Hello NG,
I am trying to find some information about the possibility to control two (or more) clients (PCs) via a Python application running on a main server. Ideally, this application should be able to monitor (almost in real time) the "activity" of these clients (which applications are launched, closed and so on, if this is even possible, obviously). Does anyone have to share some information/pointer?
Thank you a lot.
Andrea.
Andrea,
Since you have not specified any operating system, my suggestion is for you to go for a generic solution like pyheartbeat. Pyheartbeat is a program with server and client components and uses UDP to monitor which client computers are down and which, active.
You can modify pyheartbeat to do what you are wanting, by wrapping your monitoring functions and sending that information back to the server. To make things more elegant, you could probably come up with an XML schema (or other formatted text like JSON or use Pickle to serialize/de-serialze data structures) so that the information is machine-friendly but you still can translate the XML for a pretty display on the server.
Pyheartbeat can be found at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52302
If you are using Windows NT-based technology, you can setup your clients so that all activity is logged to the server; I believe there are 3rd pary applications available that can do this for you. Sorry, I don't know the specifics on how to do it.
For *nix OSes, you can have the syslog daemon log to a remote machine instead of the local. So, you can log all activity to the UNIX server. (Though, to me, it appears that you are looking for remote top like functionality for networked PCs).
Thanks, -Kartic -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
