Retrieving a file from a remote PC

[GuyWithDogs]

I've got a bunch of unattended PCs (kiosks -- screens, but no one working the keyboard or mouse) that periodically get information from a server that I control. On those machines are some log files that I'd like to get my hands on, and I'm wondering whether anyone has any ideas on how to use Javascript, AJAX, I don't know what to get these.

I've been beating my head against this since early this morning, and thought I had an approach, but my testing showed I was mistaken, and that my development PC is the cause of my problems. It's running IIS, and so certain Javascript stuff works differently.

I suspect that the answer is "you can't" - but maybe someone has come up with a sneaky way.

The machines can run applets, they can render HTML and Javascript, they check in to a server that can ship them new HTML pages, etc.

The biggest restriction is that I _cannot_ have anything pop up on the screen. So when I tried something that used the Scripting.FileSystemObject ActiveX control, I got a dialog that said "An ActiveX on this page may be unsafe..." with a Yes/Cancel button set. That's a no-no. Turns out that my dev machine doesn't show that, but my test machine did. Another thing that sort of looked promising, from my Googling and then some experimentation, is using ADODB.Stream. Again - worked on my dev PC, because it has IIS on it. But a PC "in the wild", so to speak, can't run this. Found a large Microsoft Knowledgebase article on why this was bad, and how it was disabled to fix a huge security issue. So that don't help either.

Sooo ... Anyone have any ideas? I'm willing to take a shot at anything reasonable. If I don't figure something out in the next couple of days, I'm going to give up on the idea and go with something else. In the meantime, I'm going to create a generic page that will let people easily browse to a file and upload it to us. Means that someone has to get to the machine, but that happens periodically. Sadly, it's never when we could use someone there to help diagnose problems quickly. But that would be too easy....

Thanks.

[jimmyjimjim]

What's generating the log files? Can't you just set them to be emailed off to you rather than stored on the remote computer? If not the file then at least the data?

If you are concerned about getting messages or alerts on the remote computer, can you not adjust the security settings to a custom level where you are not prompted on whether or not you would like to continue?

[GuyWithDogs]

What's generating the log files? Can't you just set them to be emailed off to you rather than stored on the remote computer? If not the file then at least the data?
That will change, eventually, since it's our program generating the data. Normally we haven't needed this file, but we're getting some odd issues with connectivity thru firewalls, proxy servers, etc. that this file might shed light on. There's a plan to POST these files back, but that doesn't help us right now.

If you are concerned about getting messages or alerts on the remote computer, can you not adjust the security settings to a custom level where you are not prompted on whether or not you would like to continue?
This particular message seems to be a "security feature" added to IE at some point. I've been looking for security changes, and playing with all sorts of tricks like trusted sites, etc. But apparently you get this warning so that people would know that something might happen. It's probably the opposite swing of the pendulum where stuff used to happen without anyone knowing about it.

[jimmyjimjim]

Try a 30 day trial version of Remotely Anywhere or something like that. That would be the easiest thing to do. You can remotely control the remote computers but most importantly get access to any of the files you need easily.

http://www.remotelyanywhere.com/