Communicating Between Two EC2 Servers - AWS

Question

I have two EC2 servers. One runs Windows Server 2012 R2 and the other runs on Amazon's Linux build. The Linux box is used as a web server with PHP doing the scripting. I would like the Linux server to send a string to the Windows server every time a PHP file (acting as a RESTful end-point) is processed.

I've never done anything similar and was wondering where to start. From the research I've done so far, it seems like using Netcat to create a Telnet connection might do the job. If so, what would the boilerplate code look like? Netcat is a pretty old platform and there's not much to be found in terms of examples from a Google search.

I am also open to other solutions that could solve this problem.

The workflow of what I am trying to do looks like:

A user hits PHP file end-point -> PHP or the server it runs on sends a string to the Windows Server -> Windows server receives the string and starts a script

Answer 1

You could look at calling winexe from within PHP. I haven't done it myself but I've read that this should do the trick.

winexe Sourceforge

Some sample code from within PHP here

I hope that this is of some help to you

Regards

Liam

Answer 2

You could think of exposing this as an endpoint on your Windows server using either of:

IIS + PHP
IIS + CGi/Perl
IIS + Asp

or anything else.

Expose a simple page on IIS (Windows web server) and hit that from within your webservice login (Linux server) whenever the Linux server receives a request. The script/page that is exposed by your Windows server could execute the desired script then. The page/endpoint that is exposed on the Windows server should be protected so that not anyone could execute it (disabling public ips. Restricting only the Linux server Ip in your firewall rules etc.)

Sample

• Within your php webservice - $my_var = file_get_contents('http://WinServerPrivateIp/runScript.pl'); // Make it asynchronous if needed $my_var = file_get_contents('http://WinServerPrivateIp/runScript.pl'); // Make it asynchronous if needed
• runScript.pl in Windows - Would execute your actual script.