[Fwd: Re: examples of doing syadmin activities as a web app]

[Roger Binns]

Michael wrote:
> I don't know if Python has a way to access an SSL
> wrapped XML-RPC server? Don't imagine it'd be to hard to implement
> though. I just haven't had a reason to need to since thus far all my
> XML-RPC apps don't need to be secure or are inside a secure network.
>
> Might be worth the effort of implementing?

You will need to define your constraints.  For example do you need
the SSL connections to stay open and be used for multiple requests
(I did in my project as I am remoting serial ports).  What do you
need to do about certificate checking, and is any human intervention
allowed/expected?  The current Python standard library does no
SSL, no certificate checking, and makes a new connection per
request.  See another thread on the issues behind fixing that,
which are a fair bit more involved on the server end.  (You also
need to consider which Python versions you want to support).

Something else you may want to consider is using connections
over SSH instead.  SSH gives your stdout and stderr from the
remote end, so you read what is going on as a progress report.
You could structure your app so that a web browser (and/or
XML-RPC) is used to talk to the web server, and then from the
web server you fan out to the machines being administered
by using SSH.  That way you can provide feedback, need nothing
installed on the machines being admin'ed (except SSH),
and do mass changes to multiple machines.

Roger