Publish a PolicyCenter Configuration

Publish a Unit Configuration to its Group

The publish function allows a unit to transfer its merged local and shared configuration to the unit's own group. When a unit configured for PolicyCenter access publishes its configuration to its group, the new group configuration will contain both the unit's local settings and any settings and attributes it previously inherited from its shared group configuration. (If you wish to transfer a unit's local configuration only, you should copy the configuration, not publish it.)

To publish a unit configuration to its group:

1. From the configurations, monitor, setup or info tabs, select the group where the unit resides from the Group: drop-down list.
   
   
2. Select the unit from the Unit: drop-down list.  show screen
   
   
3. Click publish. When you publish the unit configuration to a group, you are given the option to first back up the current group configuration so that it won't be lost.

In the figure shown above in step two, the configuration on the unit winsor_sales is published to the group the unit resides in. The unit winsor_sales then clears its own local configuration, so like all other units in the group, its entire sharable configuration is inherited from the group configuration.

Why does the publish function clear the unit's local configuration? Simply put, the publish function clears the publishing unit's local configuration so the unit can inherit its configuration from its group. Because local settings always override group settings, if the publish function did not clear the unit's local configuration, its local settings would completely supersede the shared configuration. As a result, the unit would not be able to be managed from its PolicyCenter group.

When a unit configuration is published to its group, the following changes take place on all the other units in the group:

• All existing local configuration settings remain the same on the other units. As always, if units have both local traffic classes and group traffic classes with the same name, the units will retain their local values.
  
  
• Classes and shared attributes that only existed on the published unit's configuration now appear on all units in the group.
  
  
• If the new group configuration has classes with the same name as local auto-discovered classes on a unit, the group configuration classes will take precedence.

See also: Sharing Configurations between Packeteer Devices for more information and strategies on using the publish function to create a group configuration.

Publish an Individual Traffic Class from a Unit to its Group

To publish a local class (with all of its policies, etc.) from a unit, the unit must be configured for PolicyCenter access.

Notes: A unit can only publish to the group that it belongs to, and only local or overridden classes can be individually published to a group.

To publish a class from a unit:

1. Click the manage tab in PolicyCenter.
   
   
2. Select the unit with the Group: and Unit: drop-down lists.  Show screen
   
   
3. Select a traffic class in the left window pane. The Class button will appear at the top of the right window. Click the Class button to open the Class drop-down box.
   
   
4. Select publish from the drop-down box.  show screen
   

The class is published to the unit's PolicyCenter Group configuration and is immediately shared by all configured units in this group (including the one that published the class).  The published traffic class will now appear in blue on each unit's class tree.

If you didn't want this class in one of the units, you cannot delete it from within that unit; you can only override shared classes. If you change a shared class on a unit, a local version of the class is created and takes precedence. The original published (blue) class is then "hidden" behind the local version.  If you remove the local override from this class, the shared class will reappear.

Note: If a unit has host accounting enabled with categories assigned to its local classes, publishing that unit's configuration to a PolicyCenter group configuration will delete and then recreate the group's host accounting data files. As a result, other units in the group may lose some of their previous host accounting data.

See also: PolicyCenter Configuration Management for additional information on shared and local traffic classes,