Welcome to the extraxi blog...

If you found this page accidentally and don't know what extraxi is about... we specialise in reporting solutions for the Cisco Secure ACS and Funk SBR access control servers (aka AAA servers).

The servers are predominantly used to secure network services such as dial, wireless lan, vpn, firewall and network device management.

Typically these servers just chuck out MBs of raw CSV log data about network activity. What we do is to help collect this data then import and turn it into useable information.

Friday 23 April 2010

Using aaa-reports! enterprise database snaphots

One of the great features added to enterprise v1.1 was the ability to create snapshots of the back-end databases. With automation its possible to, say quarterly or bi-annually, to create a copy of the aaa-reports! database for future use.
At some later point in time - perhaps even two years later, during an audit its easy to re-locate the snapshot and re-connect aaa-reports! giving you all the data that was present on the day the snapshot was created.
To script the creation of a snapshot simply add this command to a .bat or .cmd file executed by the windows task manager:
RunAAARE /CreateSnapshot(MY_SNAPSHOT)
To connect to specific snapshot, start aaa-reports! and enable the "multi-db" feature under options. Re-start and you will be presented with the database manager which allows you to choose which backend database you want to connect to, for example a snapshot or the DEFAULT live database.
Enjoy.

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