Automate USB Defender local policy text file

michoudi

KB article 2689 describes a method of maintaining our USB policy when agents are unable to communicate with our Manager appliance. We have User Defined Groups (UDG) with hundreds of USB Device IDs. Is anyone familiar with a way to automate or push the UDG data to the USB Defender Local Policy on an agent?

Also, when attempting to export my existing UDGs from the web based console, nothing happens. I can only export the UDG data from the desktop console application. Even then, the format of the exported data looks like it will be a very tedious process to convert to a format usable with the USB Defender Local Policy.

Help.

FormerMember

Hmm.... excellent puzzle.

The UDGs are stored on the appliance in human-readable (well, parseable, it's XML) format, but all data is transmitted to the appliance in binary machine object form. What gets exported is this "native" format that the console uses to render directly into a UDG. This sucks, because you can't modify it - either for exporting or for importing.  This is something we're aware of and will fix at some point here.

I'm coming up short on ideas for workarounds so far after trying a few things, I'll ask around to see if anyone has ideas. Worst case scenario rather than manually doing that (or editing each one and copy-pasting the value which sounds incredibly tedious) the support team can help extract your UDGs from the appliance itself and you could pull the data values out of the XML format.