The machines are powered off automatically on a nightly basis, lots of these servers are just available for building applications or testing SQL or Websites etc. The automation script used to power them off has the ability to power them on, the reason this is not done is because if a server is not going to be used then it should remain off to stop charges being incurred
These servers can be powered on by a developer (who doesn’t have admin access in guac, no shell access etc) via webhooks. In most scenarios a server or group of servers (eg. DC, SQL, WEB) are all isolated to their own network with only HTTPS access available to the web server, the developers are accessing these servers via guacamole. If we had machines running that were not utilised we would incur thousands of dollars in idle compute. I was just curios if it was possible to make this visible, this Is a pretty niche scenario and probably not something that has even been requested in the past? I have had some thoughts but have been to busy to play around with anything. My potential thoughts were: In the interface where it states – Number of connections a server has in use could potentially display OFFLINE if a ping request from the guacamole server was unable to talk to the endpoint, this then changes the SQL DB to display that message via a cron job. Anyways thanks for the replies. James Fraser • Microsoft Systems Engineer From: Tomas Maggio [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 15 August 2017 6:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Identify if a machine is online Hi James, Who/what powers off these servers? I think you could script it to ping them and with that enable/disable them on the guacamole db? Is this what you are trying to achieve? Cheers On 15 Aug 2017 5:47 p.m., "James Fraser" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi All Just wondering if there was a possible way for Guacamole to display if a machine is online/reachable from the Guacamole server. E.g. a lot of our servers are test servers and reside within Azure subscriptions, due to the nature of Azure billing it is cost effective to power off these machines. Some of the Dev’s have requested the ability to view if the machine is online or offline without visiting the Azure Portal Is this something that is on the horizon or has anyone attempted engineering this feature? Cheers James Fraser • Microsoft Systems Engineer
