Remote Client Administration: An Introduction to Client Actions with opsi-cli

Setting Action Requests with opsi-cli

The command line tool opsi-cli is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It works as a client component outside the opsi server and communicates via the opsi web service and/or opsi messagebus. opsi-cli is really useful in situations when you don’t want to use a graphical user interface, like the opsi-configed or the Web GUI. The opsi-cli command client-action offers a convenient way to set action requests for clients via the sub-command set-action-request.

Let’s look at our first example. The following command sets the action request setup (which is the default) for the hwaudit and swaudit packages on all clients:

opsi-cli client-action --clients=all set-action-request --products=hwaudit,swaudit

It’s easy to limit the pool of affected clients. Either use --clients or --client-groups and supply a list of comma-separated names. The next example sets the action request only for opsi clients which belong to the testgroup group:

doerrer@me:~$ opsi-cli -l 5 client-action --client-groups=testgroup set-action-request --products=hwaudit
[5] [2023-03-01 12:16:23.922] [               ] Selected clients: ['client-linux.domain.local', 'client-win10.domain.local']   (client_action_worker.py:56)
[5] [2023-03-01 12:16:23.972] [               ] Handling products ['hwaudit']   (set_action_request_worker.py:120)
[5] [2023-03-01 12:16:23.982] [               ] Setting 'setup' ProductActionRequest: hwaudit -> client-linux.domain.local   (set_action_request_worker.py:158)
[5] [2023-03-01 12:16:23.982] [               ] Setting 'setup' ProductActionRequest: hwaudit -> client-win10.domain.local   (set_action_request_worker.py:158)

You can specify the type of action request with the --request-type parameter. As mentioned before, the default is setup. To reset an action request, use --request-type=none. This comes in handy when you want to remove action requests you set by mistake. The screenshot illustrates this: the first action request is setup for the localboot product opsi-client-agent on the opsi client client-linux.domain.local, followed by a command which revokes this with --request-type=none. The third command sets the action request for a Windows client.

Keeping Packages Up to Date on your Clients

You can also use set-action-request to perform more complex tasks. The parameter --where-outdated affects all products installed on a client which has a newer version available in the associated software depot. This way you can use opsi-cli client-action to insure that software on the clients is up to date. You can use the following parameters to select the clients:

• --clients: comma-separated list of client names or all
• --client-groups: comma-separated list of host groups
• --exclude-clients: do not perform actions on these clients
• --exclude-client-groups: do not perform actions on these host groups

The following example demonstrates how to set all outdated products to setup on all clients, except the ones in the testgroup group:

opsi-cli -l 5 client-action --clients=all --exclude-client-groups=testgroup set-action-request --where-outdated

Similarly, you can exclude specific products or product groups using --products, --product-groups, --exclude-products, and --exclude-product-groups.

Retrying failed Installations

Correspondingly, you can retry product installations with the parameter --where-failed. It sets a new action request for all products which have the status failed.

The following example sets the product runastest to setup on all clients where the previous installation failed:

doerrer@me:~$ opsi-cli -l 5 client-action --clients=all set-action-request --where-failed --products=runastest
[5] [2023-03-01 13:58:52.715] [               ] Selected clients: ['client-linux.domain.local', 'client-macos.domain.local', 'client-win10.domain.local']   (client_action_worker.py:56)
[5] [2023-03-01 13:58:52.777] [               ] Handling products ['runastest']   (set_action_request_worker.py:120)
[5] [2023-03-01 13:58:52.788] [               ] Setting 'setup' ProductActionRequest: runastest -> client-win10.domain.local   (set_action_request_worker.py:158)

This is useful in test environments or in case some dependencies were missing when the product was first installed.

Tips & Tricks for client-action

In this last paragraph, we’ve collected some tips and tricks for you:

• If you want to learn about available options of a command, call it with the parameter --help.
• You can use cron to set up a schedule for opsi-cli commands on a Linux server (see chapter scheduling installations).
• If you’ve written your own scripts to regularly update packages in your depot, you can simply include opsi-cli client-action set-action-request --where-outdated to run the update on your clients as soon as possible.
• For a full list of commands, parameters, and options, please read our documentation (see chapter opsi command line tools and processes).

Happy tinkering!