Doit: Launch programs on your windows desktop from your Unix servers

For the last years I had the same problem: I was running windows as desktop and managing Linux/Unix?. Of cuorse, to minimize the pain, I use Cygwin and/or colinux, that make my life easier.

Often I need to open files remotely, but is so tedious to find them in the samba share... and then I've found this tool: doit  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/doit/, from Simon Tatham, the putty author.

It allows execute commands in your box from the remote server, automatically translating the paths (in case you are using samba).

Fast installation

  1. Client on Unix side (1):

  2. Download and compile: [sourcecode language="bash"] curl http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/doit/doit.tar.gz | tar -xvzf - cd doit cc -o doitclient doitclient.c doitlib.c -lsocket -lnsl -lresolv [/sourcecode]

  3. Install. I use  stowfor my adhoc binaries:

[sourcecode language="bash"]

Preset variables.

LOCALBINARIES=~/local PLATFORM="$(uname -s)-$(uname -p)" PATH=$PATH:$LOCALBINARIES/$PLATFORM/bin

STOWHOME=$LOCALBINARIES/$PLATFORM/stow

mkdir -p $STOWHOME/doit/bin cp doitclient $STOWHOME/doit/bin for i in wf win winwait wcmd wclip www wpath; do ln -s doitclient $STOW_HOME/doit/bin/$i done

cd $STOW_HOME stow doit [/sourcecode]

  1. Shared secret setup and configuration: [sourcecode language="bash"] dd if=/dev/random of=$HOME/.doit-secret bs=64 count=1 chmod 640 $HOME/.doit-secret echo "secret $HOME/.doit-secret" > $HOME/.doitrc [/sourcecode]

Then set the mappings as described in the documentation. For instance:

host
  map /home/ \\sambaserver\

  1. If you are using su (or sudo reseting passwords), you will lose the SSHCLIENT variable. But can set the $DOITHOST variable. You can use this: [sourcecode language="bash"] cat <<"EOF" >> ~/.bashrc

    DOIT_HOST variable, for the DoIt tool (Integration with windows desktops)

    export DOIT_HOST=$(who -m | sed 's/.((.)).*/\1/') EOF [/sourcecode]

  2. Setup the client on a windows box. You can copy the .doit-secret or use samba to access to your home. Just create a link to "doit.exe secret.file", for instance:

    \sambaserver\keymon\local\Linux-x86\stow\doit\doit.exe \sambaserver\keymon.doit-secret

Conclusions

It is really cool, and it really works.

My only concern is that is the key, that should be shared. One solution can be use environment vars or event the Putty ‘Answerback to ^E’ ( http://tartarus.org/~simon/putty-snapshots/htmldoc/Chapter4.html#config-answerback), but I am not sure how implement it.

(1) On solaris, compiling with GCC, I got this error:

/var/tmp//cc5ZYGYW.o: In function `main':
doitclient.c:(.text+0x29e8): undefined reference to `hstrerror'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

This is solved solved adding -lsocket.