[Xymon] Windows Client

[David Baldwin]

Apologies for not responding on this one earlier.

My thoughts on WinPSClient (which I built up from the first cut Henrik
wrote, and was a great way of learning powershell):

* it needs a bit of work still
* it does have some functions not in the BBWin client
* it can be a resource hog - some apparently builtin powershell cmdlets
end up calling some dodgy underlying mechanisms, and it's not obvious
what without a bit of work. Most are OK however, and the most recent
versions are pretty aggressive about garbage collection. I'm not sure
how many persistent processes are written in powershell - memory leaks
aren't much of an issue for a short run process.
* it doesn't run external scripts - I started looking at Start-Job and
the .Net process management classes but there are so many corner cases
to handle on process termination, overlapping runs, etc.
* the service runner is very crude - start process and ignore it until
sent a stop service signal at which point go looking for it to kill.
Service restart options are irrelevant. Not sure if anything has changed
around running powershell as a service directly.
* because the service runner used is 32-bit, it uses the 32-bit version
of Powershell. There may be a workaround for this, but I couldn't find one.
* it may be better to update BBWin to C#, 64-bit, etc and include the
option of calling Powershell scripts as part of the core client and as
external scripts. I gather this isn't too hard to do from .Net, but not
sure if there are any limitations on requiring code signing of scripts
to do that, or whether system execution policy can be overridden (which
would be a bad thing in some respects).

David.
> I'm a fan of WinPSClient and would like to see that become more widely utilized. The chief drawback I have is no great way to run external scripts.
>
> Been working a lot with PowerShell lately so I might dive in one of these days....
>
> Cheers.
> Darin
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Henrik Størner
> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 10:53 AM
> To: xymon at xymon.com
> Subject: Re: [Xymon] Windows Client
>
> On 22-07-2013 15:20, Neil Simmonds wrote:
>
>> it appears that BBWin
>> may not be fit for purpose in the near future. I've looked at MrBig 
>> and WinPSClient but MrBig seems to have no one maintaining the code 
>> and WinPSClient hasn't been changed in 2 ¼ years.
>>
>> Is anyone aware of any other options or has anyone considered perhaps 
>> writing something? I'd look into it myself but I'm not a programmer so 
>> although my VBScript and Shell script abilities are reasonable
> If you are not too scared to delve into Powershell, then I would really like you to dig into the WinPSClient.
>
> It does work - despite not having been changed for quite some time. The main problem with it appears to be that it is a bit ressource-consuming; Powershell is not the most effective scripting language.
>
> But it is one that is supported on all current versions of Windows ... 
> and it does provide you with hooks into all of the Microsoft monitoring interfaces. As I understand, getting data with Powershell is just as "easy" as doing it in C#.
>
> Regards,
> Henrik
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> Xymon at xymon.com
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-- 
David Baldwin - Senior Systems Administrator (Datacentres + Networks)
Information and Communication Technology Services
Australian Sports Commission          http://ausport.gov.au
Tel 02 62147830 Fax 02 62141830       PO Box 176 Belconnen ACT 2616
david.baldwin at ausport.gov.au          Leverrier Street Bruce ACT 2617


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