Network Message Passing Between Systems
 

Good day Everyone.
I have a need of a cross-platform toolset and regardless of my google queries I am not finding what I am looking for. I hope someone can give some incite.

I am looking for a way that I can send a message from any computer system to Linux server system, have the server record the string to a file on its local disk, and execute an update program I wrote.

If it helps explain my situation, I will share what I am trying to do. I have a C program that writes a string of about 50-100 characters to a file. This program runs several times a day on many servers (Linux and Windows). Instead of writing to a file on the local disk I would like for the program to send that string to my CentOS 4 server and have the server record the string and run a update program.

Before I added the windows systems and Linux systems without ssh, I was simply just executing:
ssh me@CentOS4 "echo hello > /tmp/file ; ./update_my_files"

However, trying to expand this out to systems that do not have SSH (including windows) has been difficult. I have experimented with using windows netsend, telnet, and the Linux commands of write, mesg, and wall but was not able to get the results I was hoping for.

Has anyone done this type of thing? Or do you know of a project that does this? Any suggestions and input are welcome.

Thanks Everyone.

i would think that syslog would probably be a good option, especially if you use something like syslog-ng instead of the older syslogd or equivalents. there are plenty of widgets to send arbitrary text to syslog, and syslog-ng can automatically manage client addresses etc if you need extra data other than the raw message.

i do a slightly similar thing where i work. we run ssylog-ng on a generic centos server, and messages that come into syslog on a given port are logged into a file per client but also into a second spool file. this second file is read permanently by a really simple bash script which reads each line in turn and runs additional commands from that input. nothign to it really.

you might also want to look at splunk for a really freaky modern take on data logging. not played with it myself, but it seems extremely powerful and can acquire log data from a horrific number of different cross platform technologies and merge them all into a standard format and such like.

Can you explain this a bit more please? I am slightly familiar with syslog as I know it is responsible for almost all of the system logs for the kernel, firewall, ect. However, I did not know that you can have it listen on specific ports. What do you use to send the messages from the other systems?

Thanks for replying!

well the systems that log to it are cisco gear and other stuff, but there are tools on linux like "logger" that sends arbitrary data from a command lne to syslog, and many equivalents for windows you can find through google.

i'd suggest looking at the gentoo syslog documentation and that gives a really nice overview of how syslog-ng can give you lots of flexibility in different ways.