Monday, October 13, 2008

Bulk Command Import

Ever had to move a firewall configuration to a different hardware platform with different interface names? Ever had to create a gazillion new objects and paled at the prospect of spending hours in front of the web GUI?

A very handy but somewhat hidden feature to relieve you from your nightmares is the bulk import of CLI commands. Sure, you can copy a text document and paste it into an SSH CLI session. However I have noticed in the past that this does not always work terribly well. A good way to make sure all commands are successfully transferred is the "Import Bulk CLI Commands" menu. You can find it under System -> Maintenance -> Backup & Restore Tab: Advanced. Click on the blue triangle next to "Advanced" to expand the section and make it visible.

  • Prepare a plain text file with all the commands you want to import
  • Below "Import Bulk CLI Commands" click "Browse"
  • Select the text file which contains your firewall commands
  • Click "Import Now"
Et voila, all your commands have been imported assuming of course a properly formatted text file.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this one. Don't know why I didn't think of it before but after reading this post, I used this to script and import a big list of addresses I needed to add to the Firewall. Saved me a bit of time.

-Matt

Sebastian said...

Glad it saved you some time. I had to recently enter 150 objects I received in an Excel file and that made it very speedy indeed :)