At my workplace, we have lab machines that we use to do our testing.
The standard procedure to reserve a machine for testing was to walk around the office to make sure that no one was using the machine.
This is highly inefficient and time consuming.
At first, I set up a web page where people could reserve the lab machine but nobody was keeping the page updated so that turned up to be useless.
I finally found a solution using Microsoft log parser and wanted to share it to the stack overflow community.
It is a batch file that runs on the machine so the user can identify the last users that use the machine and easily IM them to ask if the machine is free.
Is there a better solution to do this?
Use the built-in command qwinsta (Query Win Station) to figure out what sessions (including console) are active or inactive (disconnected) and then act on the given information (creds to krusty.ar btw for linking this already).
If you feel people are abusing the machine in question, refer to rwinsta to nuke their sessions into oblivion...
You will need to install the Microsoft Log Parser
Then create the following 2 files
TSLoginsDetails.sql
SELECT
timegenerated,
EXTRACT_TOKEN(Strings,1,'|') AS Domain,
EXTRACT_TOKEN(Strings,0,'|') AS User,
EXTRACT_TOKEN(Strings,3,'|') AS SessionName,
EXTRACT_TOKEN(Strings,4,'|') AS ClientName,
EXTRACT_TOKEN(Strings,5,'|') AS ClientAddress,
EventID
FROM Security
WHERE EventID=682
ORDER BY timegenerated DESC
TSLogins.bat
echo off
cls
c:
cd "c:\Program Files\Log Parser 2.2\"
logparser.exe file:TSLoginsDetails.sql -o:DATAGRID
Now by placing this batch file on the desktop, the user can see who were the last people to login and contact them by IM to verify if they are done.
How about posting the information from the log file to the website that tells who is currently using the machine as well.
Check and notify when they log in.
Updated the "who is using the machine" page you made prior.
Run a AT job that checks every couple of hours who is on it.
Totally out of the box:
You can install the Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) on your servers and desktops to manage your tests. It's written in Java, so you can use it on Windows and Unix/Linux desktops and servers.
Using STAF, you can create a resource pool of test servers on which you conduct tests, then write STAX jobs (STAX is a STAF execution framework) to conduct the tests. The job can grab the first available server from the resource pool, run the test, monitor the test status, log results, notify the submitter, then release the server back into the pool when done. If you have multiple people submitting jobs for tests, STAF will manage the queue of requests and satisfy them as they came in. Users can either monitor the job from their desktop, or you can set up email alerts to notify them when the test is complete.
I'm not sure if I understand you, but there are a set of command line tools to deal with terminal server sessions, and there's also a Windows API to do the same if you need to do this from a program.
Since it sounds like you're a microsoft shop, you can set up the machines as resources in outlook/exchange and reserve them that way.
Related
My project: go - 1.12.5; gin-gonic; vue-cli - 3.8.2.
On windows server 2008 go under the local account, run main.exe - works well. But when log off my account, all local account programs are closed, including my go server.
The first thing I did was try to configure IIS for my GO. Nothing good came of it.
Then I tried to run main.exe from the SYSTEM account psexec -s c:\rafd\main.exe. When log off the process does not close. But the frontend is in my account and SYSTEM does not see the local files (js, html, css) of my project
Tell me how to start the Go server, to after log off my project did not stop life
Two ways to approach it.
Go with ISS (or another web server).
Should you pick this option, you have further choices:
Leave your project's code as is, but
Make sure it's able to be told which socket to listen for connections on—so that you can tell it to listen, say, on localhost:8080.
For instance, teach your program to accept a command-line parameter for that—such as -listen or whatever.
Configure IIS in a way so that it reverse-proxies incoming HTTP requests on a certain virtual host and/or path prefix to a running instance of your server. You'll have to make the IIS configuration—the socket it proxies the requests to—and the way IIS starts your program agree with each other.
Rework the code to use FastCGI protocol instead.
This basically amounts to using net/fastcgi instead of net/http.
The upside is that IIS (even its dirt-old versions) support FastCGI out of the box.
The downsides are that FastCGI is beleived to be slightly slower than plain HTTP in Go, and that you'll lose the ability to run your program in the standalone mode.
Turn your program into a proper Windows™ service or "wrap" it with some helper tool to make it a Windows™ service.
The former is cleaner as it allows your program to actually be aware of control requests the Windows Service Management subsystem would send to you. You could also easily turn your program into a shrink-wrapped product, if/when needed. You could start with golang.org/x/sys/windows/svc.
The latter may be a bit easier, but YMMV.
If you'd like to explore this way, look for tools like srvany, nssm, winsv etc.
