nexec examples?

[Anon Anon]

Hi Everyone,

 

Does anyone have any script/automation examples that your customers may be running via “nexec”?  I am not actually looking for the code/scripts themselves - just examples on what people are using it for.

I believe the probe was originally developed for BarCap (I think?).  We have a competitive situation with one of our MSP’s that is looking for ideas on when and how automation in alarm management is being used in real life (i.e. restart a number or processes/servers/whatever when a business app goes down, run a clean up script, etc.).

 

Thanks for anything you can share.

[Anon Anon]

Dan

 

The original idea of the nexec was to allow non privelged user the ability to run privileged commands on a server (primarily Unix). The idea was that a set of commands would be defined by a trusted user, which could be run by other users when they needed to do so, like check the contents of a application log file, run some diagnostic commands to which they typically would not have access to. So the barcap examples would be different to what you are expecting.

 

Rgs

 

Anjay

 

[Anon Anon]

Dan,

 

I have three examples that might interest you even though they are not exactly what you asked about:

 

• CDW used the nexec probe to allow Windows engineers to run a quarterly check script. This is similar to the use case that Anjay described. This saved the engineers a lot of time looking up credentials for the customer systems, logging in, etc. The script was written in VBScript, and it just checked a bunch of settings and conditions and returned information about any follow-up that was required.
• I used the nexec probe to allow me to script checks that required commands to be run. Later I discovered that some of these things could have been answered with the inst_list callback on the robot, but it was useful nonetheless. I used this to check the versions of Perl and the NSA that were installed on servers.
• We actually planned to use the nexec probe with AO profiles as part of automatic responses to alarms. Unfortunately, no one ever came up with any specific use cases. We setup one AO profile to automatically respond to alarms, but that used the processes probe to kill a process if it used too much memory.

-Keith