Database Revisions

The Security Management architecture has built-in revisions. Each publish operation creates a new revision which contains only the changes from the previous revisions.

Benefits of the revision architecture:

  • Safe recovery from a crisis, restoring a database to a good known revision.

  • Fast policy verification, based on the differences between installed versions

  • More efficient Management High Availability.

Important - Before using the revision feature consider these limitations:

Best Practices:

  1. We recommend to update the IPS and Application Control signatures and install the policy after the revert. Install policy if changes to log destinations are applied.

  2. If you need a full environment restore to a certain point in time, use Restore Backup. All work done after the backup is lost. To learn more, see the: R81.10 Gaia Administration Guide

  3. We recommend to purge irrelevant revisions. Accumulating too many revisions can create a heavy load on the server, which may cause disk and performance issues.

To see saved database versions:

In SmartConsole, go to Manage & Settings > Sessions > Revisions.

To open a specific revision:

  1. Go to Manage & Settings > Sessions > Revisions, and select a revision.

    The bottom pane shows the audit logs of the changes made in the revision.

  2. Optional: Click View.

    A separate read-only SmartConsole session opens.

To compare between two revisions:

  1. In SmartConsole, go to Manage & Settings > Sessions > Revisions.

  2. Select a revision.

  3. In the toolbar, click Changes.

  4. Select the revision to compare to:

    • The current revision

      Or

    • A previous revision in the list. If you select this option, select the applicable revision from the list.

    A changes report is generated. The report shows a comparison between the two selected revisions.

To revert to an earlier revision

  1. Go to Manage & Settings > Sessions > Revisions, and select a revision.

  2. In Actions, click Revert to this Revision.

    The Revert to Revision wizard opens.

To delete all versions of the database that are older than the selected version:

  1. Go to Manage & Settings > Sessions > Revisions, and select a revision.

  2. In Actions, click Purge.

  3. In the confirmation window that opens, click Yes.

Important - Purge is irreversible. When you purge, that revision and older revisions are deleted.

Notes:

  • When connected with SmartConsole to a Security Management Server, sessions that were published through the Management API in the system Domain are not shown in the Revisions view.

  • When connecting with the Management API to the Domain of a Security Management Server and running the show sessions API command with view-published-sessions set to true, sessions that were published through SmartConsole are not returned, even if they include changes in the system Domain.