I love the smell of new machines in the morning.
I'm automating a machine creation workflow that involves several separate systems across my infrastructure, some of which involve 15 year old perl scripts on Solaris hosts, PXE Booting Linux systems, and Powershell on Windows Server 2008.
I can script each of the individual parts, and integrating the Linux and Unix automation is fairly straightforward, but I'm at a loss as to how to reliably tie together the Powershell scripts to the rest of the processes.
I would prefer if the process began on a Linux host, since I imagine that it will end up as a web application living on an Apache server, but if it needs to begin on Windows, I am hesitantly okay with that.
I would ideally like something along the lines of psexec for Linux to run against Windows, but the answer in that direction appears to by Cygwin, and as much as I appreciate all of the hard work that they put in, it has never felt right, if you know what I mean. It's great for a desktop and gives a lot of functionality, but I feel like Windows servers should be treated like Windows servers and not bastardized Unix machines (which, incidentally, is my argument against OSX servers, too, and they're actually Unix). Anyway, I don't want to go with Cygwin unless that's the last and only option.
So I guess what I'm asking is if there is a way to execute jobs on Windows machines from Linux. Without Cygwin. I'm open to ideas and suggestions, including "Look idiot, everyone uses Cygwin, so suck it up and deal with it". Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
I've spent hours pounding on this very problem and it eventually came down to two viable options (there are a lot of non-viable options out there):
With the second option you're stuck fighting your way through the the GNU/Posix abstraction layer to get at the actual windows bits. Which does restrict what you're able to do with it.
The first option pretty much builds a web-based abstraction layer you write yourself on top of your full native-stack Windows install. If you're willing to put in the work, the Linux master-server only has to do a bunch of curl calls to do what needs doing. This works best when scripts are fire-and-forget though, as building a call-back system is a lot more effort.