Hi
I have today committed v2.15. This has a big, new feature that we've been
working on internally for some time and testing in our environment, that
is, external scripts and external data.
As far as is possible, I have replicated the BBWin functionality for
external data. Data files in the 'externaldatalocation' directory
(installdir\tmp by default) with the correct file format will be uploaded
to Xymon. You can therefore run external scripts, have them produce status
data files in the correct format and that will be uploaded. The format is
the same as BBWin and that described in 'Xymon Message Syntax' on this
page: http://xymon.sourceforge.net/xymon/help/manpages/man1/xymon.1.html.
The sample scripts supplied with BBWin, e.g. fsmon.vbs, should work without
material changes (fsmon for example looks in the registry for a couple of
locations of folders, this may need changing if you have never installed
BBWin).
You can now also specify external scripts in client-local.cfg to be run
either every scan or every "slow" scan, and they can be sent to run
synchronously or asynchronously - therefore a relatively simple external
script scheduler. The scripts can either pre-exist on the target or they
can be downloaded from a central web server or file share (like client
updates). Script versioning is controlled via hashes – this has also been
extended to client updates (optionally).
Obviously the use of external scripts requires some care – for example, if
you specify synchronous execution and your script never completes,
XymonPSClient will be left waiting forever. If you specify asynchronous and
your script never completes, you can end up with multiple processes
building up over time. It's quite difficult to work out what may be
happening with external scripts if you do not have any form of logging in
your script, just as it would be with BBWin – therefore if you're having
trouble, I recommend logging to file at various points in your script and
the start and end of execution.
Note that external scripts will be run as the same user as XymonPSClient,
which would usually be the LOCAL SYSTEM user. You can test whether your
script works as LOCAL SYSTEM interactively using psexec (e.g. psexec -i -s
cmd.exe), from the sysinternals process utilities (
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/psexec).
I have updated the XymonPSClient.doc which has a section on external
scripts and data – please read this carefully first as there are a number
of options associated with these new features. I will try and answer any
questions about scheduling and external data configuration, but I can't
commit to answering questions about or debugging your individual scripts.
Zak