Steve Hayman

May 17 2006

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Here are some example Automator actions that I showed during the MacEnterprise.org webcast.  Source for the actions is included in the "Projects" folder.

Please consider these all works-in-progress.  I hope they give you some interesting ideas.

Tools

Two simple command line tools are included in Binaries which you may find useful with ARD's Send UNIX Command:

IdentifierLight

• A tool to turn the System Identifier light on an Xserve on and off.  Use  IdentifierLight --help to see the available options, including flashing the light at different speeds or even displaying a message in Morse code.

BigHonkingText

• A tool to display a text message in large letters, visible from across the room,.  Use BigHonkingText --help for options.  Run this command as root and it will even display the message on top of the login window. Some examples

BigHonkingText Hello

Displays the message "Hello" for 3 seconds

BigHonkingText -p 30 Hello

Displays "Hello" for 30 seconds, or until someone clicks on the window

BigHonkingText -d -p 30 Hello

As above, except return immediately. Don't wait for the user to click.

BigHonkingText  -w 500 -h 300 Hello There

Display the message in a 300x500 window.  You can also specify percentages.  The default is "-w 90% -h 20%"

BigHonkingText -H

Produce an authentic Canada Goose honk to go along with the message.

Of course you can display the output of a command too.  You might find

BigHonkingText  `hostname`

to be useful in a large lab.

Automator Actions

Included are the source and binaries for 5 automator actions all of which are intended to follow one of the ARD "Choose Computers" actions.  The actions in the Actions folder can be placed in ~/Library/Automator.

General Strategies

Most of these actions are written in Applescript, and  involve constructing a shell script on the fly. The script is then passed to the remote computer(s) via "make new send unix command task", and the result may be extracted.  Note that at the moment only the last line of the remote command's output is available to you in this way.

Ask a Question

Uses "display dialog" to display a question and 1 to 3 answers on a group of machines, and tallies the results.  Follow this with "Prepare Data for Keynote Chart", and the Keynote "Add Chart to Slide" action, if you want to produce a graph of the result.

You might construct a workflow like this.  I would suggest launching Keynote first, and arranging that it i

Remote Desktop > Choose Remote Computer

Remote Desktop > Ask a Question

Click on the "Summary" checkbox to have the action total the results

Keynote > Prepare Data for Keynote Chart  

see below

Keynote > Add Chart to Slide

Choose "Chart Type: Pie 3D" and "Chart Group: Column" for a nice result.

Change User Password

Changes the password for a specified user on a bunch of machines.  What this is really doing is

dscl . -passwd /Users/username newpassword

on each machine from the previous action.  This will work for local user accounts but not, alas, for accounts from network directories.  For that we would need to design a new action that also takes an admin username and password, and do something like 

dscl datasource -u adminuser -P adminpasswd -passwd /Users/username newpassword

but I have not written that action yet.

This action uses some tricks to arrange not to save the password in the workflow.  You might like to choose "Show action when run" if adding this to your own workflow,

Distribute Items to Users

Here is a way to distribute files to the home directories of all users on a remote computer, not just the logged in user.  For this to work you will also need the Store Disk Item References and Retrieve Disk Item References actions which are included with Aperture, if you have that, or which can be downloaded from http://www.automator.us.

To use this, build a workflow like so

Get Specified Finder Items

Store Disk Item References

Remote Desktop > Choose Computer List

Retrieve Disk Item References

Distribute Items to Users

In this action you can choose to distribute the passed-in files to all users, or members of a specific group.

How it Works.

This particular action actually creates and runs 3 ARD tasks

1) It creates a folder called "/tmp/distribute" on the remote machine

2) It copies the passed in files to /tmp/distribute

3) It executes a shell script  ("distribute.sh") on the remote machine to copy the files out of /tmp/distribute into the specified user folder for each user.  The distribute.sh script uses "dscl" to determine the appropriate list of users and home folders.

Execute Per-User UNIX Task

This is like the existing Execute New UNIX Task in that you can give it a shell script to run on the remote computer, except in this one, you  can specify some criteria for users, and have the task executed once (via "su") for each matching user.

For instance you might specify a  command like

defaults write com.someapp somesetting blah

and use this to run it once for each user whose Home Folder matches /"Volumes/D4/Students"

Note:  The "Group list" thing in the UI isn't hooked up yet. I'm working on it.

How It Works:

It's somewhat convoluted in that it builds a shell script on the fly that will match the users you selected, and loop through them executing your script via "su" for each one.

There are two shell scripts, "preamble.sh" and "postamble.sh" included in the action.  main.applescript constructs a new shell script on the fly, based on these two scripts, the users you chose, and the command you want to execute, and passes it to the remote machines as a send unix command task.  It builds a script by concatenating, in order

   - The shell statement

       thescript="Contents of your script here"

       dsclNode="The dscl node you specified"

   - preamble.sh

       This script fragment runs "dscl" to pick up a list of users, and includes the first part of a perl script to loop through users and include/exclude them

   - Some perl statements to include and exclude various users from the script.

   - postamble.sh

     A loop to go through every user that made it through the perl exclusion statements, and use "su" to execute the commands on their behalf.

It takes this resulting script and passes it to the remote computer as a new send unix command task.

Prepare Data for Keynote Chart

This item just reformats the text coming out of Ask a Question into the right kind of Applescript record so that Keynote's Add Chart action can handle it.

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