Support and Maintenance Systems


Your system and application administrators will usually want to use tools and scripts to manage your migrated application. With migrations to Interix and Win32, you have the option to migrate any management tools that were used previously in your UNIX environment. In a Win32 migration, you can also use some of the Windows-based management tools, such as Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS).

This section discusses the options available for managing and supporting your migrated application. Take an inventory of the UNIX-based management tools that you have, and for each, decide the most appropriate solution on the Windows platform.

It is likely that you will consider porting your UNIX management tools to Interix. Consider porting the tools if your application has been migrated to Win32 and continues to use the same configuration files and scripting tools as it did on UNIX. In this case, Microsoft Services for UNIX (SFU) 3.0 provides the tools necessaryto port Perl and UNIX shell scripts to Win32, including those employing standard UNIX utilities such as awk , sed , and grep .

Remote Management and Control

UNIX, Interix, and Windows include basic remote management and control tools. These include telnet , ftp , and the Berkeley r commands that most UNIX administrators will be familiar with. These tools are ideal for mixed Windows and UNIX environments and also for UNIX support staff who are experienced in using these tools.

In mixed UNIX and Windows environments and where Interix is deployed, X Windows“ based management may well be employed. There is a range of X Windows Servers available for Windows, which are discussed in Chapter 6, Unix and Windows Interoperability. This means that for UNIX support staff, it is possible to continueto use familiar tools in the Win32 and Interix environments. The Win32 Windows environment has additional remote tools which significantly enhance remote management and control, however.

Microsoft SMS is one such tool. It includes as standard a graphical remote control tool. In addition to SMS, many third-party tools provide remote control, including:

  • Norton PC Anywhere

  • Compaq Carbon Copy

In Windows XP Professional, the remote assistance agent was introduced as partof the base operating system. This allows administrators to take control of remote desktops and solve or help solve problems.

Using Scripts for Remote Management in Win32

Windows Scripting Host is the resident runtime environment for ActiveX scripting engines and their associated programming languages. Microsoft provides Visual Basic Scripting Edition and Jscript (an implementation of ECMAScript Edition 3) with Windows 2000. There are third-party implementations of Perl, REXX, Python, and other language engines. ActiveX scripting code can also be hosted by Active Server Pages, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Active Directory network logon scripts. Together with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Active Directory Scripting Interface (ADSI) components , virtually anything in the Windows environment can be scripted.

Scripts run by the Windows Scripting Host service can access the local file system and mapped network drives ; desktop shortcuts; the Windows registry; special folders, such as My Documents; Active Directory objects; User Profiles; Environment variables ; the event log; performance counters; and the Windows Installer service. Scripts can make use of installed applications that provide ActiveX interfaces such as those in the Microsoft Office suite, and they can be invoked remotely.

Other tools available to the Systems Administrator for automating jobs are the network logon script and the Task Scheduler and AT command line interfaces tothe Windows Scheduler service. Many third-party tools are also available with additional or different ways of accomplishing automated management tasks . The Windows administrator should also be familiar with the tools provided on the Windows 2000 Professional and Server CDs and the Windows 2000 Resource Kits, which contain dozens of utilities, including many that are designed for remote automation.

Enabling Windows Script Host in Win32

You can enable remote scripting in Win32-based applications as described in the following procedure.

To enable remote scripting

  1. Install Windows Script Host 5.6, available at http://www.microsoft.com/scripting ,on both systems.

  2. Change the following registry key on the remote server, where the script willbe executed:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Script Host\Settings remote = 1 
  1. Ensure that you have administrative rights on the target computer.

Using Windows Script Host in Win32

After you have enabled remote scripting, pass a script to the WshController objects CreateScript method, provided it doesnt use any user interface elements such as WScript . Echo , STDIO , WshShell::Popup , MsgBox , InputBox , and other user-interface generating methods and objects.

Following are script templates that you can use to create remote administration scripts:

  • Admin.vbs is a template for a standard administrators tool for copying and remotely executing the client script.

  • Client.vbs carries out the work and reports back events that are raised onthe remote computer. In this case, the control script uses ADSI to retrieve the computer names from Active Directory.

The following is the code for the Admin.vbs script:

 


UNIX Application Migration Guide
Unix Application Migration Guide (Patterns & Practices)
ISBN: 0735618380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 134

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