Does anyone know of a good way to do remote administration of a Windows XP machine using just the command line?
At the moment the only things it needs to do is to be able to install applications/patches, and transfer files to and from the machine, and installing registry patches would be nice as well.
Currently we use a horrible hacked together solution that uses NetMeeting, in the past I've thrown together a proof of concept using SSH for windows (at the time windows 2000) but it didn't work to my satisfaction and was pretty buggy. Which was probably the result of the SSH Daemon I was running more then anything.
I'm pretty much open to anything, however a solution using SSH would be ideal since it's already approved for installation in my organization, and it's free. I work in the Canadian Government so anything free is best, and anything that we've already got approved for installation is even better.
psexec will allow you to run commands remotely. Some of the other PsTools can help you kill applications, get a list of processes, etc.
Why must it be
remote administration of a Windows XP machine using just the command line?
I think your very limiting yourself to what is possible by sticking to the command line. In windows environments you can easily use Group Policy to distribute most software and/or patches, and for the ones that you can't you can usually script these changes through any of the popular scripting languages such as JScript, VBScript, Kixtart, AutoIt, Powershell, etc. With these scripting languages you can easily leverage WMI to exceute and mointor processes on remotes systems, copy files, updates registry...basically everything that you're trying to accomplish....and it won't cost you anything but the cost of learning these technologies, and there many online resources and which document how to do them. Here is a link to the Microsoft Script Center, its a great start: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/default.mspx
I wrote this a while back, and used it to maintain my home windows XP desktop for a while:
ssh and telnet on windows
I used the SSH option (not telnet). It worked for my purposes (killing remote tasks, copying files etc.) It uses Cygwin, but you're able to run regular windows commands as well as the bash commands that come with cygwin.
The Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) is designed for remote access, installing software, transferring files. etc. It's open source and you can write your own service if there isn't one that does what you need. It also has a GUI component for writing, scheduling, queueing and monitoring jobs across a pool of machines.
At the moment the only things it needs to do is to be able to install
applications/patches, and transfer files to and from the machine, and
installing registry patches would be nice as well.
try to download and install eurysco to use in order:
transfer file, applications and patches with multiple-upload feature from eurysco file browser
install applications and patches in silent mode from eurysco command line feature
edit registry from eurysco system-registry feature
http://www.eurysco.com/features
Related
I am working on a project where we need to repeat certain steps with powershell to deploy stuff. i would like to create a process/install guidance (steps supported with UI) with WIX but after the msi has finished i have an entry in programs and features. I just need it to execute the powershell and the end without registering in windows. i might be using the wrong tooling or whatever, any suggestions are welcome.
Definitely not recommended unless you want to track the deployment of these scripts on different systems by checking the entries in ARP (Add/Remove Programs), and even then it clogs up the Add/Remove view of your computers. Most system administrators hate this approach, it is better to just write to your own registry key and read it back from every machine.
What are the scripts doing? Are you actually installing files.
How can I run AHK scripts on IronAHK?
Is this even possible?
Is there a method to convert scripts to IronAHK?
Thanks,
Odinulf.
If you look at the development status mentioned by Wimmel you'll see that it's far from complete. IronAHK isn't ready for use.
There are two alternatives: running AutoHotkey in WINE, and using a virtual Windows OS. WINE doesn't allow any hotkeys, sending keys, etc. It does let you make GUIs and do string processing.
Running in an emulator lets you have a full Windows desktop in a window and you can set any permissions you like, such as sharing folders with your host and manipulating the clipboard. VMWare and VirtualBox are both popular for this. You do need a Windows installation disk for these.
According to the road map the goal for version 1.0 is Complete AutoHotkey compatibility on Windows. So possibly you need to modify your script if it uses functionality not yet implemented.
See also development status and AutoHotkey compatibility.
Is it possible to set up a remote NetBeans C++ project where the source files are only accessible via SSH?
My project needs to build on a Linux box, but I'd like to develop it on a Windows machine.
Checking out the code via SVN to my Windows machine is not an option since there are a few files that differ only by case, and NTFS is not case sensitive (unfortunately, I can not change them).
I'm well aware that Windows can be kind-of forced be case-aware and the ideal solution is to just re-name those file to something sane.
However, I'm just trying to solve this using NetBeans. Since it's a remote project anyway, why bother to keep any files locally.
