Connection Automation/Brokerage System

CABS is used to assign machines to remote clients. Here at CAEDM, we use it to assign RGS blades to our students. The entire project has several parts. See the wiki for information about how the system works. For installation instructions, see the README files inside of the sub-directories.

We use Docker to create a test environment for CABS. control.py contains automated test cases. They have been tested with Docker 1.12.3 and Python 2.7. Follow these steps to run the tests:

1. Run ./broker/dev.sh to start the broker. Wait until the line "starting up" is printed to stdout.
2. In another terminal window, run ./control.py test. (note: the first time you run this, it will take a while for control.py to start all the docker containers needed to simulate the agents).

To view the state of the simulated agents, start the CABS interface with ./interface/dev.sh. After the django app is running, visit localhost:8080 in a web browser. Log in with username "cabstest" and password "password". Click on the "Machines" tab. The page will auto-refresh every five minutes, but you can manually refresh more often to see updates immediately while testing.

You can use control.py to manually simulate events such as a user requesting a machine through the cabs client, a user logging in to a machine, a machine shutting down, etc. Run ./control.py --help for a list of commands.

When developing the agent, use ./control.py restart to restart the cabs agent on all running Docker containers. If you make changes to the Dockerfile for the agent, use ./control.py build to rebuild the image and stop all containers running the old image.

Also, watch out for certificate files. Those are the only files we haven't checked into the git repo (for obvious reasons). On my machine, I have the following files:

agent/app/agent_server.pem
agent/app/broker_cert.pem
client/app/src/cert.pem

You don't need these files to run the automated test cases in control.py, but you will need them when running make for the agent or client. It's probably easiest to get them from one of our working machines that has the agent/client already installed.

Bug fixes:

1. Prevent the interface from trying to resolve BYU's LDAP server when in debug mode, which caused it to crash when not connected to BYU's network. (For use in production, settings.py will still need to be edited heavily as it contains BYU-specific settings.)

Bug Fixes:

1. install linux client files with proper permissions
2. fix various problems with the windows client installer

Bug Fixes:

1. Passwords with colons

New Features:

1. The agent talks with the RGS Tester. If the tester can't log in to a blade, it is disabled by "auto-it". The rgsconnect agent if it finds itself in this state will first attempt to restart the rgs sender service to rectify the problem. If the tester then finds the system working on the next round of tests, then the blade is re-enabled. If the tester still can't log in on the next round of tests, it will send a reboot command to the agent service. This feature has been working beautifully on the Linux systems for multiple semesters now without any ill effects.

2. The agent can have modules loaded to test for broken conditions. If a broken condition is found, the agent can tell the broker to not have anyone visit that machine. The modules can include code to rectify the problem if desired.

Notes from the developer:

install.exe should start the agent running right away, but it wasn't doing it for me. The service did start automatically after I rebooted though. Alternatively, you can run sc start cabs_agent from a command prompt to start it immediately.

The agent writes logs to the Local System user's APPDATA folder. On my VM, the location was C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Roaming\cabsagent.log. By default on Windows, the log level is set to WARNING (so there shouldn't be anything in the log if all is well). If you edit \Program Files\CABS\Agent\cabsagent.conf and set Log_Level to INFO (and then restart the cabs agent service), the agent will log every time it sends a heartbeat which could be handy if you're not sure whether or not it's working.

Oh, and one more thing: I don't think the install.exe file will work unless they uninstall the existing agent first (fixing that could be on the todo list). Running \Program Files\CABS\Agent\uninstall.exe should do it, but they should check the Agent folder and delete any files that uninstall.exe doesn't take care of.

• Jordan Whitehead (???-2015. Original author)
• Jacob O'Bryant (2015-2017)