API

After a few years on hold it’s great to be back at CITC this time in the British Motor Museum. The video presentation covers a short (if speedy) introduction to Node-RED and it’s ability to integrate systems through their APIs.

Demo 2 is of note and shows how a user visiting a malicious website can have their internet access revoked until a helpdesk agent has a chance to clean-up their machine and then grant access again without even having to login to the firewall controlling that access.

It’s been a while since posting and I do hope to sort that out but for now another quick mention of some work with Ruckus Cloudpath.

Although massively flexible in its design I’ve come into a few niche cases where administrators would like a single DPSK pool (which is bound to a single SSID) but where different users have different expiry dates on those DPSKs. Thus far I’m planning on interacting with the API via Node-RED to update these entries in the API as the provisioning process takes place – something for another blog post.

However for those who are just getting to grips with the API (using PowerShell in my case) I hope the short example in this GitHub repo can be of use: https://github.com/jamesfed/RuckusCloudpathAPI.

One of my favourite features of PowerShell is the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet which (among a great many other things) can download the data from an RSS feed. One application I’ve found for this is to stay on top of security bulletins from organisations like Adobe and Drupal.

However just downloading the data from the feed and kicking it out in an email isn’t quite good enough for my needs thus the script below gets data from a CSV which contains the URL to the feed as well as some extra details to inject into any email notification (e.g. a link to the guide on how to deploy Adobe Updates).

In my production environment this script creates tickets on a FreskDesk helpdesk to log and manage any new update notifications. In the attached example below the script just fires off email notifications.

Have a look at the screenshot sequence below for more info!

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Update 09/05/2017 – v0.2 – Now handles XML and Arrays in the link and title objects (good for reddit and blogspot!)