batch file launched from ssh doesn't display on host - ssh

I'm trying to launch a graphic program on a host. The program is launched from a batch file which resides on the host.
My host is Windows 10, my client is Windows Server 2008.
I tried using ssh through PuTTy and and through CygWin, getting the same results.
After launching the program from the client, it is running properly on the host - I can see the CPU usage go up and the output is written to file. However, nothing is displayed on the host's screen.
I have one user on the host, Administrator, and that is the one that I logged into through ssh.
When I launch the batch file directly from the host, everything works fine - I do see the program display properly.
Any idea why this is happening?
Thanks!

From everything I've seen, this is indeed not possible on Windows 10, at least not without some serious hacking. Instead, we're using the Python package xmlrpc, which is great for this sort of thing.

Related

Apache webserver on ubuntu giving error 500 remotely, works fine on the local machine

I have a small PC that I am using as a web kiosk. Running ubuntu 20.04 with a typical lamp stack. I have installed the lamp stack as I normally do (I have a few machines with apache around here) but for some reason this new PC I just got (with preinstalled ubuntu) is giving me a headache I cannot figure out.
When the system loads it auto logs in and boots to the kiosk, using snap and wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk. That part works fine. The issue is when I try to load the site from another machine, it gives me an Error 500. The website has an admin backend that I need to be able to access. The backend is nothing crazy, just a simple user login system with the ability to post some data to mysql that I made. The site works 100% on my main computer that I developed it on, and it works remotely while on my main machine. I zipped all the files and copied them over to the new PC unzipped and now its giving me the 500 error when trying to access from any other PC.
Small testing php files like a simple echo statement or phpinfo will load just fine locally and remotely. phpmyadmin also loads just fine remotely and locally.
What could be the issue? Why would it load locally and give a 500 error remotely? I am at a loss.
I have tried uninstalling/purging/reinstalling the lamp stack. UFW is disabled, I've cleared cache and tried other browser and other machines. Still won't load remotely.

Setting display resolution for Selenium tests on virtual machine as Jenkins Slave

I'm having trouble running some Selenium tests on a Jenkins Slave. To be specific, the display resolution that is used to run the tests is too small, causing some of the tests to fail.
To check the display resolution, we log the display height and width to the console, using:
driver.manage().window().maximize();
System.out.println("Window height: " + driver.manage().window().getSize().getHeight());
System.out.println("Window width: " + driver.manage().window().getSize().getWidth());
This returns:
Window height: 784
Window width: 1040
which seems like a very strange resolution to me. The desired resolution is 1920 x 1080.
The server that is used as a slave is a virtual machine (Windows Server 2012 R2). The Jenkins Slave is Connected via JNLP agent. The slave has the service running with Log On As "Local System" with the "Allow service to interact with desktop" option enabled.
So far we've tried a number of things like:
Connecting to slave VM using RDP and disconnecting to leave session open with desired display resolution
Using powershell to set the display resolution
Setting the default display resolution in the VM configuration
Setting the window dimensions using Selenium
And more...
All of these didn't resolve the issues. Suggestions are very welcome!
Finally managed to fix these issues after realizing that Jenkins does not necessarily need to run the slaves as a windows service. To start the slave, the JNLP agent can be downloaded from Jenkins and copied to the server. When running the JNLP file, you can select for the option to install the slave agent as a service.
Previously we had this option selected, that's why the slave was running as a service. After stopping and removing the service, we ran the JNLP file again and made sure to not select the option.
The solutions suggested that included disconnecting the remote desktop session and leaving the session open with a large resolution didn't work when running the slave as a service. They do work however when running the slave in the default way.
Make sure that the remote desktop session is not ended after a certain period of time:
Hope this helps someone!
Based on my experience with this you can't solve this problem programmatically. Your tests will run on the resolution which was used last time when you physically accessed this VM's display. For example, if I open VM on my big screen monitor and maximize it, tests will run on that resolution. But if I open it on my laptop screen and close RDP connection, tests will run on that smaller screen size.
I know it sounds strange, but I really couldn't find better solution. :D So now I must be careful to maximize VM display on my bigger screen before I close VM. You will probably dislike this answer, but remember it when you find yourself out of other solutions. ;)
Solution that worked for me is to run Chrome in a 'headless' mode (without GUI). It works with Jenkins Agent running as a service, when GUI is not available.
Here is the code sample of the web driver initialization:
var options = new ChromeOptions();
options.BinaryLocation = #"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe";
options.AddArgument("Headless");
options.AddArgument("window-size=1920,1080");
driver = new ChromeDriver(#"<path>\Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver.2.37.0\driver\win32", options);
I've been experienced the same issue. My seleniumn tests run under jenkins slave installed as windows service, using "Local System" account with "Allow service to interact with desktop" option enabled in windows 7. Some test cases were always failed due to incorrect display resolution.
I logged in to the console of the windows VM (EXSI Server + VMware Fusion), changed the resolution to 1400x900, and restart the windwos VM. Everything works well now.

