Re: Wishlist request: SSH remote administration added to API

[Aaron G. <agr...@uw...>]

OK, thanks for the feedback.  I thought it would be more-or-less doable,
so I'm glad to have confirmation of that.  I'll be watching with
interest, and if I can help out, great.  I'm not sure quite what you
mean by the network connection part, though.  Do you mean a connection
internal to webmin?  Downloading files via scp is pretty easy, so I
think I must not understand what you mean.

On Mon, 2002-12-16 at 22:00, Jamie Cameron wrote:
> Quite an interesting idea .. it would be possible to convert most if not
> all existing modules to be able to connect to another host via SSH,
> by replacing all function calls that read or write files or start or signal
> processes with calls to the SSH program to connect to the remote host.
> 
> Unfortunately, not everything can be 'remoted' like this - for example,
> there is no way to tell SSH to open a network connection on the other
> server. Many modules do this for downloading files and so on .. So a lot
> of modules couldn't be converted to use SSH.
> 
> It would still be an interesting and mostly do-able long term project
> though .. but not one I am going to start right away.
> 
>  - Jamie
> 
> Aaron Grewell <agr...@uw...> wrote ..
> > First of all, thank you very much for webmin.  It is a very valuable
> > tool.  I think I have come up with a way for it to be even more of a
> > help to administrators.  My suggestion is this:
> > 
> > Currently, many plugins require that webmin be loaded on the same box as
> > the service being administered.  This makes webmin somewhat of an
> > administrative burden itself on a medium-to-large network. 
> > Although it offsets this by making administration easier, it is not
> > really necessary to do things this way.  There is already an
> > administrative service that ships with almost all unix-type systems, and
> > can be loaded on most systems that do not ship it.  I am, of course,
> > referring to ssh.
> > 
> > Every function (AFAICT, please let me know if I am mistaken here) that
> > is currently performed by webmin can be performed remotely via ssh.  In
> > addition, many things that webmin cannot do right now (i.e. Windows
> > remote administration) can be done via ssh, since it absolves the webmin
> > server of necessarily supporting the commands being performed.  Only the
> > plugin has to handle the commands, and be able to locate and deal with
> > them remotely.
> > 
> > Proposed API additions:
> > 
> > ssh_exec - run commands via ssh and return their output for
> > error-handling
> > ssh_get_file - download a file either via ssh and cat, or scp
> > ssh_put_file - the reverse
> > ssh_open - a wrapper for open() which uses the above commands to
> > retrieve a file before opening, then put it back when finished.  These
> > sorts of commands would be important for porting, as the external plugin
> > authors are probably not going to want to put all the logic in, and it
> > should be able to be handled centrally in the API for most cases.
> > 
> > And whatever others I am forgetting that are important for this to work
> > right.  How's that for open-ended? ;)
> > 
> > I really think that by further relieving administrators' burdens wrt
> > webmin cluster maintenance and opening the way into non-unix systems for
> > webmin plugins this would make webmin even more of a must-have tool than
> > it already is.
> > 
> > Of course, you are probably thinking "well, so why don't you do it
> > then?"  The answer is that I lack the skill to do this myself.  My perl
> > skills are limited, although given sufficient direction I would be
> > willing to help with, say, updating the plugins once the API changes
> > were made.  That shouldn't be rocket science, probably just seriously
> > boring except in the corner cases.
> > 
> > I hope that this is not a huge task, but I think that it could be a huge
> > benefit to this project.  You know the code better than I, as I have
> > only reviewed it briefly.  What do you think?
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:
> With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility 
> Learn to use your power at OSDN's High Performance Computing Channel
> http://hpc.devchannel.org/
> -
> Forwarded by the Webmin development list at web...@we...
> To remove yourself from this list, go to
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webadmin-devel