[Tutor] accessing another system's environment

[Steve Willoughby]

On 25-Feb-11 20:26, Bill Allen wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 21:33, Steve Willoughby <steve at alchemy.com
> <mailto:steve at alchemy.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 25-Feb-11 19:27, Steve Willoughby wrote:
>
>
>     Or are you saying you want to, from a remote Unix system, reach out
>     to a Windows system and see that Windows system's system environment
>     variables?
>
>
> Yes, that's it exactly.    :-)

Ok... this is starting to make more sense then.

So you have two problems, really.  One is to get the linux box to invoke 
a command remotely on the windows box, and the other is what command to 
run on the windows side.  Either *could* be a Python script, in theory, 
but those are two separate problems.

There are lots of ways to go about this.  You could write some kind of 
service in Python (CPython, or IronPython/.net or even C# or whatever) 
which manages the settings on your windows system. A Python script could 
then be written to interact with that service.

Or, you could use a linux RDP-compatible tool to interactively run 
commands on the windows box for you.

One question you need to figure out is how interactive you want this to 
be, or how automated.  That will drive the implementation of what comes 
after.  As will the list of available options at your site for securely 
allowing a remote host to run administrative tools on your windows systems.

> I administrate the workstations in our engineering environment and some
> of the major pieces of software we use are configured via the Windows
> system environment variables.  Being able to reach out to a PC and check
> or change those is handy, even important, in my situation.   I am trying
> to explore the possibility of managing these from a system I am using in
> a platform independent way and figure that I ought to be able to do this
> with Python.  Perhaps there are third party Python modules I need to
> help accomplish this?
>
> --Bill
>


-- 
Steve Willoughby / steve at alchemy.com
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
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