While documentation for how to write an adapter is still being worked on, it should be pretty simple to write an adapter that uses SSH to connect to your Linux box and copy and backup configuration files. Is that what you were looking to do? A device adapter can execute any command you could do through a normal command line.

I'd be curious to know what you would actually like the device adapter to do, and we can use that as a stepping stone to figure out an adapter that would suit your needs.

Are you curious about writing an adapter, or would you like one to be developed? If you are interested, here is a link to our device adapter documentation: How to Write a Device Adapter.

The documentation is a work in progress, but I'd appreciate any feedback you have.

While documentation for how to write an adapter is still being worked on, it should be pretty simple to write an adapter that uses SSH to connect to your Linux box and copy and backup configuration files. Is that what you were looking to do? A device adapter can execute any command you could do through a normal command line.blockquote>

Yes, this is what I was hoping to do. This linux box is nothing more than router/gateway. Something that gathered the O/S info, IP & ethernet configuration and info, and the info from iptables would be a good start.

That should be something to could be written fairly easily. Since documentation is still being worked on, I understand that outsiders might not have the slightest idea of how to write a device adapter, but this is being worked on. I will see what the ZipTie team can do to pump something out that will allow you to backup what you said.

On a high level, a device adapter allows for ZipTie to interact with a device based on the commands and interactions specified in an XML file. Once the device adapter interacts with a device, it stores whatever information it received from its interaction with the device into a file that is then parsed by Perl. We leverage Perl to parse whatever data we care about that was gathered by the device adapter. This is how we grab the configuration data as well as important device attributes.

I hope to get a basic template up of a device adapter that would be relatively easy to modify and do some copy/paste to add any other commands you want to execute. After that comes the Perl part, but I don't know if you are interested in going the distance in writing a device adapter.

I see this post is fairly old now but I just wrote my first adapter last night to back up my Linksys WRT54* routers running OpenWrt (Linux). It basically saves the nvram and select /etc/* files. It's not all that difficult if you are somewhat familiar with Perl and follow that Video Tutorial along with the Wiki information. I could use more practice with this but do you have an idea of what exact you would want to back up on the Linux boxes? I think it would be good for backing up select configuration files, or maybe even a tarball of /etc, etc. The F5 bigip adapter also would be along the similar lines since the F5 is a Linux based appliance.

I see someone must have tried the adapter and gave it 1 star which is completely understandable. I would like to improve it so it would be more useful to someone (including me). Please post suggestions on what you believe the adapter should do. OpenWrt is so customizable it's might be tricky to do a one size fits all. I am actually thinking rather than backing up the config files it might be better to just save the entire firmware/filesystem. We're only talking a couple of meg. Also, since SNMP isn't installed by default I probably shouldn't count on it being there. Anyway, let me know what I need to do to get this baby up to 2 stars!

I updated the OpenWrt adapter to save nvram and create a backup.tgz of /etc and /www. Removed requirement to have SNMP installed. Should now work with a base system with SSH enabled. Let me know if anyone needs enhancements. I will probably fill in some more of the model blanks in the near future (memory, etc).