Today we submitted a pull-request for our first public OPNsense plugin, Configuration Sync for OPNsense using S3 compatible storage.

Configuration Sync is a tool designed to one-way synchronize the config.xml system configuration files from the OPNsense host to S3 compatible object data storage in close to real time. While the tool has the side-effect of being a great configuration backup tool the intent is to provide a tool that stores the OPNsense system configuration in a location that is readily addressable using DevOps automation tools such as through Terraform and others.

Features

  • Straight-forward setup and configuration that should be easily understood by anyone familiar with S3 compatible providers.
  • Configurable duty cycle to detect changes using a low system impact recursive hash mechanism to ensure new configuration files are sync’d out to the S3 location with limited delay.
  • All configuration backup files and the current configuration are sync’d to the S3 storage location.
  • S3 object metadata tagging with extra information to ensure your OPNsense configuration files are easily identified, fields include mtime, bytes, md5, system hostid and hostname.
  • Configuration parameter test allowing you confirm your credentials are valid before saving and comitting.
  • Plenty of logging to help you understand what is happening.

Use cases

  • Cloud compute environments where instances can be destroyed withoutwarning. Because the last running config.xml can be collected from a known S3 location it becomes possible to respawn the OPNsense instance with the last known configuration using automation tools such as Terraform and others.
  • Configuarion Sync has the side effect of being a very useful configuration backup tool, when combined with S3 storage features such as storage-encryption, access-permissions and access-logging and audit your OPNsense configurations should be well protected.

Limitations

  • Currently the only S3 storage provider supported is AWS, the underlying boto3 library can support others and this is being worked on.
  • Restoring an OPNsense instance may require more than just the last config.xml configuration file, currently there are no known ways to automatically cause required plugins and packages to be downloaded and applied from a base OPNsense image, however this limitation is being worked on as part of another plugin.

Screen shots

opnsense-plugin-configsync-01 opnsense-plugin-configsync-02 opnsense-plugin-configsync-03

Pre release binaries

We’ve packaged the plugin so you can go ahead and try it out before it is accepted by the OPNsense team for inclusion as a regular plugin. All the usual pre-release warnings apply here, however if you know how to to manually install a package you can find them here.

If you do happen to spot a bug or issue, we’d really like to hear about it, please submit as an issue here.

Code repo

Check out code github.com/verbnetworks/opnsense-plugin-configsync