ZipTie Nipper Integration

What is Nipper ?

Nipper stands for "Network Infrastructure Parser" and performs security audits of network device configuration files. Nipper is an open-source tool that is developed under GNU Public License (GPL). The report produced by Nipper includes detailed security-related issues with recommendations, a configuration report and various appendices that contain information about abbreviations, logging levels, timezones, etc.

More information about Nipper can be found at Titania and Sourceforge.

How is it relevant to ZipTie ?

The ZipTie-Nipper integration - from now on referred to as Zipper - allows an user to run Nipper against the configurations that ZipTie has backed up. All the user has to do is "right-click" on the device, select the "Nipper" option, and voila : A Nipper Report is generated for the device's configuration. Now the user can inspect Nipper's security audit and make appropriate changes to the device using ZipTie to remediate any issues that Nipper might have reported (see screenshot below).

Since ZipTie supports all the devices that Nipper supports, you pretty much have all the functionality of Nipper through ZipTie.

Deploying the Nipper plugin

For 2007.09b

• Stop/shutdown/close the ZipTie client
• Download and unzip the Zipper crate (see below) into the installation folder of the client. (e.g. c:\work\ziptie-client\).
• nipper-plugin.zip: Zip file containing the Zipper plugin and crate file (only for 2007.12).

Caveats

• Zipper is supported only Windows even though Nipper (and ZipTie) can run on multiple platforms. Zipper will be extended to support other platforms as time permits.
• Zipper supports report generation only in html format (even though Nipper supports other formats)
• Zipper currently has problem generating reports on CatOS switches (being investigated)
• Zipper is not available out-of-the-box with ZipTie because of licensing issues (ZipTie uses MPL, and Nipper uses GPL).

Resources

Got a question, bug, or enhancement about Zipper ? Please use the following resources to get your thoughts across to us :

• Bugs and enhancements - please use the ZipTie Bugzilla.
• Can't get Zipper to work or general questions - please use the ZipTie Forums and/or the IRC Channel

The source for Zipper can be obtained by following the instructions on our developer wiki to checkout ZipTie's soure code (the project name is org.ziptie.ui.nipper).