Heterogeneous system administration issues

I know heterogeneous environments became popular lately, but hey - let's talk about the drawbacks of such systems. So for example let us visualise a process that is dependant on Windows, Linux and MacOS that run on three separate machines.

First of all each of these machines has to be properly configured (services, security, performance). System administrators are usually commited to a specific platform so setting up other configurations is more time consuming.

For example, it took me some time to get familiar with using Darwin's launchctl service management framework. Well all I wanted to do is run my task periodically... cron is a great and simple tool capable of achieving it... however all other services/tasks were configured via launchctl, for me writing a huge XML configuration file instead of a simple crontab entry is an overkill. 

But anyway, lets us presuppose that this Mac enables it's HDD as a network drive available via SFTP and AFP. This hard drive contains data that needs to be processed by a dedicated piece of software that runs only on Windows... in case you found a fast way of solving this problem before I actually stated it: no you can't change that piece of software.

So the user responsible for processing the data mounts the SFTP shares and proceeds with his task. However the user also needs access to his own resources located in another location, which requires providing other credentials. It seems like Windows7 is not capable of keeping multiple SFTP sessions with a single machine (in fact it caches it, thus making it difficult to re-log again). Since we don't want to restart Windows every ten minutes (clear the system cache) let's keep Windows on a virtual machine that may be accessed by rdesktop.

We execute a python script responsible for preprocessing the data and starting the OS specific processing software:

#some data preprocessing
os.system('''<some operations> &&
             <a full path to the`specific software`.exe> 
             <many parameters> %s ''' % a_long_list_of_arguments)


And what do we get:

> The input line is to long

I managed to google out that MS maximum command prompt  length varies from 2047 to 8191 characters, depending on the OS version. Now this is hilarious... 

After all these adventures I installed cygwin (a tool that makes Windows reassemble an operating system) on the virtual machine and configured the script to run under the linux-like environment (finally it worked).

 So next time, remember: think twice (bah, thrice) before you intend to configure a sophisticated process on a heterogeneous environment :-)

~KR