I'm writing a Python script to access all computers on the network, log in to them and read some log files. I don't want to use something as low-level as socket, but I can if I must. I realize that my problem is similar to this question, but not the same.
Are there any modules for accessing external Windows machines?
Has anyone done anything like this before?
I'm specifically looking to log into Windows 7 machines, not unix.
Let's also assume that each computer I want to log into has Remote Desktop installed and enabled. I'm also not worried about network security or encryption because these files are not confidential. Windows machines don't have SSH installed on the by default do they?
There has to be something on the other side for you to talk to. This limits you to either setting up a "server" on each machine, installing a real server (i.e. sshd), building a "server" yourself and installing it, or using a built in and active feature of the OS.
Based upon this, what kind of system do you want to set up on these machines? What does it need to do? Just read the contents of a prespecified file list? Will that list change?
One solution is to turn on telnet, and use paramiko or twisted to
talk across it. This isn't very secure of course
Next up, set up a samba share, and access the folder remotely. This
is also insecure, though less so than telnet
You could find a ssh daemon port and run that, if you are so inclined
Psexec from sysinternals might work
Use twisted to build a server app with the features you need
Use ncat to listen on a port and spawn a cmd prompt
Be aware that most of the solutions for accessing windows remotely are... poor. The best solution is probably to roll your own, but that is hard work and you will probably make mistakes.
Also, Windows 7 is not exactly multi-user friendly. Individual processes can run as separate users, but the OS does not support having multiple users logged in at the same time. Someone is going to be the "user" and everyone else is just a process with a different credential set.
This is more an artificial limitation on M$'s part than anything technical. To see this in action, try to log in with RDP while a user is logged in locally. Fun times.
Per your edit, the easiest thing to do is just set up a samba share on the box.
After this share is set up:
with open(r'\\myCompNameOrIP\C\windows\logs\logfile.txt','rb') as logfile:
loglines = logfile.readlines()
Or you can use the gencat sample found here. Just give it r'\\myCompNameOrIP\C\windows\logs\*.txt' as the search path and watch the magic.
From Ubuntu I use samba:
In Bash:
gvfs-mount smb://them/folder
Here I give name, domain and password
Then in python:
folder = '/home/me/.gvfs/folder on them'
using the os module I read folders and files inside.
I am working in a small business environment.
Why not have each of the computers send the log file to the central computer?
Related
I want to make access from remote ubuntu server to local machine because I have multiple files in this machine and I want to transfer it periodically (every minute) to server how can I do that using python
Depending on your local machine OS and network setup, I would recommend the following:
File transfers
Based on the file size, if its a small copy, I would use scp (secure copy). This is because of the simplicity of the command.
In most use cases however I would use rsync because of its great capabilities, most importantly the ability to handle failed partial transfers. It works by analysing the differences between the source and destination. It has pretty much every preference under the sun available (overwriting, deltas, etc.)
Note that when using these commands in an automation script over a longer period of time, you'll probably want to set up a static IP or DDNS for your remote machine.
Python
To run shell commands in a Python script, use pexpect. Its built around the original C based expect and it's fantastic. I used it the other day to transfer a folder from a dev computer to a number of different Raspberry Pis remotely at the same time. Check out the documentation here: https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Automation
As for automation, it really depends on how you want it set up. If you want the python script responsible for transferring data to be called when you want to transfer data you could look into crontab. It's very well known by admins so easy to Google.
Alternatively, if this is part of a Python app you could have the app running in the background and sleeping (time.sleep() or a time elapsed function to check) between transfers. If you needed to do other things in the same Python app then you could stick the whole transfer and sleep part into a thread (also easily implemented in Python).
I hope this helps, let me know if you want details elaborated.
You can easily transfer files between local and remote or between two remote servers. If both servers are Linux-based and require to transfer multiple files and folder using single command, however, you need to follow up below steps:
User from one remote server should have access to another remote server to corresponding directory you want to transfer the file.
You might need to create a policy or group and assign to server list to that group
which you want to access and assign the user to that group so 2 different remote
server can talk to each other.
Run the following scp command:-
scp [options] username1#source_host:directory1/filename1
username2#destination_host:directory2/filename2
How do i setup a local server such that whenever someone telnets in to the server at the specified port number , a python command line must be displayed at the specified location on the remote machine so that i can remotely run my python modules.
