I’m very interested on WinPSClient too. I’m planning to install it on a series of servers that we will be configuring in the next few weeks.
I second the idea of using Windows Task Scheduler.
Has there been any thought on how to enable creating extensions? It could be like what’s done in Unix, or copy what’s done in BBWin.
Thanks!
glauber
From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Shea, Graeme A Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 14:31 To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: Re: [Xymon] WinPSClient - Updates?
What if instead of “wrapping” a service around it the script ran as a scheduled task every 5 minutes?
For the task properties the command line becomes something like C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
And the argument &'C:\Path_To_Client\ XymonPSClient.ps1'
Put a tick in repeat task, set the period to 5 mins and the duration to indefinably. Probably no need to save the password.
The task can be exported as an xml file for import into other systems and/or included in the distribution package.
Regards Graeme
From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of David Baldwin Sent: Wednesday, 13 November 2013 3:55 PM To: Jason Richards Pagh; xymon at xymon.com<mailto:xymon at xymon.com> 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.