in reply to Re: IO::Pty, Net::Telnet and SSH
in thread IO::Pty, Net::Telnet and SSH [SOLVED]

Hi,

I had been using Net::SSH::Perl successfully. The problem came when I needed to run some interactive programs on the remote servers and needed Expect to interact with them. Since Expect can either spawn a new program or work with an open filehandle, I thought I'd find a way to open a SSH or Telnet connection to a server, do the login work then let Expect takeover when an interactive script had to be executed on the remote side.

I'm thinking what I could do is spawn SSH directly from Expect. The thing is I don't *always* need to run interactive scripts on the remote side, hence why I don't *always* need to use Expect. This is why I thought it would be neater to have Net::Telnet open the Telnet or SSH connection (depending on server) then run Expect when I need to.

I'm open to suggestions, if you have another way in mind of how I can achieve this (preferably non-hackish way as the idea is that the code is maintainable afterwards)

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Re^3: IO::Pty, Net::Telnet and SSH
by fmerges (Chaplain) on Nov 04, 2006 at 16:40 UTC

    Hi,

    And why not using something like a dispatch table, so things that don't need to be interactive uses the $ssh->cmd inside of the subroutines that handles the command, and for the ones you need interactive, you just use the $ssh->shell with Expect. Take a look at the shell method on Net::SSH::Perl.

    Regards,

    fmerges at irc.freenode.net
[reply]

      Not a bad suggestion, but that defeats the purpose of this script I'm writing. I need to run an interactive program not on 1 server, on 500+ of them, so the idea is that this Perl script can connect to each server, and enter the same input that I gave the Perl script.

      To give you an idea how this all fits together, when I run my script, it asks me for a list of servers, then it asks me a few questions. Once I'm done entering the info, the script will (when I find a fix for this IO::Pty, Net::Telnet and SSH issue) connect to each server and run the interactive program with the input I gave the program. So running the $ssh->shell isn't going to work.

[reply]

        Hi,

        Don't know if this will work for you, but I know people who solved this kind of issue writting small servers that provide system commands with RPC capabilities, using SOAP or XML-RPC for example.

        I mean first try with what you are doing, if it works okay, but otherwise think about this:

          Caller.pl  <----XMLRPC/SOAP-----> Bridge.pl 
                                       /
                                       |
                                       /
      System/Native Program  <-----> Expect

        [download]

        This way you can easily provide remote calls to existing programs that uses the STDIN without changing anything.

        Regards,

        fmerges at irc.freenode.net
[reply]
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