Awhile back I did a short article that looked at using the vnc:// handler to programatically interface with the Screen Sharing application and a follow up article on invoking RDP via CoRD from the command line. Well, if you are an Absolute Manage user, you can also remotely control client computers through the admin without passing username and password information (trust stems from the agent and server relationship). This is a pretty neat feature.
Absolute Manage has registered the lanrevagent:// handler at installation time (Admin). The syntax for invoking lanrevagent is similar to a REST interface, except here you define the command, followed by what exactly to run that command against. The command to remotely control a host is remotecontrolagent. The easiest way to indicate an agent to be controlled is to define a computername that the agent can control, done by following the remotecontrolagent command with ?computername=<the actual computer name to be used>. When defining the computername you will need to replace any special characters with their URL encoded representation (ie – for a space that would be a %20). This is really actually very straight forward. To control a computer named Krypted MacBook, you would use the following URL from a browser:
lanrevadmin://remotecontrolagent?computername=Krypted%20MacBook
Or simply use the terminal command:
open lanrevadmin://remotecontrolagent?computername=Krypted%20MacBook
Using the open command allows for variable substitution, which makes this yet another addition to the possibilities surrounding automating administration tasks through help desk software without having to expose passwords to intermediate administrators. Provided that host names are in synchronization between servers, you then have the ability to invoke commands against Absolute Manage using other products as part of your management lifecycle or some form of middleware.
