Workshops

The BICsuite Run Program Part 6: Security Considerations and Conclusion

Posted on by lisa
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 able to change the contents of the DIRSPEC parameter. Hence, it wouldn’t be aproblem at all to change the...
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The BICsuite Run Program Part 5: Circumventing limitations

Posted on by lisa
Part 5 of the run program workshop for BICsuite and schedulix
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 of a parametervalue, parameters can be used to circumvent the 512 bytes limitation...
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The BICsuite Run Program Part 4: Other interpreters

Posted on by lisa
Part 4 of the run program workshop for BICsuite and schedulix
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 output should have iptables format. As a script that could be called onitself, the task i...
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The BICsuite Run Program Part 3: Backticks

Posted on by lisa
Part 3 of the run program workshop for BICsuite and schedulix
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 doublequotes, but it doesn’t remove them. Parameter substitution is still performed and the argument doesn’tbreak at a...
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The BICsuite Run Program Part 2: Advanced usage

Posted on by lisa
Part 2 of the run program workshop for BICsuite and schedulix
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 program about it. To do so, we assume that printargs expects two command line arguments, a -i indicates t...
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The BICsuite Run Program Part 1: Introduction and Simple Usage

Posted on by lisa
Part 1 of the run program workshop for BICsuite and schedulix
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 executed. This field is parsed by the scheduling server and split into an array of arguments. This array of argume...
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Tutorial 10: New calendar features for timescheduling

Posted on by lisa
Different holiday calenders have to be scheduled
In that video tutorial we demonstrate some of the new timescheduling features of BICsuite and schedulix. We are assuming that our company has branches in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. As well as the national holidays, each branch has its own public holidays. A job should only run if all the branches are working, that is if there are no public holidays in any of the federal states. We schedule a second job so that it will always run if at least one of the three branches is working. More videos...
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Tutorial 9: More time scheduling options

Posted on by lisa
screenshot of a video about time scheduling options
In that video we execute time scheduled jobs on specific days by changing the master schedules that we created in video tutorial number 8. The Munich job should run every Friday. The New York job has to run on the last Friday of the month, and the Tokyo job should only run when Friday falls on a 13th. More videos about the BICsuite scheduling system Explore the BICsuite-highlights You have some questions? Please contact us!
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