Data Harvesting 3

[Seilsong]

Greetings.
I have been tasked with writing something that will carry out the following scheduled or manual task:

Problem domain.
Poll 120 networked PCs daily by IP address.
Navigate to a folder in C drive.
Harvest a daily HTML report which is generated by McAffee virus scan.
Place each report in full a daily report OR insert the report in a back end database table where it can be accessed by other applications.

I had hoped that a simple Java application might do the job but would appreciate some guidance from anyone more experienced than I.

Here are my ideas.
Use JDBC to access a database containing all appropriate IP addresses.
Place the addresses in a java container.
Iterate over them and carry out connectivity.
Now the difficult bit. Navigate to the folder on each machine and get the HTML file, parse it and insert the code into an accessible location.
Easy if its an XML file. Not so easy if its HTML.

Any ideas will be rewarded with mighty gratitude !!

 

[idarke]

If you can get an ftp client installed on each of the 120 PCs, then you can use the java ftp api to connect to each, navigate to a directory and copy a file.

Or, you could write a small program of your own that listens on a socket and copies the files to a calling program.

Either way, I think you're going to need something on each of those PC's.

 

[sedj]

I think it would be easier to write some WINAPI/C++ stuff - which would maybe achieve what you want - I'm not sure.

Or perhaps install a daemon running on the client machines which pushed data from the client machine to your "harvesting" server. Its very easy to install a windows/NT service on client machines using winapi ...

--------------------------------------------------
Free Database Connection Pooling Software

http://www.primrose.org.uk

 

[Diancecht]

I think this is more an OS scripting work.

Anyway, you can always do system calls from a Java program. My approach would be mapping the drive where the html file is on each pc and get it as a regular file.

For the HTML pasring, maybe you can use any of these

http://java-source.net/open-source/html-parsers

Cheers,

Dian