Controlling Pc From Server?

[andrea_gavana]

Hello NG,

I am trying to find some information about the possibility to control
two (or more) clients (PCs) via a Python application running on a main server.
Ideally, this application should be able to monitor (almost in real time)
the "activity" of these clients (which applications are launched, closed
and so on, if this is even possible, obviously). Does anyone have to share
some information/pointer?

Thank you a lot.

Andrea.

 

[Kartic]

(e-mail address removed) said the following on 2/27/2005 4:44 AM:

Hello NG,

I am trying to find some information about the possibility to control
two (or more) clients (PCs) via a Python application running on a main server.
Ideally, this application should be able to monitor (almost in real time)
the "activity" of these clients (which applications are launched, closed
and so on, if this is even possible, obviously). Does anyone have to share
some information/pointer?

Thank you a lot.

Andrea.

Andrea,

Since you have not specified any operating system, my suggestion is for
you to go for a generic solution like pyheartbeat. Pyheartbeat is a
program with server and client components and uses UDP to monitor which
client computers are down and which, active.

You can modify pyheartbeat to do what you are wanting, by wrapping your
monitoring functions and sending that information back to the server. To
make things more elegant, you could probably come up with an XML schema
(or other formatted text like JSON or use Pickle to
serialize/de-serialze data structures) so that the information is
machine-friendly but you still can translate the XML for a pretty
display on the server.

Pyheartbeat can be found at
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52302

If you are using Windows NT-based technology, you can setup your clients
so that all activity is logged to the server; I believe there are 3rd
pary applications available that can do this for you. Sorry, I don't
know the specifics on how to do it.

For *nix OSes, you can have the syslog daemon log to a remote machine
instead of the local. So, you can log all activity to the UNIX server.
(Though, to me, it appears that you are looking for remote top like
functionality for networked PCs).

Thanks,
-Kartic