CT320 HW6: Eternal Vigilance!

Motivation

In the previous assignment, we kept track of which files were appearing and disappearing. That was great, but it’s not enough. In the system administration business, you have to keep track of a lot of things:                 

• Are the disks still mounted?
• Is the network up?
• Is the web server running?
• Have any users been added?
• Is Galactus approaching our solar system?

If only there were a program to help you keep track of things. One that could … guard … against unexpected changes!                 

Summary

For this assignment, you will write a program called “guard”, which helps you keep track of things. It can be a bash script, a perl script, or a python script, but nothing else. This program is useful for system monitoring. You run it with arguments, from any directory, like this (% is my prompt):                 

    % ./guard id

That says to run the id command, and note its output. Then, later, if you run guard id again, it will run the id command again, and inform you if anything has changed.                 

For example, guard date will probably change every time, unless you’re quick. However, we don’t expect guard id to change too often.                 

Output

There are three cases:                 

1. This particular command (and arguments) has never been executed before.
   Say so, and display the output of the command.
2. This command (and arguments) produced the same output as before.
   Display nothing, because nothing changed. This is the normal, happy, case.
3. This command (and arguments) produced different output than before.
   Say so, and show the difference between the old and new outputs using diff. Also, update the saved output with the new, changed, output.

guard would typically be executed from cron, where the output gets mailed to you. Ensure that the output is sufficiently labeled so that it makes sense, even out of context. Of course, guard itself knows nothing about email—guard simply produces output or not. cron handles emailing the output to you.                 

Arguments

guard takes a number of arguments, which will form a shell command. All of these should work. Remember that % is my prompt, yours will be different.                 

    % ./guard id
    % ./guard date +%c
    % ./guard cat /etc/passwd
    % ./guard "sed 's/:.*//' /etc/passwd | sort"
    % ./guard gcc --version
    % ./guard 'cd ~info; ls -ld m*'
    % ./guard echo a/b/c
    % ./guard echo abc
    % ./guard echo a b c

Options

If the option --trace is given before the command, then guard will add debug output. It’s your choice for what that means, but it must at least mention the full path where the output is stored.                 

If the option --all is given, with no other arguments, then guard will list the commands in the database. The commands listed must be the same as they were entered—mangled versions are not acceptable.                 

Database

guard has to store the commands and results somewhere. For that purpose, it will use the directory ~/.guard, which your program must create as needed. How it actually stores the data under ~/.guard is up to you. You could have one big file under ~/.guard, a number of files, an entire hierarchical directory structure, etc. You have to create ~/.guard.                 

Note that the command given to guard can contain all sort of special characters: spaces, stars, quotes, slashes, etc.                 

Sample Use from cron:

Here are some examples of use from cron. If no changes occur, then guard produces no output. However, if changes do occur, then guard proudces output, which cron then mails to you.                 

    SHELL=/bin/bash
    PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:~/bin

    # Ensure web server is working:
    */5 * * * *	guard wget -qO- https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~applin/alphabet

    # Do my directories have proper permissions?
    # Use \% because cron interprets % specially.
    @hourly	guard stat -c '\%A \%n' ~ ~/public_html ~/public_html/pmwiki

    # Compiler updates?
    @daily	guard g++ --version
    @daily	guard python3 --version

    # General paranoia
    @daily	guard id
    @daily	guard pwd
    @daily	guard host $HOSTNAME
    @daily	guard cat /etc/system-release
    @daily	guard uname -r

    export STACK_FRAME_LINK_OVERRIDE=ffff-ad921d60486366258809553a3db49a4a

Requirements

• “Command” generally includes the arguments. For example, echo a and echo b are two different commands.
• On the other hand, the same command executed in two different directories is considered to be the same command. pwd is only one command, even though it gives different results in different directories, so it’s a poor candidate for use with guard.
• Error messages go to stderr.
• All error messages must include $0 (or its equivalent).
• Provide a usage message and stop for no arguments, or for bad arguments (for example, -Z or --zulu).
• Capture both stdout & stderr of the command.

Submission

Use web checkin, or:                 

    ~ct320/bin/checkin HW6 guard

How to receive negative points: