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under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
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Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNUFree Documentation License".
Contents
1. Who is Steinbeck?
2. What is Steinbeck?
3. Motivation
4. Features
5. How it works?
6. Usage and
Configuration
7. Troubleshooting
8. Authors
9. Credits
Obviously, this must be the first question (tough
everybody, more or less, knows who he is). John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in
Salinas, CA. He is one of the most influential American writers with Nobel
Prize for Literature. Here is an informational line from nobelprize.org;
"Steinbeck
first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous
stories about Monterey paisanos."
That book is one of my favourites.
Steinbeck easifies a simple job in a secure way. It
can be used to run shell scripts on a (linux)unix box with SSH server during
which it can check on-going progress and grab the end result.
Steinbeck may be used by system admins or security
testers who have to deal with running scripts on (many) remote machines and/or
getting results back.
·
platform
independence with java ;)
·
secure
connection with ssh
·
multi-threading
·
result
grabbing
·
progress
updating
the last two features can be utilized
with small changes in the scripts. read on.
Steinbeck utilizes SSH for the
underlying connection between client and server (box in which a script will be
run). It uses jsch-0.1.20.jar, which is an open source pure java implementation
of SSH2. For more information, see http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/.
After running java -jar
Steinbeckv1.1.jar users can form tuples each comprising a remote machine (with
username -root-, password, IP, port) a script to run, remote working directory
and local working directory.
After adding/editing tuples to the
list, user can run all of the scripts simultenously and see them progressing
(like Nessus) in case scripts are configured. It should be that simple. There
is one thing that is kind of important with scripts to run. If user wants
Steinbeck to show the on going progress of remotely running scripts on remote
machines, then user has to make her script to create a "progress.txt"
file, which should include a progress score between 0 and 100. Normally, script
should create this file as the first thing in the current directory (i.e.
"touch progress.txt"). Then once in a while, after reasonable
calculations, script should update the internals of this file with a number. An
example script may look like this;
touch progress.txt
sleep 5
echo 10 > progress.txt
sleep 5
echo 20 > progress.txt
sleep 5
echo 30 > progress.txt
sleep 10
echo 90 > progress.txt
sleep 5
ls -al > results.txt
echo 100 > progress.txt
As one can note from the end of the
file, any results should be written into results.txt before progress becomes
100. No worries tough, when grabbed, this results.txt will be renamed as
{REMOTE_IP}+results.txt on the local box in the working directory. So, if the
user is running multiple scripts in a single remote machine he has to make sure
that tuples point to different local working directories.
After configuration of scripts are
handled, then in order to add|edit|remove any sessions user has to use Manage
menu item. This should be straightforward. But one important thing to note is
this, when user adds or edits a tuple, (and pressing Done button), a connection
test will take place to remote box. Any errors (authentication, connection) can
be tackled here.
User can start running scripts by
using Run menu item, or by using the Start button. This will open another
window having progress bars updating (if scripts are configured!). User can
stop running sessions or when they are all done, a pop-up message will appear
(Again this is possible if scripts are configured properly).
For a session, {IP+Username+Port+RemotePath+LocalPath} tuple is a key. So, as long as this tuple is unique, user can run a session and get response (results.txt that is).
7.1 Be sure that the items below are applied to SSH
server configuration file (/etc/ssh/sshd_config);
PasswordAuthentication Yes
PermitRootLogin Yes (if connected as "root")
7.2 For some reason, when echo is used in the scripts (for
other reasons than forming results.txt or progress.txt), program stops. So,
don't use smt. like this in the scripts:
...
echo
"Hello there"
...
7.3 Try to use Sun's JRE although Steinbeck should run
with any specification-compliant java runtime. But that is in theory, of
course.
7.4 Scripts will not work on a Linux machine after they
were generated on a Windows or a Macintosh box.
Developed by bedirhan urgun
([email protected])
Thanks to Omer Faruk Sen and EnderUNIX.