blog/archive/2012/12/12.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from December 2012</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from December 2012</description>
   6                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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   9         <item>
  10                 <title>Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC</title>
  11                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html</link>
  12                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html</guid>
  13                 <pubDate>Thu, 6 Dec 2012 10:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
  14                 <description>&lt;p&gt;Where I work at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uio.no/&quot;&gt;University of
  15 Oslo&lt;/a&gt;, we use the
  16 &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/&quot;&gt;Cerebrum user
  17 administration system&lt;/a&gt; to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
  18 I&#39;ve known since the system was written that the server is providing
  19 an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC&quot;&gt;XML-RPC&lt;/a&gt; API, but
  20 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
  21 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
  22 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
  23 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
  24 Python.&lt;/p&gt;
  25
  26 &lt;p&gt;I started by looking at the source of the Java
  27 &lt;a href=&quot;http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/&quot;&gt;bofh
  28 client&lt;/a&gt;, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
  29 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
  30 &lt;a href=&quot;http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html&quot;&gt;a
  31 simple example in&lt;/a&gt; the XML-RPC howto.&lt;/p&gt;
  32
  33 &lt;p&gt;This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
  34 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
  35 user currently logged in:&lt;/p&gt;
  36
  37 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
  38 #!/usr/bin/env python
  39 import getpass
  40 import xmlrpclib
  41 server_url = &#39;https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000&#39;;
  42 username = getpass.getuser()
  43 password = getpass.getpass()
  44 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
  45 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
  46 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
  47 print server.run_command(sessionid, &quot;user_info&quot;, username)
  48 result = server.logout(sessionid)
  49 print result
  50 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
  51
  52 &lt;p&gt;Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
  53 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.&lt;/p&gt;
  54 </description>
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