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.
Related
I am currently running ossec 3.6 in local mode and forwarding data to Splunk. I cannot seem to find something similar in wazuh - am I missing something? We really don't want to have a manager as all our data goes to Splunk anyway. We'd like to continue outputting ossec/wazuh data in Splunk format and send straight to Splunk. I've Googled and read the wazuh docs, but cannot find anything that addresses this. Is this possible?
Currently, there is no way to use standalone agents in Wazuh.
However, Wazuh managers also act as an standalone agent. Therefore, if the system you want to monitor is Linux, you can directly install the Wazuh-manager package there and it will take care of collecting and analyzing its local logs. Take a look at this doc, in case it helps Migrating OSSEC server.
If your target version is different from Linux (Windows, macOS, etc), there is no alternative and you will have to install a Wazuh-manager on a linux instance that the agent can report to. Agents without a manager cannot do anything.
I hope this solves your question!
I am working on customizing the oracle service cloud customer portal, but since OSvC provides only WebDAV to connect to it. It is very time-consuming to edit files and then upload them to WebDAV even for a single word change.
I am looking for a solution to serve it locally make desired changes and then upload the desired code to webDEV.
But after searching the file structure I can not make which framework it uses, I tried to use websites like https://builtwith.com/ and WhatRuns but they are also not able to find anything useful.
Although after searching in the file structure, I find some files of CodeIgnitor but the structure is way more different than the CodeIgnitor folder structure.
The short answer is no, you will not be able to run Customer Portal locally. While it is a fork of CodeIgniter from many years ago, there are server-side dependencies that will prevent you from running it in a local sandbox.
That said, it is possible to automate many of the manual tasks of interacting with WebDAV for change testing. If you edit locally, then you can use scripting hooks or event RPA robots to automate some of the manual file movement. Personally I have a flow to edit remotely in my test environment with an editor (like VSCode or Nova) that can connect to a remote server via WebDAV and edit files directly in the development area of a site. Then, when finished, I have a script that pulls down the latest version of all files and then allows me to commit changes to Git for SCM.
Another option is RPA. You can develop a robot that can be run to automate the manual tasks that you face in your workflow. Personally, I think that scripting is a better solution than RPA since you can automate all of the actions via scripting or a shell. But, it's another option to consider.
Another way of "Live editing" the OSvC CP code is to connect to WebDav via a software that supports it like Mountain Duck which uploads your code to OSvC on save.
OR use the better solution Windows Explorer which supports connecting to WebDav and treating it like a network drive, by going on My Computer -> Computer -> Map Network Drive then put https://yoursite.custhelp.com/dav/cp click Next then you'll be promoted to login using your OSvC login.
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 should I script my application(a C# console application), to run at the virtual machine start-up?
Should I use shell scripts or something else?
What should the structure of the script file be like?
Thanks, Catalin
Just copy you exe file in the Startup folder (Start->All Programs->Startup, right click->open)
You might try using SrvStart. SrvStart allows you to run any application as a Windows Service. While the vast majority of applications are not suited for this type of deployment (i.e. Notepad, Microsoft Word, etc.), there are lots of utilities which can run seamlessly as a background service. By interfacing with the Windows Service Manager, SrvStart “interprets” the Operating System commands, such as start (open) and stop (close), and sends them to the target application which doesn’t know the difference.
Here is an article that might be a useful starting place:
http://www.howtogeek.com/50786/using-srvstart-to-run-any-application-as-a-windows-service/
I've attempted just about everything to get our ClickOnce VB.NET app to run under Terminal Services as a RemoteApp. I have a batch file that runs the .application file for the app.
This works fine via RDP desktop session on the terminal server. As a TS RemoteApp, however, well... not so much.
I get a quick flash of command prompt (the batch file) on the client system and then... nothing...
Same goes for having it point to the .application file directly (without using a batch file) or even copying the publication locally and having it point to that.
I found a technet.microsoft.com discussion about a similar issue, but there's no resolution to it listed.
For anyone who has run into this before and got it working, what did you have to do?
We currently use RemoteApp's for everything else on that server, so I'm hoping to stick with that if possible.
The current workaround is to build and run an MSI-based installer for the app on our terminal server whenever we publish via OneClick out to the network, but this can be quite a pain at times and is easy to forget to do.
Since the app works fine via Terminal Services when run in full desktop mode but not during RemoteApp, I don't think it's anything specific to Terminal Server permissions so much as ClickOnce requiring something that isn't available when running as a RemoteApp.
The Key to getting it to work is to use Windows Explorer "C:\windows\explorer.exe". This process is the base process when you login to a full session.
If you setup the RemoteApp to use Windows Explorer and the command line argument of the path to the .application file for the ClickOnce application then it will work when launched as a remote application. Windows Explorer will flash for a second when it starts, but it will disappear then the ClickOnce application will launch.
Why does it have to be a ClickOnce application? I would consider just deploying the exe file and assemblies.
I know it only half a solution, but if the application does not change much, it might be a good solution.
I believe your problem is related to the fact that ClickOnce needs to store it's data in a special user folder called the ClickOnce application cache. Apparently because of how Terminal Services sets up user folders ClickOnce can't access this in TerminalServices mode.
See this link for more information.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/267k390a(VS.80).aspx
There may not be a way to do it :(
Can you launch the .exe directly? It's buried under your profile in \AppData\Local\Apps\2.0[obfuscated folders], but you should be able to find it.
That will skip the built-in update process, but if it can be launched that way you could then write code to do a manual update after the application starts.
Faced the same problem this morning and got it resolved by copying the clickonce app's directory from the user settings folder to somewhere like c:\MyApp\ - I know its nasty and not very ideal.. but good enough for me!
We recently ran across this issue and decided to post a bug report on this issue to the Visual Studio development team. Feel free to comment on the bug report. It has to be a bug in ClickOnce caused by some changes in Server 2008.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/653362/net-clickonce-deployment-not-working-as-remoteapp-or-citrix-xenapp-on-server-2008-server-2008-r2
We also have a discussion on the MSDN forums covering this issue:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/thread/7f41667d-287a-4157-be71-d408751358d9/#92a7e5d9-22b6-44ba-9346-ef87a3b85edc
Try using RegMon and FileMon when starting the app - You may be able to track it down to a file and/or registry permission issue.
Also maybe check the event logs to see if anything's getting logged when the process fails.