[Xymon] WinPSClient - Updates?

Jason Richards Pagh JasonRP at techheads.com
Wed Nov 13 06:05:30 CET 2013


How would I go about getting involved? I’d be willing to put some effort into this, but I’ve never contributed to a project in sourceforge, so I’m not sure if I have to be authorized of if anyone can do it.

I don’t have the familiarity with BBWin to determine what other functionality needs to be added to WinPSClient, but if you can point me in the right direction I can check it out. I’ve been working with PowerShell for a few years, so I’m pretty up to speed in order to be useful. :)

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Jason Richards Pagh

From: David Baldwin <david.baldwin at ausport.gov.au<mailto:david.baldwin at ausport.gov.au>>
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2013 at 8:55 PM
To: Jason Richards Pagh <jasonrp at techheads.com<mailto:jasonrp at techheads.com>>, "xymon at xymon.com<mailto:xymon at xymon.com>" <xymon at xymon.com<mailto:xymon at xymon.com>>
Cc: David Baldwin <David.Baldwin at ausport.gov.au<mailto:David.Baldwin at ausport.gov.au>>
Subject: [Xymon] Re: WinPSClient - Updates?

Jason,

Thanks for the email.
So it looks like the WinPSClient hasn’t been updated in a few months. I had seen a thread from quite a while ago about some issues David was running into, but can’t tell if he’s still around and willing/able to work on it.

In principle I am interested, but don't have a lot of time to work on it at present.
I’ve been able to get XymonPSClient.exe (aka SrvAny) to run powershell natively as a 64-bit executable. The only change necessary to enable this was changing the PowerShell executable to running as %windir%\sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe. The sysnative portion prevents a 32-bit program (SrvAny) from being redirected to %windir%\SysWow64. (See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384187(v=vs.85).aspx<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384187%28v=vs.85%29.aspx>).

Thanks - I found the "sysNative" workaround a month or two ago also. Very useful for running PS scripts from BBWin since it is still 32-bit only.
I also found a better service wrapper than SrvAny, namely nssm (http://nssm.cc/). This has the ability to detect if powershell fails and restart it, which is something SrvAny lacks. It also comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so when using the latter the sysnative piece isn’t necessary. I’ve only been working at this for a day or two, so it probably needs more testing, but it looks promising.

That's an awesome improvement. Definitely a big advance :)
Is there any work (design contemplation) about how xymonclient.ps1 could handle external scripts? I assume this was just a future phase and not so much a limitation or barrier that hadn’t yet been overcome.

I'd played around with things like start-job in PS, but I hadn't worked through all of the legacy reporting mechanisms from BBNT/BBWin (e.g. writing text files into directory - that's an easy one in practice) but more to the point worked out throttling mechanisms for long-running scripts that don't exit, etc. Had also considered just running external scripts as scheduled tasks, but not had time to investigate.

>From memory there were some other issues such as dealing with memory leaks (periodic service restart would solve that).

David.

--
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<mailto:david.baldwin at ausport.gov.au>          Leverrier Street Bruce ACT 2617


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