Re: Wishlist request: SSH remote administration added to API

[Jamie C. <jca...@we...>]

Sometimes webmin itself downloads files, such as in the Software Packages
module. The problem is, when managing a remote server using SSH the download
would have to be made by the remote server, not the master. There is no easy
way to use SSH to open a network connection on another server, either for
downloading or other network communications.

This could be worked around by having the master server download the file and
then transfer it to the remote server though .. so I guess it isn't really as
big a problem as I first thought :)

 - Jamie

Aaron Grewell <agr...@uw...> wrote ..
> 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?
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
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