Can Radmind be run remotely?

By: Richard Glaser - Revised: 2006-05-30 devin

Yes, you have multiple options for running radmind remotely

If you have Apple Remote Desktop installed on clients, the "Send Unix command..." to run the tools remotely.

You can run radmind remotely with or without any end-user interaction. If you have SSH enabled on the client you can run the tools remotely using SSH.

You can run a script that waits for an event, like waiting for a trigger file to be created (a regular file but with a specific name and location, like /tmp/run_maintenance_now), poll a webserver for a webpage change (using cURL), or even open up a port and wait for a specific packet message.

Looking for a trigger file polls the file system (polling is considered bad in most cases), but by looking for a file, you can actually start radmind with ARD via copying a file or using the send Unix command and "touch"-ing it, or even using Timbuktu and copying a file with the right name to the right location. ULabMin includes an idlescript that does looks for a trigger file and will run radmind if it exists.

cURL'ing a webpage is another form of polling, but it allows you to use, for example, a web database that non-admin consultants can use to only run radmind. Nobody has built this sort of functionality with curl yet.

Finally, opening a port is also possible, and it uses less resources because it doesn't poll, but it does open a port on the computer. There is a sample script in the radmind list archives of a perl script that will do this.

In all of these cases, the idlescript that is waiting for the triggering event must then execute the necessary steps to run radmind. In many cases, that means making sure a user is not logged in (and alerting them that maintenance is going to execute, they have x minutes to save their work on a server etc), preventing login by calling iHook and covering the login panel, or better to reboot and use a startup item that is aware that it should run radmind at startup. Rebooting is the best method because it resets many thing that could get in the way of the radmind tools. ULabMin includes all of this functionality.