Restoring Space 15.2 data to 16.1

The upgrade from Space platform 15.2 to 16.1 is one of the worst procedures I’ve seen in quite a while.   It is complicated because the underlying CentOS is being upgraded at the same time, so I guess that’s part of the reason, but still, it could be a lot slicker and better tested.

In summary, you have to apply a couple of patches, the second of which backs your 15.2 data up somewhere else – ideally over SCP to a remote server.  You then shut down your 15.2 VM, install a fresh 16.1 VM with the same IP addresses, and restore the data to it.

Sounds easy, but the 16.1 installation part can generally only be done by the customer’s VMware admin because it needs console access.  So you’ve got to rely on them following lots of instructions quite well.

JBAS011469 Error in Junos Space

Just went onto a customer’s Junos Space/Security Director installation to discover that their SRX5800 was showing as ‘out of sync’.    I tried to do a ‘Resynchronize with Network’ from the Device Operations menu, but this failed with the following error:

Error while reading config from device: <devicename> javax.persistence. TransactionRequiredException: JBAS011469: Transaction is required to perform this operation (either use a transaction of extended persistence context)

JBAS011469 error in Space 15.2

Unfortunately (like most Space-related errors) there’s nothing about this in Juniper’s knowledgebase – the only hit I found on a Google search was a similar error, but with a different cause that had been fixed.   So I thought I’d put this here in case it helps anyone.  

Setting up vSRX and Space in VMware Fusion

I’m going to be travelling a bit in the near future and wanted an easy, laptop-based Juniper device and Junos Space instance to mess with. I’ve recently made some headway with CLI configlets and wanted to build on what I’ve got working.

I already run VMware Fusion on the Mac in order to run Ubuntu and Windows, so I figured that was the best thing to use. What I wanted was two VMs that could see each other and be accessed from the host machine, but without them being dependent on the host’s interfaces being up. Wifi access would be chargeable, and wired impossible – without making an ethernet loopback plug to bring the Mac’s interface up artifically, that is. So that ruled out both bridged and NAT type connections. What I needed was some kind of internal network within the host – Fusion seems to call this a ‘Private to my Mac’ connection.

Junos Space Log Collector – Utilities

The Juniper documentation on log collector is a bit sparse to be honest, and once it is installed, SSHing to it doesn’t seem to produce a configuration menu any more.  In order to change its config, there are some scripts, but I had to dig around for them:

Forgotten ‘maintenance’ password for Junos Space

The maintenance users password can be reset in Junos Space if you still have access via the CLI:

• SSH to the Space host
• Log in as the admin user
• Choose the debug option on the menu (6 or 7, depending on whether this is a VM or an appliance).  Just press the number, not the number followed by return!
• Put in the admin user’s password again.  You’re now in the Centos shell.
• Issue the command ‘htpasswd -sb /var/www/maintenance/maintPW maintenance <newpassword>‘

 

Simple as that…   I was never sure why an additional maintenance password was required as well as the admin user and the GUI super user password.  Makes it a pain to keep a record of, but there you go – presumably there’s a good reason.