Giving human readable names to servers in jobrunr - jobrunr

Jobrunr dashboard by default shows UUIDs in place of server names.
Is it possible to make this more human readable and/or customizable? For example, ip address, hostname etc.

Currently this is not possible, but feel free to create an feature request or (even better) a PR to add this functionality.
Update on 17/01/2023: this is now solved in JobRunr v6. Not only the background job servers will show the names but also inside the processing block a job.

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How to make uchiwa dashboard url be able to adjust threshold?

me again..
I had done all the sensu-uchiwa-graphite set up. And i get a new request,:(. Rather than go to change the threshold in check.json file on sensu server..any plugin at the UCHIWA that this adjustment will be shown in Uchiwa dashboard? I asked because in case that my application teams wanna change it by themselves without accessing to server.
I think sensu-admin in enterprise is available but we need to pay big money per year ;(...
Thanks in advance to help.
Sumana W.
This is fairly doable if you use a configuration management system like Chef/Ansible/Puppet - especially if you run standalone checks on the sensu-client.
This allows the clients to define their own thresholds, rather than changing the sensu servers themselves.
See https://sensuapp.org/docs/latest/reference/checks.html#standalone-checks
In this case, the definitions for the checks are sitting on the client servers and they have the choice of their thresholds or configurations. The client itself manages how often to run the check and sends the output back to the server, rather than the server requesting the checks. This helps quite a bit as far as scaling or multitenancy.
The other way to accomplish this, if you are tied to serverside checks, would be to use client attributes (https://sensuapp.org/docs/0.25/reference/checks.html#check-token-substitution)
For example, you can have a cpu check that says something like check-cpu.sh -w :::cpu_warn::: -c :::cpu_critical::: and these come from a cpu_warn and cpu_critical value from the client.json on the client server.
Source: We use sensu extensively in an enterprise environment across thousands of hosts and have been working through these same issues.

Proper way to distinguish between multiple services using zeroconf

I'm writing a piece of software that will run on computers as well as phones.
The service uses an HTTP API for communication and will be published over the local network using Zeroconf.
Initially I published my service using _http._tcp. as the service type but I quickly discovered that both my NAS and my music receiver(!) also broadcasts themselves with that exact service type.
So the question now arises how to differentiate between my service and other services that are using HTTP.
Alternatives
Using a different service type
The is certainly the most certainly the easiest way and (almost) guarantees no other services will be picked up.
However, according to Apple1 new services should be registered with IANA. This is obviously not required but seeing as they recommend it it feels like it would be the wrong way to do it
Using the TXT record
Apple2 describes the TXT record like this:
When a service is registered, three related DNS records are created: a service (SRV) record, a pointer (PTR) record, and a text (TXT) record. The TXT record contains additional data needed to resolve or use the service, although it is also often empty.
The certainly feels like it could be the right way to do it, but I'm still not sure and it's hard to find a description of what the field should contain.
My first though would be to put something like <service_name>-<version> which will then be parsed to see which service it actually is.
My NAS seems to use this for identifying model and version numbers.
Try talking to the service
After finding a service one could always perform a HEAD request on a known endpoint and look for a known header set by the service.
This feels like a fairly slow approach and who knows what making a HEAD request to my receiver will do.
And just to be clear, this question has nothing to do with a specific language or framework, it's about the concepts of zeroconf.
I could show some code but I don't see how that would help.
First, does the service you're advertising actually meet the qualifications for _http as defined by RFC 2782. Specifically- is it not just using HTTP for a transport but is also:
can be displayed by "typical" web browser client software, and
is intended primarily to be viewed by a human user.
If no, register your own service type (there are a couple other services that use HTTP as a transport but don't meet those qualifications so they have -http as a suffix to the service name, see pgpkey-http, senteo-http, xul-http).
If yes, there are a couple ways to go depending on how strict one's interpretation of the RFC is. The least strict being just adding a TXT record as you've already noted in your question. iTunes registers itself with a TXT record in the format iTSh Version=196618.
If you're feeling a little more strict, the RFC only explicitly states that the u=, p= and path= TXT records exist for HTTP. Perhaps someone can chime in on this, but I haven't seen much discussion on whether adding TXT records to already existing entries is frowned upon or not. So with that, the other way is to just an algorithmic instance name. For example, adding the suffix "-NicklasAService" to the device name. Hopefully giving it a unique name to the local network but still making it so that the service can be easily picked out by the PTR record by just looking for the suffix.

