In my university there's a certain wlan network open for the students and employees. To use it, however, one must first log in via a website using your own username and password. This can also be done by submitting a http request with the right POST-data to the same website. I already have a shell script that does this but I'm still curious to whether it would be possible to have this script run automagically every time my computer connects to the university wlan. Is it possible to do this in some semi-easy way?
I know that NetworkManager (which is used in Ubuntu) exposes a DBUS interface -- I would suspect there is an event for network connected / disconnected which you could use. Try checking the NetworkManager DBUS Interface spec.
If you've never worked with DBUS before, fear not, there are bindings for pretty much every language. I'm sure there's even a CLI client you could invoke from a shell script. This blog entry shows how to detect a new connection from NetworkManager with Python -- it might be a good starting point
You might write a simple script that runs "iwconfig" and processes it's output. If the name of the network is found (with Regex for example) you send a request.
I don't think you can trigger the script when you are acutally connected to the network, but you can add it to CRON, so it is executed for example every ten seconds.
Heres's a document you may find helpful: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto
Related
Let's state a situation:
I have the possibility to run arbitrary commands on a server as an unprivileged user, through "unconventional means".
I do not have the possibility to login using ssh to that server, either as my unprivileged user or anything else. So I do not have currently a CLI allowing me to run any commands I would like in a "normal" way.
I can ping that server and nothing prevents me to connect to arbitrary ports.
I still would like to have a command line to allow me to run arbitrary command as i wish on that server.
Theoretically nothing would prevent me to launch any program as my unprivileged user, including one that would open a port, allow some remote user to connect to it and just forward any commands to bash, returning the result. I just don't know any good program to do that.
So, does any one know? I looked at ways to launch ssh_server as an unprivileged user but some users reported that recent versions of ssh_server do not allow that anymore. Actually I don't even need ssh specifically, any way to get a working CLI would do the trick. Even a crappy node.js program launching an http server would work, as long as I have a CLI (... and it's not excessively crappy, the goal is to have a clean CLI, not something that bugs every two characters).
In case you would ask why I would like to do that, it's not related to anything illegal ^^. I just have to work with a very crappy Jenkins server for which I'm not allowed to have direct access to its agents. Whoever is responsible for that server doesn't give a sh** about its users' needs so we have to use hacky solutions just to have some diagnostic data about that server (like ram, cpu and disk usage, installed programs, etc...). Having a CLI that I can launch some time instead of altering a build configuration and waiting 20 minutes to have an answer about what's going on would really help.
Thanks in advance for any answer.
So do you have shell access to the server at least once? E.g., during the single day of the month when you are physically present at the site of your client or the outsourcing contractor?
And if you have shell access then, can you or your sysmin install Cockpit?
It listens on port 9090.
You can then use the credentials of your local user and open a terminal window in your browser. See sidebar item "Terminal" on the screenshots of the cockpit homepage.
According to the documentation
Cockpit has no special privileges and doesn’t run as root. It creates a session as the logged in user and has the same permissions as that user.
Requirements:
I want to run my application on linux in the background (at startup of course).
I want to be able to call start/stop/restart commands directly from console (it have to be simple just like for /etc/init.d - just call simple command directly from console).
I want to be able to call status - and I want that this command will somehow get the actual status of application returned by itself. I thought that I can call some method which returns String or just use stdin to send command but when I do noup .. &, or start-stop-daemon, then the stdin is detached. Is there a simple way to attach stdin back to the application (I've seen that I can create a pipe, but this is pretty complitated). Or what is the best way to communicate with application after it is started as a daemon (I can make a socket and connect through telnet for example, but I am looking for simpler solution and possibility to do it directly from console, without starting telnet first)? Ideally it will be great to get the possibility to send any command, but simple status will be sufficient (but again - it have to communicate with the application to get that status somnehow)
I have found many different answers. Some of them says to simply use nohup and &, and some others says that nohup and & is old fashion. Some answers says to use start-stop-daemon or JSvc (for java). But it seems that none of them will suffice this 3 requirements from me.
So... What are the simplest possibilities for all of 3 requirements to be met?
PS. I don't want to use screen. The application must be run as a linux daemon.
PPS. Application is written in Java but I am looking for generic soluction which is not limited to java.
You should create a command line tool for communicate with a daemon in way you need. The tool itself can use TCP/IP or named pipes.
And then use cli-tool start|stop|restart|status from console.
If you need to start a daemon at startup sequence (before user login) you have to deal with init system (init.d, systemd, OpenRC, etc...).
Dragons be here:
Be sure that init doesn't restart your daemon after manual stop via cli.
