blog/data/2012-12-06-bofhd-scripting.txt

   1 Title: Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC
   2 Tags: english, sysadmin
   3 Date: 2012-12-06 10:30
   4
   5 <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
   6 Oslo</a>, we use the
   7 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
   8 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
   9 I've known since the system was written that the server was providing
  10 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
  11 never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we always use
  12 the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  Here are a few
  13 notes on how to use it with Python.</p>
  14
  15 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
  16 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
  17 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
  18 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
  19 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
  20 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
  21
  22 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
  23 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
  24 user currently logged in:</p>
  25
  26 <blockquote><pre>
  27 #!/usr/bin/env python
  28 import getpass
  29 import xmlrpclib
  30 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
  31 username = getpass.getuser()
  32 password = getpass.getpass()
  33 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
  34 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
  35 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
  36 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
  37 result = server.logout(sessionid)
  38 print result
  39 </pre></blockquote>
  40
  41 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
  42 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>