Thanks
Currently, no. In general programming files with different cases of the same name is a bad practice.
You can enable case sensitivity in Windows - you may need to have a Professional version or better.
For Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817921
For Windows 7: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732389.aspx
See also: Windows Services for Unix
Another solution would be to setup VNC/RDP on the remote Unix system. The overall solution should be to conform to a better file naming convention:
Programmer 1: "Hey man, take a look at noCamelCase.cs - I just rewrote it."
Programmer 2: "Um, nocamelcase.cs is blank."
There are two ways of doing remote builds with Netbeans. The first, the project is stored locally. You just create a regular project and on the 2nd page of the wizard you specify the network directory with the source and the remote build host. I've used this for Solaris client to Linux server, but not from Windows as we don't have the mounts exported by SMB. This uses ssh and some shared lib interposers to get the build info.
The second way is to create a remote project. In this case the project is created on the remote host and date is copied on demand to the client. I've only doe a few tests with this as I preferred the first method as it had much better latency.
Lastly, you could either use vnc or install X on your windows machine and do everything on the Linux machine.
I work part-time as a computer tech at the local high school. They needed a system to keep track of all the computers in the district (things like physical location of the machines and serial numbers for inventory), and told me to keep it on a budget. I sat down and wrote a little thousand-line script in Perl/Tk, which accesses a PostgreSQL database on the local server.
I also successfully wrote a launcher in C++ and compiled it with bcc32, so they can single-click the launcher executable to start the program without having to type anything into DOS. That works fine, and I can load this program myself by manually installing all the dependencies for it by hand.
I would like to build a setup program to automatically load the PostgreSQL application, Strawberry Perl, as well as the Tk, and DBD::Pg libraries, and finally, of course, the folder my application is stored in. It'd be nice to be able to create desktop shortcuts or start menu items too.
Has anyone had any success with software to generate .MSI files for Windows Installer on Windows XP and above? If so, what did you use, and did it cost any money? Alternatively, where do I need to begin reading in order to write my own setup program?
Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
I'm not sure if this will do everything you want, but have you looked at Win32::InstallShield?
What options are there for saving and retrieving documents to and from the cloud, from within Emacs?
I use Emacs at work, on a Windows machine, and at home, on a Linux box, so ideally I would want a solution that works more or less out of the box for both operating systems.
I touched on g-client, but could not quite get it to work. Obviously, if there are no other, simpler options, I'm just going to have to spend a couple of more hours on it.
Many thanks,
Andreas
Dropbox is pretty universal. I store even my Emacs config files there. Works on Windows, Linux, OS X, and iPhone. Syncs automatically. Stores history. Is free. What else do you want?:-)
Two options that I can think of:
If you have access to a server somewhere that runs ssh, then use ssh with tramp. You can also run a ssh server at your home linux box and access your home files through from work. Tramp works perfectly fine on Windows with ssh from cygwin. It will automatically grab a file (provided that you give emacs something like /ssh:yourusername#yourserverhost:~/yourfile), put it to a temporary file at your computer, then copy it back to the host when you save it.
Use a source control system like SVN or Git. Again you can host the server at your home or you can find online hosts (most are for open source and are thus public, but some are free and private; I use unfuddle.com). You would have to regularly commit/update, but you can easily automate that if you want, and the source control system gives you a nice history of your files and a safety net in case you did something very wrong.
Emacs has excellent integration with source control system. If you find the build-in one not sufficient (it is quite generic and thus does not offer interface to some specific features of a particular source control system), there are plenty of good alternative (psvn for SVN, and magit for Git, for example).
sshfs, if you have good connection speed.
Otherwise there's always tramp-mode for Emacs.
Edit: Just saw you are using Windows.
It's been some years since I used Windows as my desktop, but I used WebDrive back then. It sort-of works, although it always was a bit unstable.
Emacs has great support for remote file systems via Tramp. So the real question is what should you use as a remote FS. There are a bunch of them and as long as they have a way of mounting them or logging in via ssh (for Tramp) you should be ok.
I use JungleDisk - works great for Windows, Linux and Mac. Starts around $2 per month and there's a cap of around $90 per year. You can back up to S3 or to Rackspace.
It integrates at the file system level so you can either read/write directly to it or create links from it to your local file system. I use that to share my .emacs, .bash etc between multiple machines.
Chris