24 Nov 10 Sneak Peek: ZCLI (Zentific Command Line Interface)

I lost my bookmark to this on my speed dial somehow and forgot about it for a few months. Now it’s time to play ketchup.

As many of you know from my post in August (yes, it was really that long ago), I have been working on things which will be used in the next version of zrpc, zpoll, zenstatd, etc. It’s undergone a bit of a name change (before: libzer now: azy), but as of a few weeks ago I have determined that it is stable enough for general client-side use. Server functionality works as well, though I have not tested it nearly as thoroughly yet. This will be a full replacement for the current libzxr, and it is smaller, faster, more flexible, and quite an improvement.

Azy, like its predecessor, implements both xmlrpc and jsonrpc. It will eventually be appearing in Zentific 2.0 (we like to think ahead). Azy support http cookies natively and, most importantly, http pipelining! This means that clients are able to connect to a server, send out however many calls they have without disconnecting, and then receive the responses asynchronously, greatly reducing rpc transmission time since there are no sockets needing to be connected between calls.

While Azy is not being used in zrpc/zpoll/etc immediately, it is making my work of coding the CLI a breeze. Essentially I just have to correctly parse the command line options/arguments, and then throw an azy-generated function into my main connection loop. The calls return very quickly, optionally with some very nice looking info thanks to eina’s logging capabilities.

Let’s talk a little about CLI security. I’ve been very conscious of sysadmin paranoia in my development; account credentials can be securely stored (using secret cipher encryption that is unique to each user and generated from the runtime environment for now, but perhaps with priv/pub key pair support later if people demand it as a feature) in zentific’s binary session file if the user desires, though the default behavior does not save any login data. Session data is stored between calls in the same way to avoid needing to log in every time an action is performed, and also to ensure that no other user can “steal” your session from the session file. Attempts to reuse a session file by another user or on another computer will result in zcli automatically detecting this and deleting the file to prevent security breaches.

Now let’s check out some direct output:

Usage: zcli [command [options]]

Command Line Interface for Zentific
Commands:
login
ls
passwd
pause
poweroff
reboot
shutdown
unpause
useradd

Options:
-v, –verbose Print runtime logs
-q, –quiet Print only requested info, no formatting
-V, –version show program version.
-R, –copyright show copyright.
-L, –license show license.
-h, –help show this message.

As you can see, I’ve tried to keep the commands identical to what a sysadmin would be familiar with to make use a breeze.
Don’t worry about the “short” command list; the list shown here is not complete, and the commands all have options that can be specified just like the regular versions. Let’s check a couple of them out!

Usage: zcli ls [options] [node[/vm]]

Command Line Interface for Zentific
ls – List
zcli ls 44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000
zcli ls -l 44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000/44444444-3333-2222-1111-123456789012
zcli ls -ld 44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000

Options:
-l Use a long listing format
-d List entries instead of their contents
-h, –help show this message.

This is the ‘ls’ command of zcli. As can be seen, it has a number of different uses.

The first example will output a list of all vm uuids on node with uuid ’44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000′, assuming it exists (VM.getAllByNode).

The second example will output the full stats of vm with uuid ’44444444-3333-2222-1111-123456789012′ on node ’44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000′, allowing the use of the ls command just as one would expect (nodes are directories, vms are files). Note that if ‘-l’ had not been specified, zcli would confirm or deny the existence of that vm on the specified node.

The third example will output all stats for node with uuid ’44444444-3333-2222-1111-000000000000′, as you would expect since both ‘-l’ and ‘-d’ are specified, just like with regular ls.

Usage: zcli useradd [options] username [email]


Usage: zcli useradd [options] username [email]

Command Line Interface for Zentific
useradd – Add a new user
zcli useradd -p=password username user@domain.com
zcli useradd -g=node -G=dom0_nodes -G=my_nodes
-p=supersekrit_passc0d3 node32
zcli useradd -n joe

Options:
-n, –no-disable don’t disable account upon creation (default behavior)
-D, –defaults don’t create a user, add/change default settings;
call with no other args to view current defaults
-c=GIVEN-NAME, –given-name=GIVEN-NAME
user’s given name (same as username if not specified)
Type: STR.
-g=GROUP, –group=GROUP
primary group to add user to:
(super, maint, admin, radmin, none, node OR 0-5)
Type: STR.
-l=LANGUAGE, –language=LANGUAGE
set language locale for user (eg. en_US, en_GB, fr_FR,
pt_BR)
Type: STR.
-G=GROUPS, –groups=GROUPS
secondary groups to add user to
(can be specified repeatedly)
-p=PASSWORD, –password=PASSWORD
password for user
Type: STR.
-h, –help show this message.

Here you see the very familiar ‘useradd’ command (User.addUser), which functions just like its *nix counterpart. You will notice that I have retained the ‘-D’ functionality for default settings. These can be set as expected with the options here, and they will also be stored securely in the zentific session file for reuse, used to fill in the blanks for unspecified user parameters any time a new user is created.

