UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

I am working in support and we are planning to automate a system to reduce the direct manual intervention to core system.

Please find the below details.
1. we have a web application that runs on Windows Platform.
2. From web application, we need to connect to remote Unix machine.
3. After connecting we need to execute application specific commands and need to capture the output.
4. And the output needs to be displayed in web page.


Web application part is ready but need help in the about requirement.

I heard that "SSHD" can be used to achieve this, but not sure.

Can someone please help....

sshd is a daemon that runs on UNIX. You wouldn't run it on Windows.

ssh is kind of overkill if you're going to be running requests all the time. Is the UNIX machine behind a firewall / on a local net? Does it have apache installed? I'd be tempted to just use CGI. Your windows script could connect to http://local.ip.address/cgi-bin/script.sh and get its output.

If running a webserver on the unix system is not an option (or even if it is), you can consider running the command(s) periodically via cron, saving the results in a share that is accessible from the windows system. This could also be used to generate data for a report that is formatted by an applet of some variety.

apache server has not installed on server. But the server is in the same network. Since this is a production server, we system admin will not allow to install any other programs.... do we have any other possibilities?

---------- Post updated at 10:41 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:32 PM ----------

Thanks for the reply derekludwig!

Code:

If running a webserver on the unix system is not an option (or even if  it is), you can consider running the command(s) periodically via cron,  saving the results in a share that is accessible from the windows  system. This could also be used to generate data for a report that is  formatted by an applet of some variety.

We have hundreds of background processes that kick off as per the schedule (even in repetitive scheduled intervals), if we schedule a script in scheduled intervals ( not for a a specific process rather for all) it will be a kind of increasing the load on application. And also we need to read the input from webpage (like get the report for process "A" or get the report for "A" and "B" between a particular timespan).

You are limited by what's running on the server, then. What's running on the server?

You can install Cygwin on your windows server and write .bat file using Cygwin commands such as ssh. You can script ssh to run a command on another server. you can also probably connect with public/private authentication, although I have not tried that. Once you prove that you can run all of the jobs that you need to run from Windows you just need something to kick off the jobs when they need to be run.

However, I would still use cron on the Unix/Linux servers, since if your Windows job scheduler breaks the jobs won't run and cron will run as long as the server is running.

Balaji asked:
A simple webserver could be written in almost any good^TM scripting language. There are also a goodly number of open source webservers that could be of use. But I would discuss what you want to do with your systems administrators. They may have good reason not to allow a webserver to run on your application server, be it policy, resourcing, support concerns, patching, licensing, etc. It may be easier for them to spin you up a new system than trying to have your existing application server also be a webserver.

Balaji also wrote If you are concerned about the increased load with a scheduled script, then I would be very worried about a script that will be invoked on an ad-hoc basis by users. Especially scripts that takes "user input" - see XKCD: Exploits of a Mom .