Doing remote system calls via SAMBA would be a bit tricky, I think you're correct in that SAMBA isn't really designed for that sort of thing.

You aren't the first to run across this issue though. There are a few other cross platform applications that do similar things to what you are attempting to accomplish. One in particular that I have in mind is called Big Brother. It can monitor various operating systems, including Linux and NT, from one central location. What they do is install a daemon (or service in the NT world) on each of the computers that need to be monitored. These daemons handle the the calls that can't be determined remotely.. ie, current disk usage, cpu usage, bandwidth utilization, etc.

They seem to have designed it well, in that it is reasonably simple to create a plug-in for it. If you don't want to spend the time creating this system yourself, you could always consider using Big Brother, and creating a plug-in for the functionality you wish to have. If it doesn't do what you want, you could always use it's system as an example.

They developed their own protocol (I believe) for the system to communicate with all the remote daemons it was monitoring. If you don't end up just creating a Big Brother plug-in, another method for creating such a beast would be to use SOAP or RPC, if you're boxes will have a web server running on them.

If you don't have a webserver, or you want to communicate via another network protocol, there is an excellent book on the subject called Network Programming with Perl by Lincoln Stein. Good luck!
-Eric

In reply to Re: Network Programming between Linux/NT by andreychek
in thread Network Programming between Linux/NT by Tuna

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.