executing on a remote machine - usb

The Setup
We have an aircon unit in the office but it takes a good hour to start cooling the place down, I have an IR USB device that communicates via a com port. I have a utility to send various IR codes to control an aircon unit.
I use .bat files to load the .exe and the .bin file
irtoy.exe -d COM4 -p -a 100 -f ACPowerToggle.bin
My question is what's the best way I can execute this on a remote server? Is it possible from a web server or something else?

I suggest using an SSH server like OpenSSH, as well as providing secure access, you can execute programs, manage everything needed as well as direct access to the computer's operating system.
Edit:
Yes, you can use both iOS and Android apps to access your SSH server using a smart phone.

Related

Can I run one WSL2 virtual machine instance on two system?

I'm new to the WSL2 and wondering if it's possible to run the same WSL2 ubuntu instance on both my desktop and laptop.
Now I am able to use wsl --export and wsl --import method to save and load the system to/from my portable hard drive. But these methods takes a long time.
I notice that wsl --import load a file named ext4.vhdx. Is there a way to load straightly from this file?
Update v2.0:
I was able to get a workaround and it works great.
Thanks to Booting from vhdx here, I was able to load straightly from my vhdx file on my portable hard disk. Windows track down its subsystem with regedit, So we can write our own(p.s: make sure to get BasePath right, it starts with "\\\\?", or you will not be able to access the subsystem' filesystem on your host system.):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\【your SID here】\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{【UUID here】}]
"State"=dword:00000001
"DistributionName"="distribution name"
"Version"=dword:00000002
"BasePath"="vhdx folder path" 【 e.g. "\\\\?\\E:\\S061\\WSL\\ubuntu-20"】
"Flags"=dword:0000000f
"DefaultUid"=dword:000003e8
I suppose the best way to do this would be to store ext4.vhd on a network storage device accessible to both devices.
I have previosly mentioned how to move ext4.vhd. You can check that out here
Basically you need to export from one machine and import it while making sure the vhd file is configured for wsl to access from the network storage
Since this should *officially* not supported expect some performance hits
Another way would be to run WSL on one computer and ssh/remote desktop to it from another device on the network
I'm of the strong belief that sharing the same ext4 vhd between two VM's simultaneously would be a bad idea. See this and this Unix & Linux StackExchange, including the part about ...
note that sharing LVs/partitions on a single disk between the servers at the same time is NOT very safe. You should only access whole disks from any of the servers at one time.
However, as dopewind's answer mentioned, you can access the WSL instance on one computer (probably the desktop) from another (e.g. the laptop). There are several techniques you can use:
If you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise on one of the computers, you can enable Remote Desktop, which allows you to access pretty much everything on one computer from another. RDP ("Remote Desktop Protocol") even works from other devices such as an iPad or Android tablet (or even a phone, although that's a bit of a small screen for a "desktop"). That said, there are better, more idiomatic solutions for WSL ...
You could enable SSH server on the Windows 10 computer with the WSL instance (instructions). This may sound counterintuitive to some people, since Linux itself running in the WSL instance also includes an SSH server (by default). But by SSH'ing from (for example) your laptop into your desktop's Windows 10, you can then launch any WSL instance you have installed (if you choose to install more than one) via wsl -d <distroName>. You also avoid a lot of the network unpleasantness in the next option ...
You could, as mentioned above, enable SSH on the WSL instance (usually something like sudo service ssh start) and then ssh directly into it. However, note that WSL2 instances are NAT'd, so there's a whole lot more hackery that you have to do to get access to the network interface. There's a whole huge thread on the WSL Github about it. Personally, I'd recommend the "Windows SSH Server" option mentioned about to start out with, then you can worry about direct SSH access later if you need it.
Side note: Even though I have SSH enabled on my WSL instances, I still use Windows SSH to proxy to them, to avoid these networking issues.

Can we use BLPAPI remotely?