Command line tool itself runs with unprivileged user rights, so restart may be hard if first startup script use superuser rights or application-specific user and, especially in case deep init integration, you might have to use sudo cli-tool start.
To avoid this one possible solution is to make wrapper daemon, that runs forever via init and control the underlying application (start-stop) with proper rights.
Cons: Develop two additional tools for a daemon.
Pros: Wrapper daemon can operate as a circuit breaker between superuser/specific user and userspace.
creation of a website through which can access Linux server and where can execute some operations like executing scripts, firing up some commands. need some expert guidance with some concepts.just guide me how can i achieve through, i have goggled a lot unable to get the proper concepts or methods. or is it even possible.
Have you considered using something along the lines of VNC or SSH? As JNevill pointed out, either of these methods would be infinitely more secure. Also, consider using something like cron for scheduled jobs.
However, sometimes a webpage for running a program on a server may be acceptable. e.g. IoT project. To do this, you would setup an API page using a back-end language like PHP (recommended if you're using Linux). In the back-end language you would check your user credentials, and then run the command.
Some guidelines in doing this:
Never allow commands to be entered on the webpage, only allow tasks to be completed using controlled inputs like buttons, selectboxes and sliders. i.e. a button to get an Arduino to close your garage door, or a slider to dim/brighten a light bulb, or a button to start a program to index something, etc.
None of these "command buttons" should ever do anything harmful. i.e. delete a folder or file.
We have a set of Mac machines (mostly PPC) that are used for running Java applications for experiments. The applications consist of folders with a bunch of jar files, some documentation, and some shell scripts.
I'd like to be able to push out new version of our experiments to a directory on one Linux server, and then instruct the Macs to update their versions, or retrieve an entire new experiment if they don't yet have it.
../deployment/
../deployment/experiment1/
../deployment/experiment2/
and so on
I'd like to come up with a way to automate the update process. The Macs are not always on, and they have their IP addresses assigned by DHCP, so the server (which has a domain name) can't contact them directly. I imagine that I would need some sort of daemon running full-time on the Macs, pinging the server every minute or so, to find out whether some "experiments have been updated" announcement has been set.
Can anyone think of an efficient way to manage this? Solutions can involve either existing Mac applications, or shell scripts that I can write.
You might have some success with a simple Subversion setup; if you have the dev tools on your farm of Macs, then they'll already have Subversion installed.
Your script is as simple as running svn up on the deployment directory as often as you want and checking your changes in to the Subversion server from your machine. You can do this without any special setup on the server.
If you don't care about history and a version control system seems too "heavy", the traditional Unix tool for this is called rsync, and there's lots of information on its website.
Perhaps you're looking for a solution that doesn't involve any polling; in that case, maybe you could have a process that runs on each Mac and registers a local network Bonjour service; DNS-SD libraries are probably available for your language of choice, and it's a pretty simple matter to get a list of active machines in this case. I wrote this script in Ruby to find local machines running SSH:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'dnssd'
handle = DNSSD.browse('_ssh._tcp') do |reply|
puts "#{reply.name}.#{reply.domain}"
end
sleep 1
handle.stop
You can use AppleScript remotely if you turn on Remote Events on the client machines. As an example, you can control programs like iTunes remotely.
I'd suggest that you put an update script on your remote machines (AppleScript or otherwise) and then use remote AppleScript to trigger running your update script as needed.
If you update often then Jim Puls idea is a great one. If you'd rather have direct control over when the machines start looking for an update then remote AppleScript is the simplest solution I can think of.
I'm looking for possible solutions to the following need:
I have a VPN configured (using openVPN over Linux, BTW), and I want to know at any moment which hosts are connected to it. I recognize that it probably is the same thing as trying to know which hosts are connected to a lan, so any of the solutions might do the job...
The fact is that I once used a hamachi vpn on linux and with it I had the chance to know which hosts were connected to a particular network where I belonged, so I was wondering if something similar might be possible in openVPN (or even any VPN and/or any LAN).
Preferably, I'm looking for opensource/free sw solutions, or maybe the hints to program it myself (in the most simple way if possible, not that I don't know how to program, but I'm trying to achieve this in a simple manner). But anyway, if there are no os/fsw solutions, any other one might do...
Thanks a lot!
Javier,
Mexico city
An easy way to do this with OpenVPN in linux is to use the client-connect and client-disconnect scripts on the server end to maintain a list for you. The client-connect script can log the $common_name environment variable (and also its $trusted_ip, if you like) each time a client connects, and the client-disconnect script can remove that client from the list.
If you also write both connections and disconnections to a different time-stamped log, you'll have a permanent record of the time and duration of each connection.