Controlling Pc From Server?

[Kartic]

andrea_gavana at tin.it said the following on 2/27/2005 4:44 AM:
> Hello NG,
> 
>         I am trying to find some information about the possibility to control
> two (or more) clients (PCs) via a Python application running on a main server.
> Ideally, this application should be able to monitor (almost in real time)
> the "activity" of these clients (which applications are launched, closed
> and so on, if this is even possible, obviously). Does anyone have to share
> some information/pointer?
> 
> Thank you a lot.
> 
> Andrea.


Andrea,

Since you have not specified any operating system, my suggestion is for 
you to go for a generic solution like pyheartbeat. Pyheartbeat is a 
program with server and client components and uses UDP to monitor which 
client computers are down and which, active.

You can modify pyheartbeat to do what you are wanting, by wrapping your 
monitoring functions and sending that information back to the server. To 
make things more elegant, you could probably come up with an XML schema 
(or other formatted text like JSON or use Pickle to 
serialize/de-serialze data structures) so that the information is 
machine-friendly but you still can translate the XML for a pretty 
display on the server.

Pyheartbeat can be found at 
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52302

If you are using Windows NT-based technology, you can setup your clients 
so that all activity is logged to the server; I believe there are 3rd 
pary applications available that can do this for you. Sorry, I don't 
know the specifics on how to do it.

For *nix OSes, you can have the syslog daemon log to a remote machine 
instead of the local. So, you can log all activity to the UNIX server. 
(Though, to me, it appears that you are looking for remote top like 
functionality for networked PCs).

Thanks,
-Kartic