Note that of these, only srvany is provided by Microsoft® and, AFAIK, it's missing since Win7, W2k8, so your best built-in bet might be messing with sc.exe.
In either case, should you pick this route, you'll have to deal with the question of setting up proper permissions on your app's assets.
This question is reasonably complex in itself since there are many moving parts involved.
For a start, you have to make sure your assets are tried to be accessed not from "the process' current directory"—which may be essentially random when it runs as a service—but either from the place the process was explicitly told about when run (via command-line option or whatever) or figured out somehow using a reasonably engeneered guess (and this is a complicated topic in itself).
Next, you either have to make sure the account your Windows™ uses to run your service really has the permissions to access the place your assets are stored in.
Another possibility is to add a dedicated account and make the SCM use it for running your service.
Note that in either case proper error handling and their reporting is paramount: when your program is being run non-interactively, you want to know when something goes wrong: socket failed to be opened or listened on, assets not found, access was denied when trying to open an asset file, and so on—in all these cases you have to 1) handle the error, and 2) report it in a way you can deal with it.
For a non-interactive Windows™ program the best way may be to use the Event Log (say, via golang.org/x/sys/windows/svc/eventlog).
Simplest solutions would be using windows schedular.
Start your exe file on system logon with highest privilage in background. So whenever your system will logon it will start your exe and make runnign in background.
You can refer this answer,
How do I set a Windows scheduled task to run in the background?
I've got the following totally reproducible scenario, which I'm unable to understand:
There is a very simple application, which does nothing else than calling CreateObject("Word.Application"), that is creating an instance of MS Word for COM interop. This application is located on a Windows Terminal Server. The test case is to connect via RDP, execute the application and the application will output the time taken for the CreateObject call.
The problem now is that the execution time is significantly longer, if I connect from a specific notebook (HP Spectre): It takes 1,7s (+/- 0.1s).
If I connect from any other machine (notebook or desktop computer), then the execution time is between 0,2-0,4s.
The execution times don't depend on the used RDP account, or screen resolution, or local printers. I even did a fresh install of Windows on that HP notebook to rule out any other side-effects. It doesn't matter if the HP notebook is connected via WLAN or an USB network card. I'm at a loss understanding the 4x to 8x execution time difference to any other machine.
Which reason (component/setting) could explain this big difference in execution time?
Some additional information: I tried debugging the process using an API monitor and could see that >90% of the execution time is actually being spent between a call to RpcSend and RpcReceive. Unfortunately I can't make sense of this information.
It could be the credential management somehow being in the way.
Open the .rdp file with notepad and add
enablecredsspsupport:i:0
This setting determines whether RDP will use the Credential Security Support Provider (CredSSP) for authentication if it is available
Related documentation
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/ff393716%28v%3dws.10%29
According to your information about RpcSend and RpcReceive time consumption, it could be the case you have some service stopped on your client machine, like DCOM server or some other COM-related (they usually have "COM" or "transaction" in their names).
Some of that services could be started/stopped (if Manually mode selected) by system to/after transfer your request, but there is a time delay to starting service.
I suggest you to open Computer Management - Services or run -> services.msc and compare COM-related services running on your "slow" client and on your "fast" clients, and try to set Automatically running instead Manually or Disabled.
Also, try to run API Monitor on such processes to determine the time-consuming place more precisely.
First of all, I apologize if I am wasting your time, because it looks like a simple step which I am not able to figure out even after some research.
Ok, here is what I am trying to achieve, I have written some UI tests using TestStack.White, I would like to execute this on a Jenkins Slave as different user, since the application behaves differently based on the roles that are assigned to them in Active Directory.
So after doing a bit of lookup on google I found the following links which are relevant to what I am trying to achieve.
http://teststackwhite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/AdvancedTopics/ContinuousIntegration/
How to get Sikuli working in headless mode
Jenkins on Windows and GUI Tests without RDC
It looks like that I have to install TightVNC on Jenkins slave and should connect to slave from Jenkins Master and execute tests on slave.
Which brings me to my first question, how do I exactly achieve this from a Jenkins job?
About logging in as different users, I understand I can use to "autologon.exe" to achieve this. So just wondering how I can do this on the Windows Slave from Jenkins Master. My company doesn't allow SSH to Windows instances (slave machines), I cannot remotely execute SSH from Jenkins Master.
I understand that I may not be looking at this correctly, so any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance for your time and advice.
I am getting ready to do something similar to this but I am building a communication layer into our UI Automation application so that our build machine (our company rolled our own build machine) can send TCP request back and forth. I am going to deploy the UI Automation and the build to a share then start a virtual machine. The build machines template will have a startup script that launches both our applications from the share. Once the virtual machine is started then I am going to communicate with the UI Automation application to tell it to start and it will tell me when its done so I can tear down the VM. I am going to save all the test results out to a share for reporting purposes.
