Cisco Config Archiving

Not everyone can afford to install and maintain a massive change management database application for their IT infrastructure.  Thankfully at least on Cisco IOS devices it is quite simple to setup a reliable way to archive the devices' configurations.  For those of you that maybe aren't sure why this is important, let me give a few examples of when it could be very useful.

1. Device Failure:  Imagine that your core switch or router fails hard and you have to put in a replacement.  Think about how long it would take to configure the new device from scratch and how error prone the process would be.  Instead you could just slap the configuration that was archived from the old device on the new device and be back in business in a few minutes (not including the time to get the spare in place physically).
2. Change:  So what happens when the network goes down or has a problem?  The first question is usually "What changed?".  Your configuration archive along with some tools like diff or the built in IOS archive compare can tell you what has changed on a device.  
3. Auditing:  Many companies are subject to legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA.  Tools are available to perform audits on IOS configs to ensure compliance.  With an archive you can run these tools against the directory of text files quickly without having to allow the scripts access to the live device.

Ok so now that you know WHY you want configuration archiving, let's look at how to configure it.  The first step is that the device must be running an IOS version that supports the command.  In router IOS it was introduced in 12.3, in switches it has been back ported to 12.2.  

Assuming that the device now supports the archive commands, setting up archiving is fairly straight forward.

router# config t
router(config)# archive
router(config-archive)# path tftp://tftpserver.example.com/$h.cfg
router(config-archive)# write-memory
router(config-archive)# time-period 360
router(config-archive)# end
router# copy run start

The first command is simply archive which puts you into config-archive mode.  Next we set the path to where we want the archived configurations to be stored.  In this case we're putting it onto a TFTP server.  Because I like to have template configurations that I can easily paste into a device I used $h to have the router put the host name automatically into the path statement.  The next statement write-memory tells the device to archive the configuration every time someone does a copy run start or wr mem.  Finally time-period tells the router the amount of time in minutes between archives.  In this case the router would archive the configuration every 6 hours.


As configured above, the router would put a new file into the TFTP server every 6 hours forever or until the TFTP server ran out of space.  Thankfully for some URL types like SCP and FTP, IOS will manage the number of archived configurations for you.  With those types of URLs you can specify maximum <number> in the config-archive mode to tell IOS how many backup copies to keep.  When it hits the maximum it will overwrite the oldest file the next time it archives the configuration.


In my next post I will look at the tools within IOS for using archived configurations to find differences and to rollback to old configurations.