How to stop users from visiting staging area after production deployment

We have a few servers that have different roles. For instance, we have production servers, and testing/staging servers. We have a few end users who forget to switch paths to production once things are tested and approved or use; They use the new paths for a bit, then revert back to using the testing/staging at some point for some reason that we can't understand other than stupidity. We still want to be able to get a glimpse into our staging environment after pushing a build into production, but we want to stop them from being able to still hit those servers/services.
We are now pondering some solutions to this problem. One being never give them the direct staging url. An idea would be to create a virtual directory or have a set of domain aliases that we could give them and then shut down while still allowing us access to these endpoints. We could restrict our main staging domain to the office ip range so they never have direct access and call it good.
Does this sound like a good solution? Is our process wrong, are there better routes?
I am interested in solutions for websites as well as web services where visuals can't be used effectively.
We've run into this at my work as well… quite recently in fact. One thing that I thought about other than the virtual directory was setting up specific ports for them to test on then either take the ports down or change them for our internal uses only.
Well without details in how your application is deployed it could be troublesome to give concrete examples. One wonderful solution is to get better users :P Perhaps a more possible solution however is to let your production boxes move a certain set of users(as decided in your code) to your test/staging systems. I.E. the User always connects to Production, but the production machines at connect/auth time, may decide these people are too cool for production let them run the test/staging code instead.
It's not a fullproof method of course, but it works for many many websites to let a certain set of users into different parts of their codebase.
I don't know how feasible this would be for you, but it's a possibility perhaps.
I find that users sometimes have difficulties with URLs, and don't like to have subtle changes like port number in the address.
The best approach I've found is to have the application tell the user what environment they are in.
For example, my teams have used absolutely positioned headers or footers, color coded for Dev/Staging environments that show the application version number with an alpha/beta tag, along with a message that says "Work done on this site will be lost, use Production (link) to keep your work." Typically we make the Dev area red, and the staging area yellow. We also like to put a link to the bug tracking system right in this area.
On production there is not usually a region like this. However, we do sometimes provide positive reinforcement by placing a green region, with the app version and a Production tag in it, and then fade the green region away after a few seconds. This helps keep the app front and center, but let's the user know they are in the right place.

FileMaker: Is there any native way to get the client's computer name?

Is there a FileMaker (11 Advanced) native way to obtain the client's computer name in a script? The computer name shown in FileMaker server when displaying clients connected to a database would do nicely.
Purpose: I'm looking to have filemaker recall and set window position based on user and computer. (The same user could have a different window position and size preference for their laptop than for their desktop -- think of byHost user preferences.)
Alternate: I'm aware that a the client computer name could be grabbed using an external script, but would prefer a native way, if available.
I am still unable to answer the question as asked. However, for the purpose stated, I just found the command
Get ( SystemNICAddress )
It will provide a unique identifier for each computer that will change infrequently. This is all that is required for my purpose and will likely work better than the value I originally requested.
This new function was introduced in FileMaker Pro 12.0:
Get ( PersistentID )
From the FileMaker documentation at http://www.filemaker.com/help/12/fmp/html/func_ref2.32.54.html:
"Returns a unique, unchanging identifier for the computer on which FileMaker Pro is running or the device on which FileMaker Go is running, in the form of a 32-digit hexadecimal string."
If you're using FMP 12+, this would be a better choice than relying on Get(SystemNICAddress), which can change.
I know this is an old post, but we've worked with the same thing for other reasons and maybe this will help someone.
Since it doesn't seem that FM natively has this function built-in, even for version 17, I just made a table with the NIC address records created when the file opens (if it doesn't exist already) and then the DNS name was manually added later. Then the DNS name could be referenced after using GET to find the NIC address. Some computers do have multiple NICs so those are broken up into separate records (it's just returned as a list) but the same DNS name is applied to them all. Except in the case of a VPN NIC which sometimes reports at 00:00:00:00:00:00; those are just ignored. Otherwise you may have multiple computers with the same null NIC - and that isn't helpful. We use the DNS name for reporting of our employees sales in relation to their call volume. And trying to remember the NICs of a hundred computers is not as simple as a DNS name to know where the person was sitting at the time.
There is a native way to do it.
Get ( HostName )
But you can't use this with a hosted filed, file needs to be opened on the client machine locally.
There can be other advantages to using local FileMaker files that communicate with hosted files
- Better performance for graphics heavy layouts
- Providing an offline cache
Another approach is to use a system shell script.
For completeness sake, a non-native approach, there are a few Filemaker plugins that can provide this functionality. www.360works.com/scriptmaster/
To identify client with FileMaker 11, I simply use:
Get(DesktopPath)
Maybe it could help...

Can Microsoft Windows Workflow route to specific workstations?

I want to write a workflow application that routes a link to a document. The routing is based upon machines not users because I don't know who will ever be at a given post. For example, I have a form. It is initially filled out in location A. I now want it to go to location B and have them fill out the rest. Finally, it goes to location C where a supervisor will approve it.
None of these locations has a known user. That is I don't know who it will be. I only know that whomever it is is authorized (they are assigned to the workstation and are approved to be there.)
Will Microsoft Windows Workflow do this or do I need to build my own workflow based on SQL Server, IP Addresses, and so forth?
Also, How would the user at a workstation be notified a document had been sent to their machine?
Thanks for any help.
I think if I was approaching this problem workflow would work to do it. It is a state machine you want that has three states:
A Start
B Completing
C Approving
However workflow needs to work in one central place (trust me on this, you only want to have one workflow run time running at once, otherwise the same bit of work can be done multiple times see our questions on MSDN forum). So a central server running the workflow is the answer.
How you present this to the users can be done in multiple ways. Dave suggested using an ASP.NET site to identify the machines that are doing the work, which is probably how I would do it. However you could also write a windows forms client that would do the same thing. This would require using something like SOAP / WCF to facilitate communication between client form applications and the central workflow service. This would have the advantage that you could use a system try icon to alert the user.
You might also want to look at human workflow engines, as they are designed to do things such as this (and more), I'm most familiar with PNMsoft's Sequence
You can design a generic "routing" workflow that will cause data to go to a workstation. The easiest way to do this would be to embed the workflow in an ASP.NET application. Each workstation should visit the application with a workstation ID in the querystring:
http://myapp/default.aspx?wid=01
When the form is filled out at workstation A, the workflow running in the web app can enter it into the "work bin" of the next workstation. Anyone sitting at the computer for which the form is destined will see it appear in their list of forms to review. You can use AJAX to make it slick and auto-updating.