Remote Actions

Overview

The Trendics Remote Agent allows Remote Actions to be executed on your server via email, SMS, IM, or the web. There are two types of Remote Actions...

• Informational Remote Actions - Allows executing commands on your server to check available disk space, check free memory, check swap usage, check number of running processes, check open connections, etc.
• Executable Remote Actions - Allows executing commands on your server to restart processes, flush queues, free disk space, etc.

Example Configuration

The configuration file is located on your server. Changing this configuration file requires access to the files on your server.

<remote-action-plug-in class="plugins.remoteaction.RemoteActionPlugIn">
	<poll-every-seconds eval="true">60</poll-every-seconds>

	<!--  Example Information Remote Action -->
	<remote-action-def>
		<name>check-disk-space</name>
		<title>Check Disk Space</title>
		<shell-command>
			df -kh
		</shell-command>
	</remote-action-def>

	<!--  Example Executable Remote Action -->
	<remote-action-def>
		<name>restart-mysql</name>
		<title>Restart MySQL</title>
		<shell-command>
			/etc/init.d/mysqld restart
		</shell-command>
	</remote-action-def>
</remote-action-plug-in>

Security

• No Open Ports - The Trendics Remote Agent installed on your server does not accept inbound socket connections; instead, the Trendics Remote Agent will only make an outbound connection to api.trendics.com.
• Authenticated Sessions - All means of executing a Remote Action (email, SMS, IM, or web) require authentication via a session password only known to you.
• Predefined Actions - The only commands that may be executed are those specifically pre-defined by you in the Trendics Remote Agent config file located on your server. Remote users cannot execute arbitrary shell commands.
• No Parameters - To avoid executing malicious commands as parameters to predefined commands, parameters are not supported.
• Transparency - The Trendics Remote Agent is a relatively short Python script. You can easily review the source to see exactly what is being done.