The SDKs at https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/api-library/ allow you to connect to localhost 8194 to fetch data. Please correct if any of the following is incorrect:
The use of the SDK requires the installation of a Terminal software on the PC where the program using the SDK is being run.
The Terminal software creates an endpoint listening on port 8194 through which the data can be fetched.
Question:
Is it possible for another computer in the local network to run the SDK and connect to the computer that hosts the Terminal service?
Does the Terminal service license support such use wherein the data leaves the PC and gets pulled to a different PC?
Regards
No, it is not technically possible to connect to another PC which is running the Terminal and even if you can get around this it is not allowed by the license. Data downloaded on a PC running the Terminal must stay on that PC.
Bloomberg offers 2 solutions which don't require the Terminal to run and do require authentication: Server API (SAPI) and B-PIPE. To clarify, because you're describing having to run the Terminal on the PC you're necessarily talking about Desktop API.

How to detect the OS and CPU architecture of a remote SSH server

I have a program that connects to a remote machine via SSH. I want to upload and run a binary on that machine. In order to do that I need to know what OS it is (I will support Linux, Mac and probably Windows), and what CPU architecture (I will probably only support x86_64, but it would be good to be able to detect others and print a sensible error, if this is possible).
It doesn't look like the SSH protocol itself provides any of this information. Is there a simple, ROBUST way to do this? With as few hacks as possible (no hairy Bash scripts!).
The best thing I can think of is to try running uname -s -m, and whatever the Windows equivalent is and parse the results.
The SSH protocol doesn't provide any information about the remote system except its protocol version. However, oftentimes vendors will include a string in the protocol string. For example, if you do nc gitlab.com 22 </dev/null | head -n 1, you can tell that GitLab runs Ubuntu.
However, not all remote systems provide this information, so for a reliable test, you'll probably need to log into the system. As mentioned, you can run uname on Unix systems, and cmd /c ver on Windows systems to find out what OS you're on. Note that the latter will not work on Windows if you log into a MinGW-based bash on Windows, since the /c will be rewritten as C:\; you'll need to double the slash or use uname there.
I'm not aware of a single command that you can invoke that will work on all systems, so you'll probably have to make multiple shell requests. You are probably better off doing this using an SSH library, since the OpenSSH binary will print any banner from the remote side whether you want it or not, and that can be confused with the output you get from the remote side.

Using saltstack ssh

Is there a difference between using salt-proxy ssh and directly salt-ssh? I'm interested because according to documentation both aimed to run remote commands without agent installation on the end machine.
You cant simply do salt-ssh on a proxy minion, for which you would have to write your own custom ssh interface to the remote system, because your proxy minion may not support doing salt-ssh.
How to choose between using salt-ssh vs salt-proxy totally depends on the type of a minion system.
As stated in the saltstack documentation - https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/ssh/index.html and
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/proxyminion/index.html
For salt-ssh to be used, the remote system must have python installed - one of the criteria. For example, controlling ubuntu from centos.
As stated in the salt-proxy doc,
Proxy minions are a developing Salt feature that enables controlling
devices that, for whatever reason, cannot run a standard salt-minion.
Examples include network gear that has an API but runs a proprietary
OS, devices with limited CPU or memory, or devices that could run a
minion, but for security reasons, will not.

Get remote cmd from linux termnal

I need to run some scripts in a windows remote machine from a terminal linux, I've tried using telnet however in the windows machine it's unable and there isn't installed a ssh server. So I need other way to run the command remotely without a graphical interface.
I have the possibility for run the command from a windows machine, however I need to open a SSH Tunnel to see the remote machine, I've used psexec but it didn't work for me.
Do you have access to install software on the remote server?
Your SSH client will not be able to connect to the remote machine unless that machine is running an SSH server to respond to your client's connection request.
There are a number of possible options for SSH servers to run on Windows.
(Google for ssh server windows)
Because SSH gives an external user some access to/control over your server it is designed to be a secure tool. I would therefore recommend using an SSH server which is still actively maintained, and keep it up to date. Servers which are old and no longer supported are are likely to contain known security issues which may never be addressed, thereby leaving your server vulnerable.
There are a number of good free open-source solutions for this, so you shouldn't need to buy anything.
In the past I've worked with Windows machines running Cygwin, with the OpenSSH ssh server installed. Depending how much of the Cygwin system you choose to install, it can make the target Windows host rather like logging into another Linux box in terms of environment.
You can download the installer for Cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/