I know this doesn't directly answer your question but this approach is one I have heard about from multiple people working in various automation frameworks.
If I was going to do this in Jenkins I would look into Jenkins plugin system. The plugin system as far as I know uses Java so you should be able to create some type of communication layer and interface with some type of VM. If you don't have the option to start and stop a VM you will need to look into start and stopping processes on a remote machine while masquerading as a user. I know this can be done in C# but I have never looked into it in Java.
Thanks all for your comments and answers, basically this is what I did to get it working for me,
Establish VNC connection with a VNC Client on Jenkins slave, this was done manually not through Jenkins.
Use an app called "Caffeine" to prevent windows from locking out, it simulates a key up event on F15 (every xx seconds) so there is no interruption with testing task in my project.
Launch JNLP connection to the Jenkins Master and "Caffeine" app as a part of windows logon through VNC Connection.
Close out of the VNC connection (not logging off), this was done manually not through Jenkins.
Let the build run as different users using PSExec on the slaves.
This seems to be working fine so far, I didn't reply sooner since I wanted to monitor the jobs for a few days before posting my reply here.
I am building a Windows service that will watch for specific occurrences of events and disk activity. When such an event occurs my plan is to alert the user to the event via a client app, and provide remediation if necessary. I have (mostly) completed both the client and service components, which work great... unless the client app isn't running.
In short, I am looking for a way to start up the client app from the Windows service via CreateProcess to provide information to the user. However, it appears the service can't even see the file/folder of the client app to execute it. I suspect this is due to the credentials under which the service is running, or maybe due to service level restrictions, but wanted to reach out for some advise before I get into this any deeper.
So, the obvious question first... am I thinking about this clearly? Is the architecture plan sound, or should I look at another method? I would prefer not to re-do any of the work I have already completed, but obviously want to make sure the plan and process is solid.
Question #2, what are the limitations I face with this model? Is there a service account that will allow this level of access?
I am obviously struggling with this right now, so any thoughts or assistance will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Kris
As others have mentioned already, you can't (easily) launch an application directly from the service, so I think the easiest way around the problem is to create a process that starts on login and runs with the credentials of the logged in user, eg an app that sits in the system tray, and it opens up a named pipe or a network port to the service. If the service needs to alert the user, it sends a message down that channel and then the client process can either show its own UI or launch an application. Interprocess communication using pipes or ports are the simplest way to deal with the restrictions on session 0 processes.
A Windows service does not have access to the user session in Vista and above, so it is blocked from starting an executable on that session. You can download a white paper from Microsoft that goes into detail: Impact of Session 0 Isolation on Services and Drivers in Windows.
Since Vista, services run in session 0 and the user's desktop is always in a different session. Thus you need to work hard to start a service on the user's desktop.
It can be done but it is pretty tricky. Details can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/archive/2009/07/14/launching-an-interactive-process-from-windows-service-in-windows-vista-and-later.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
is there any way i can make my records in the database to be automatic. e.g i want a message to be sent to helpdesk if a requested service is not attended within 24 hours, without clicking anything.
technically it depends on the database you are using. if the database supports it, you could set up a scheduled job to scan the records and identify late services and email the helpdesk.
if the database doesn't support scheduled tasks then you could set up a client job on a timer to do the same thing.
This is what application software is for.
When the application saves to the database, the application also sends an email.
The traditional approach to this is to schedule a job (there are too many ways[1] to do that for me to go into details without knowing your server operating system, DBMS, and how much control you have to install or schedule programs on the server).
Your scheduled job would regularly check the database for records that have not been attended, and then take the appropriate action such as emailing the support team.
[1] Just so that this is not left completely unanswered; some DBMS (ex. SQL Server) have built in job scheduling facilities. You could run a Windows service on the server to do this. If not, you might consider running a Windows Service on one of your own servers to access the website (a great way to waste bandwidth).
Use a scheduler like this one, found on rufus site. You could program it to run, for instance, every hour, and make it do the job without human interaction.
I am a Java shop myself and I've been using quartz. It is quite good and usable if you can adjust to jruby.
I've never liked database or operating system based solutions, since you might not control them and often get asked to run on different environments.
Here's a very simple background job handler for Ruby:
codeforpeople.rubyforge.org/svn/bj/trunk/README
Easy to install and use. Fairly lightweight. It uses a SQL backend for managing concurrency. Runs on multiple machines simultaneously if you need it to.