Where I work at the University of +Oslo, we use the +Cerebrum user +administration system to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc. +I've known since the system was written that the server is providing +an XML-RPC API, but +I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we +always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want +to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up +virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with +Python.
+ +I started by looking at the source of the Java +bofh +client, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also +googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found +a +simple example in the XML-RPC howto.
+ +This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of +commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the +user currently logged in:
+ ++ ++#!/usr/bin/env python +import getpass +import xmlrpclib +server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000'; +username = getpass.getuser() +password = getpass.getpass() +server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url); +#print server.get_commands(sessionid) +sessionid = server.login(username, password) +print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username) +result = server.logout(sessionid) +print result +
Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS +and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
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