Now no blog post of this length would be complete without some real world test output (no video since it’s just a boring CLI!). I will demonstrate the output, with verbose setting enabled, of a very simple session:

1:14AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v login admin
Password (echo is disabled):
INF<13101>:zcli zcli_login.c:44 zcli_login() Login successful for session d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda!
INF<13101>:zcli zcli_main.c:23 _disconnected() Disconnected
INF<13101>:zcli zcli_eet.c:209 zcli_eet_setup_write() Wrote session to disk with unix timestamp 1290579288
1:14AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v ls
INF<13102>:zcli zcli_eet.c:53 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Found session with timestamp from 6.35 seconds ago
INF<13102>:zcli zcli_eet.c:64 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Keeping old session id d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda
INF<13102>:zcli zcli_ls.c:97 zcli_ls() 2 nodes found:
7f822640-47fd-45de-ad48-abe08b8e95fb
320563f5-2275-46e6-b172-95d2ae019f28
INF<13102>:zcli zcli_main.c:23 _disconnected() Disconnected
INF<13102>:zcli zcli_eet.c:209 zcli_eet_setup_write() Wrote session to disk with unix timestamp 1290579294
1:14AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v ls 7f822640-47fd-45de-ad48-abe08b8e95fb
INF<13103>:zcli zcli_eet.c:53 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Found session with timestamp from 10.00 seconds ago
INF<13103>:zcli zcli_eet.c:64 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Keeping old session id d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda
INF<13103>:zcli zcli_ls.c:106 zcli_ls() 19 vms found for node 7f822640-47fd-45de-ad48-abe08b8e95fb:
1b7989ab-0984-43d2-9476-8b6fcdb695a0
7643e225-49ff-445b-be67-5d1c7f93d0e1
a7eec08f-c443-422a-8b1f-8c46dbae21ad
7da77ccc-0da3-4c22-bcac-d8b0f4a01840
4575fe57-110c-4275-bcde-4b464c5c0d0c
6b7e9bb7-54d0-414c-bd1b-6ac60bdbeed9
cb4925a9-5c03-4679-bdbb-27ef6e965fdf
72c55b78-1472-4ac7-ab68-3ba0e42421bb
d1d1adc1-2d91-4623-a0fb-77bafc869cf7
f624d978-fb7f-4e39-8bd7-6840730d7ac9
5382f520-8b75-4f8f-a72f-187a4f4a047b
d4e67e63-f311-4a84-ba8b-7cdb8623735c
acce7c69-3376-4b62-970f-067c2aa66150
b217f08c-1b7c-4763-aa12-04762af7e9cb
940f5eac-2690-48f9-bd19-0e383f03431a
937e6cbc-e798-4e7f-bb92-4d81d8d94be2
60d78a96-fcd1-c2a8-b7e6-76db9daeecf9
2f570292-e48b-438a-e58a-1f7d1b86eded
47e918dd-d875-a7dc-a91e-6ce6e813430b
INF<13103>:zcli zcli_main.c:23 _disconnected() Disconnected
INF<13103>:zcli zcli_eet.c:209 zcli_eet_setup_write() Wrote session to disk with unix timestamp 1290579304
1:15AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v ls 7f822640-47fd-45de-ad48-abe08b8e95fb/1b7989ab-0984-43d2-9476-8b6fcdb695a0
INF<13105>:zcli zcli_eet.c:53 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Found session with timestamp from 18.84 seconds ago
INF<13105>:zcli zcli_eet.c:64 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Keeping old session id d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda
VM with uuid '1b7989ab-0984-43d2-9476-8b6fcdb695a0' exists on node 7f822640-47fd-45de-ad48-abe08b8e95fb
INF<13105>:zcli zcli_main.c:23 _disconnected() Disconnected
INF<13105>:zcli zcli_eet.c:209 zcli_eet_setup_write() Wrote session to disk with unix timestamp 1290579323
1:15AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v useradd -D
INF<13108>:zcli zcli_eet.c:53 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Found session with timestamp from 13.29 seconds ago
INF<13108>:zcli zcli_eet.c:64 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Keeping old session id d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda
INF<13108>:zcli zcli_eet.c:165 zcli_eet_user_defaults_read() Reading user defaults from disk
INF<13108>:zcli zcli_getopt.c:383 zcli_getopt_parse() Current defaults:
uid: 0
username: test
givenname: default zcli givenname
email: emaaaaaail
active: 0
type: 3
language: en_US
1:15AM zmike@darc# src/bin/zcli -v logout
INF<13109>:zcli zcli_eet.c:53 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Found session with timestamp from 17.64 seconds ago
INF<13109>:zcli zcli_eet.c:64 _zcli_eet_setup_read() Keeping old session id d9e617fd-a61b-4a2b-a7ff-07ea94522fda
INF<13109>:zcli zcli_main.c:57 _connected() Cleared session file
INF<13109>:zcli zcli_login.c:66 zcli_logout() Logout succeeded!
INF<13109>:zcli zcli_main.c:23 _disconnected() Disconnected

The above output all has lots of pretty colors when you use the real thing, but I’m far too lazy to translate that into colors here so you’ll have to enjoy the content and not the glitter. That’s all for now, but feel free to ping me or post here with obscure feature requests!

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