Logging the output of VBoxHeadless

I want to be able to launch a VM in headless mode and log the outputs of its tty to the command line.
Basically I have a situation where the VM will be launched remotely (hence the command line requirement), but every once and a while, the VM's bootup sequence freezes, and right now there's no way for me to debug why the VM is not booting up properly unless I go there manually and view it in a non-headless mode.
The VM itself does not have a GUI, it just boots into TTY mode.
So is there anyway I can get some debugging output from the TTY while it's headless?
One crazy idea would be using non-headless mode and taking screenshots of the window that opens, but there must be a better way!
You can use the following command to output a PNG file of the current screen, even in headless mode:
vboxmanage controlvm [vmname] screenshotpng screen.png
I am trying to get some integration testing for bootstrapped virtualboxes up and running and ran into the exact same problem. After finding out that VRDP is a dead end, because RDP cannot send text but only bitmaps, I remembered that some cloud providers require grub to output to ttyS0.
What is ttyS0 you ask? It's the serial console of course :-)
Here's how to configure Debian to output to serial console
VirtualBox allows you to redirect the serial port into either a file or a pipe, meaning you should be able to get all the information you desire by simply reading the specified filepath.

Print PDF from Navision Application Server

I have problem printing reports to PDF through bullzip from Navision Application Server (1) if user is not in Local Admin group (2). Only under both conditions.
In Nav code I'm doing the following: init bullzip automation object (set all parameters to suppress GUI), run report to print document to virtual bullzip printer, catch output file. Thats it. Straight as a rail.
I have two environments: Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (different versions of Nav, but this is changing nothing). On Windows 7 it just do nothing (but works if user is admin). On server I can see error in Event Log (translated to English)
Faulting application gui.exe, version 9.8.0.1599, time stamp 0x517126dc, faulting module USER32.dll, version 6.0.6002.18541, time stamp 0x4ec3e39f, exception code 0xc0000142, fault offset 0x0006f52f, the process ID 0x3bc, application start time 0x01ce562238369fa9.
Gui.exe is a part of bullzip.
If I run the same code from Nav Classic Client, or from the same NAS launched in command line, or under local administrator account, or if i put the NAS user in local admin group - it works just fine.
To solve this problem i need to find out one of two and how to fix it:
What is the difference between local admin and regular user that could cause application to crash in non-interactive mode (service) under regular user account.
What is the difference in running NAS as service and as command line that could cause application to crash when run as service.
What I've tried so far: extend non-interactive desktop heap, give user all local privileges that admin have in gpedit. Not works. Don't know direction for further digging.
Any alternative free pdf printers advices are welcome.
This question is still actual. Though I've managed to setup PDF printing with PDFCreator. The tough part was to let several different NAS to print simultaneously. And now the setup have a bottleneck - PDFCreator's printing queue. With bullzip automations it could be avoided.
We've had some cases where third party DLL's have crashed within NAV due to permission restrictions.
The only effective way we could narrow down the files that it was trying to access was through using Process Monitor to try narrow down what was causing permission issues.
We found a folder within System32 to do with the System's Network Profile that some DLLs use. On that note, NAS's and such should be run under a domain account.
I think re-installing the application will do that,
Just make sure you are uninstalling each bullzip and ghost script,
Now Ghost script is tricky thing, if you are installing 32 bit over 64 then you are having problem,
refer this download link download appropriate version, install it,
and then install bullzip, after downloading new version from here
this will do..
then also if any problem(if you are using application for automation, you require new com object..) refer Forum, that explains most of application interface problems..
where you need to use public class PdfSettings with namespace bioPdf.
I hope this will help ..

How would I created a flexible EC2 Windows 2008 boot script?

If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.