[Canberra-pm] Runing commands on server.

[Paul Fenwick]

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G'day Finn,

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 10:08:50AM +1100, Finn Blucher wrote:

>   not really sure where to start with this. Basically I would like
>   people to be able to double click on an icon on their windows
>   desktop and it executes commands on a linux server. I was thinking

[...]

>   mostly needed to start backups manually. It probably would only need
>   to be capable of running one predefined command. Any ideas, or has
>   this all been done before?

To use the oft-quoted Perl motto, "There's more than one way to do it".
However, if you're running a web-server (such as apache) on your
Linux server, then I may have a very simple and easy solution for you.

Create a script which runs the backup commands that you're after,
and place it in a basic-auth protected cgi-bin directory.  The
basic-auth means that it's not going to be stumbled over by
web-crawlers or curious work experience students.  Make sure that
your script prints out a content-type
(print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"), and you probably should have
it spawn off a separate process so the backup can run as an
independant task to the original CGI (which your web-server may kill
if it gets bored, or the client goes away).  Randal outlines one
such method of doing this (with source-code) at:

	http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col39.html

You can probably get away with something much less complex than what
Randal has done, since you may not have a requirement to monitor
the running process from a web-browser.

Once you've done that, it's simply a task of book-marking the page
and dragging the bookmark to the desktop.

Cheers,

	Paul

- -- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681
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