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Release 2.11: This is the new BICsuite

A new, modern GUI, detailed operator privileges, a sophisticated approval system and much more: Discover the new features of BICsuite Release 2.11: New frontend A new frontend based on NodeJS was developed from scratch. The browser-based application has been designed as a single page application. This eliminated a significant downside of the Zope-based frontend. Using it is now also considerably more fluid and pleasant due…

Decentralized Workload Automation

Decentralized workload automation plays a key role in successful digital transformation. Decentralization is an important factor in a company’s dynamic and ability to grow. Moreover, decentralization has a positive effect on the agility, motivation and willingness of teams and managers to take responsibility. The trend towards decentralization in modern corporate cultures is taking place in parallel with the trend towards decentralization in IT: monolithic mainframes…

BICsuite and schedulix not affected by Java Log4j security vulnerability

There is currently a lot of media attention for a discovered security vulnerability in the Java Log4j library. As we take security risks very seriously, we have checked whether the components of our BICsuite and schedulix Workload Automation System written in Java are affected by the issue. We are pleased to inform our customers and interested parties that our system is not affected by the…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 6: Security Considerations and Conclusion

Although, as we’ve seen, the run program on itself is a powerful feature, it is not without risks. Code injectionis the appropriate keyword here. Just imagine a run program like the following has been configured: run program = /bin/bash -c “ls -l $DIRSPEC” And that DIRSPEC is a parameter of type parameter. That means that if someone has operating privilegesfor that job, that person is…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 5: Circumventing limitations

The maximum length of the run program is limited to 512 characters. Usually this doesn’t feel like any kindof limitation. Sometimes though, especially when creating long inline scripts, the limit is easily reached.But even if the run program field is limited in length, the command line, that is executed after parametersubstitution, isn’t. This is because there is also no practical limitation to the maximum length…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 4: Other interpreters

There’s nothing special about the Bourne shell. Other command interpreters or even a mix of them, typicallyshell and something else, can be used. Naturally adding languages does result in a more complex quoting;each level of interpretation adds another level of quoting. As an example we create a small script that is used to find the IP addresses from where an invalid loginattempt has been attempted.…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 3: Backticks

In the Bourne shell it is possible to assign a variable the output (stdout) of a program. Expressions like A=`expr $A + 1` used to be very common. (Since many environments now use the Bash instead of the Bourne shell, this kindof expressions is gradually disappearing). The good news is that the scheduling server knows about the backticks. It treats them as if they were…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 2: Advanced usage

The previous section showed how to use quoting in the run program of the job scheduler systems BICsuite and schedulix. But sometimes we need to access environment variables, in order to adapt the behaviour of our program to the special requirements of the execution environment. As an example we assume that some input file lies in the $HOME/input directory. We’d like to tell our printargs…

The BICsuite Run Program Part 1: Introduction and Simple Usage

BICsuite and schedulix offer powerful functions that enable scripts to be saved and executed in the scheduling server. The linchpin is the Run Program, which we would like to introduce to you in more detail in this series of articles. The following also applies for the Rerun Program and the Kill Program. The field run program contains the definition of the command line to be…

That’s the Version 2.10

With the new release 2.10, BICsuite and schedulix have become even more user-friendly. In Release 2.10 released on 21/05/04, these changes and additions have been made: Zope 4 / 5 Web GUIZope 4 / 5 based on Python 3 is now officially supported for the BICsuite / schedulix Web GUI. Zope 2 based on Python 2 is still supported but will be deprecated in the…