Tartarus supplier reports

The primary function of the Tartarus supplier reports is to automatically determine the MAC addresses of PCs purchased from the SelectPC supplier (currently Hewlett Packard). This allows us to set the dhclient.mac value in a machine's LCFG profile without first powering the machine on.

Incoming mail handling

A report has been created on the HP order management portal which periodically (currently weekly) returns information on SelectPCs (eg. purchase order, serial number, mac address) by email to tartarus-supplier@inf.ed.ac.uk . This email address is an alias which is configured to forward the email to a CGI script on the Tartarus server by means of a kerberos authenticated HTTP POST. The /disk/mailraid/scripts/krbcurl script is used to perform this HTTP POST.

Reception at Tartarus server

The CGI script /cgi-bin/krbsecured/submitsupplierreport in the Tartarus web root (/usr/lib/tartarus/web) accepts the incoming HTTP POST. This script stashes the incoming email in a sub-directory of /var/tartarus/supplierreports - which sub-directory depends on the source email address. The file /etc/tartarus/supplierreports defines the mapping between source mail addresses and stash sub-directory. The email is saved in a file with a filename of the date the email was sent.

Processing of incoming supplier reports

The script /usr/lib/tartarus/bin/loadsupplierreport is called by cron on a daily basis. It checks one or more of the sub-directories /var/tartarus/supplierreports for new incoming mail files, processes those files, loads any data into the supplier_report table and renames the processed files with a '.seen' suffix. As the format of the supplier report mail will differ depending on the mail source, each sub-directory is handled by a different Perl module in /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Tartarus/LoadSupplierReport.

For example, the current HP Select PC reports are sent by HP OrderStatus <do-not-reply-orderstatus@hp.com> , stashed into /var/tartarus/supplierreports/hp19 and processed by /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Tartarus/LoadSupplierport/hp19.pm

-- AlastairScobie - 20 Sep 2019