Truncated configuration files in IMC

[TomCorder]

Hi,

I have IMC 5.1 E0202 up and running on a 64-bit Win 2008 R2 server but have today noticed that all of the larger backed-up configuration files for our network devices (typically ProCurve 2610s) are being truncated at 4K (4096 bytes).  The backup task producing these partial configs is reporting success.

I have searched the boards and can see no mention of this problem; can anyone shed any light and/or suggest a solution?

Thank you, Tom.

[LindsayHill]

This sounds vaguely familiar. What backup method are you using? TFTP/FTP/CLI/SFTP ?

[TomCorder]

Thanks for the reply.  We are using SFTP.

[LindsayHill · Accepted solution]

I think there's a bug with certain firmware versions that stops scp/sftp file transfer working properly. To test this out, can you try doing a manual sftp with a switch that is failing in IMC?

This will verify if it's an IMC problem, or a switch problem. 

For the 2910al, there's this bug fixed in 14.49:

* File Transfer (PR_0000057021)—A remote client is unable to copy the switch's config file via SCP or SFTP. 

I think that's the relevant bug.

If you can't manually transfer the file via SFTP, then you'll need to see if there's any updated firmware that resolves the problem. Otherwise we could try changing the file transfer mode to something like TFTP, which will make IMC fall back to using the CLI (since it shouldn't do a TFTP backup if you've got SSH as the login mode).

[TomCorder]

OK, I have used psftp to manually download the /cfg/config1 file and the same truncation occurs.  There is a firmware update available for the 2610 (11.98 over the currently installed 11.72) but, unfortunately, I will have to schedule some downtime to get that installed.

Is switching to CLI access straightforward in the meantime?

[TomCorder]

Update: I managed to negotiate a downtime with the few staff on one little-used 2610 switch and have upgraded it to 11.98.  I am not sure if it was expected but the process wiped the running config which, as I had no complete backup in IMC (!), I had to rebuild from various sources...  Anyway, the upgrade appears to have fixed the underlying problem as I can now make a complete manual backup using psftp.  I will now check that I can get IMC to do the same.

Thank you!

Tom.

[LindsayHill]

Good to hear that the firmware upgrade fixes it - but it seems odd that you lost your config.  That shouldn't normally happen during an upgrade.

To make the backups use CLI rather than SFTP, try setting the file transfer mode for those devices to say TFTP. Since you're using a Login Type of SSH, IMC will say "Hey, I can't use an insecure method, so I'll just fall back to using SSH + CLI".