I'm new to Python. So Please enlighten me whether this is possible. If so How?
It is more a question about how to invoke a program when someone connects to a telnet server. The program could be written in any language (including, but not restricted to python). The answer depends on the operating system of the remote server. You also have to differentiate if you want to have this behavior for all users that log in, or only to some users.
WMI might be the answer you want. And Here is a good tutorial.
I need to make a python script that will do these steps in order, but I'm not sure how to go about setting this up.
SSH into a server
Copy a folder from point A to point B (cp /foo/bar/folder1 /foo/folder2)
mysql -u root -pfoobar (This database is accessible from localhost only)
create a database, do some other mysql stuff in the mysql console
Replaces instances of Foo with Bar in file foobar
Copy and edit a file
Restart a service
The fact that I have to ssh into a server, and THEN do all of this is really confusing me. I looked into the Fabric library, but that seems to do only do 1 command at a time and doesn't keep context from previous commands.
I looked into the Fabric library, but that seems to do only do 1 command at a time and doesn't keep context from previous commands.
Look into Fabric more. It is still probably what you want.
This page has a lot of good examples.
By "context" I'm assuming you want to be able to cd into another directory and run commands from there. That's what fabric.context_managers.cd is for -- search for it on that page.
Sounds like you are doing some sort of remote deployment/configuring. There's a whole world of tools out there to professionally set this up, look into Chef and Puppet.
Alternatively if you're just looking for a quick and easy way of scripting some remote commands, maybe pexpect can do what you need.
Pexpect is a pure Python module for spawning child applications; controlling them; and responding to expected patterns in their output.
I haven't used it myself but a quick glance at its manual suggests it can work with an SSH session fine: https://pexpect.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/pxssh.html
I have never used Fabric.
My way to solve those kind of issues (before starting to use saltstack) it was using pyexpect, to run the ssh connection, and all the commands that were needed.
maybe the use of a series of sql scripts to work with the database (just to make it easier) would help.
Another way, since you need to access the remote server using ssh, it would be using paramiko to connect and execute commands remotely. It's a bit more complicated when you want to see what's happening on stdout (while with pexpect you will see exactly what's going on).
but it all depends from what you really need.
I am writing a script in python, and part of it needs to connect to a remote computer using rdp. Is there a script or an api that I could use to create this function? Also, if there is not, is there a way to package a rdp application along side python and then use a python script to run it? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance, Nate
If you need an interactive window, use the subprocess module to start your rdesktop.exe (or whatever).
If you need to run some command automatically, you're probably better off forgetting about RDP and using ssh (with passwordless, passphraseless authentication via RSA or similar), psexec (note that some antivirus programs may dislike psexec, not because it's bad, but because it's infrequently been used by malware for bad purposes) or WinRM (this is what you use in PowerShell; it's like ssh or psexec, except it serializes objects on the sender, transmits, and deserializes back to an object on the recipient).
Given a choice among the 3, I'd choose ssh. Cygwin ssh works fine, but there are several other implementations available for Windows.
HTH
As per this GitHub comment, you can try to use libfreerdp via ctypes in Python.
See: FreeRDP library at GitHub which is a free remote desktop protocol library and clients.
Home page: www.freerdp.com
Related: Programmatically manipulating active RDP session.
We run many Python scripts for data processing tasks. We have a modeling computer that has been upgraded to provide the best performance for these tasks, but it is shared by many people that all need to run different scripts on it at the same time.
Is it possible for me to run a Python script remotely on that machine from my laptop while others are either directly logged into it or also remotely running a script?
Is SSH a possibility? I haven't ever run any scripts remotely aside from logging in via remote desktop. Ideally, I could start the Python script on that remote machine, but all the messages would be visible to me on my laptop. Does this sound doable?
EDIT:
I forgot to mention all machines are running Windows 7.
SSH is definitely the way to go and also have a look at Fabric.
Regarding your edit. You can use Fabric on Windows. And I think that using SSH on Windows will be a bit easier than dancing with their Powershell's remoting capabilities.
SSH does seem like it should meet your needs.
You could also consider setting up an iPython notebook server that everyone could use.
Its got nice parallel processing capabilities if you are doing some serious number crunching.