Background: This is what I have so far:
(1) Solaris server running various cron jobs I want to have monitored by Jenkins. Server ports 80, 8080, etc., are blocked at some point and will probably not be unblocked due to security policy. I can't be root, I only have a user account with its own cron on the box. (2) Copy of Jenkins installed, running, and correctly configured to monitor the above jobs as "external jobs", and a set of jobs correctly configured to generate displays and various bits of execution data on the dashboard. (3) Ability to view Solaris Jenkins-generated Dashboard via Firefox client residing on above server with X display piped through PuTTY to XLiveCD-based X server running on Windows box. (4) Can't view from outside of the box. Ports are blocked. This setup works for me as long as I use Firebox on that box to point to http://127.0.0.1:8080 and pipe the display via X through the tunnel created by PuTTY. Good for me, and useful, but bad for folks with no X server and/or no access to the Solaris server in question, and very slow through existing VPN connection. (5) Copy of Jenkins running on Windows box and able to share its display via port 8080 to the rest of the intranet. I can ftp to this Windows box from the Solaris box, and I can also view web pages from the web server running on the Windows box from the Solaris box, but that's the wrong direction. :-) My initial idea was to have the copy of Jenkins run on the Solaris box gathering job execution data, and to find some way to copy the latest contents of the ~/.jenkins/jobs directory via scp or ftp to the C:/ Program Files/Jenkins/jobs directory on the Windows box, but it seems Solaris Jenkins uses symlinks (rightfully so!) in its jobs directory, and those structures don't transfer gracefully to NTFS. I can't directly copy them and have things work, or at least my attempts thus far have failed. More experimentation is in order. My second thought was to find a way to beam the dashboard display from Solaris Jenkins to Windows Jenkins, and variants of that appear to be possible either via the master/slave facility in Jenkins or via one of the published plugins, but many of the required settings seem to not be present for tasks of the type "Monitor External Job" which may put a crimp in that approach. The tool is precisely what I'm looking for in terms of maintaining cron-started script execution and run time history, but the fact that its display is trapped on a box that is sealed off from the intranet makes it far less useful than it could be. This is not the fault of Jenkins ... I just have complex requirements. :-) Any help would be appreciated! Has anyone found a way to get around a similar situation? Jenkins is a neat tool, BTW. Thanks to the authors for writing and maintaining it!
