, HA-pair, user accounts...
Panorama stores in it's config a bunch of rulesets and templates that can 
be applied to the managed devices; when it pushes those to a managed device 
they're merged at runtime into that device's live config, but not part of 
that box's actual local config.

> the panorama (master) offers a cli, just like a panorama client, where
> the panorama configuration can be viewed with 'show config run'.
> 
> these configs can be dumped as xml or text.  only xml can be loaded.
> 
> Do i have all of this correct?  I did not glean much useful info from the
> palo alto website.

all correct, TTBOMK.
-e

> thanks
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Rancid-discuss <rancid-discuss-bounces at shrubbery.net> on behalf of john heasley <heas at shrubbery.net>
>> Date: Monday, July 15, 2019 at 3:00 PM
>> To: Erik Muller <erikm at buh.org>
>> Cc: "rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net" <rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net>
>> Subject: Re: [rancid] Restore a Palo Alto Firewall from a Rancid bacup
>>
>> Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 09:18:34PM +0200, Erik Muller:
>>> On 7/12/19 14:15 , Gauthier, Chris wrote:
>>>> Rancid configs for PAN can NOT be used to restore the config, unless you
>>>> cut and paste the configuration. This is because the native config files
>>>> are stored in XML format and that is the format the Palo Alto utilities
>>>> expect when performing restorations.
>>>
>>> Having recently needed to deal with a bunch of PAs, I ran into that same
>>> issue and ended up writing a tool (https://github.com/ermuller/bracematch)
>>> to simplify the process.
>>>
>>> RE the other question about Panorama vs device configs, if you're backing
>>> up your Panorama configuration (which has been fine via Rancid in my
>>
>> How are you backing the Panorama configuration?  is that just another
>> rancid 'paloalto' target?
>>
>>> experience) as well as the base config on the device, you don't need to
>>> backup the merged configuration.  And you probably shouldn't pull the
>>> merged config, for restore purposes, as anything other than the local
>>> device configuration will come from the Panorama templates once the device
>>> is replaced.  Of course, the merged config might still be convenient to
>>> save to easily see the complete policy set active on a given box.
>>>
>>> -e
>