sharepointcacheprimer 1.0b3.post5

Description:

sharepointcacheprimer 1.0b3.post5

Overview
The first time a browser hits a sharepoint site after a restart, the
caches are empty, so the page can take a while to load. One can script
something to silently hit a sharepoint web-frontend, causing it to build
caches and preventing any real people from experiencing that.
This tool does this for a specific circumstance where it’s kind of hard
to script it without better tools - where normal NTML authentication
doesn’t work, because there is ADFSv3 authentication configured, and
where there may be a number of web-frontends behind a load balancer.
I don’t know why this is required. I’m not a sharepoint admin. Maybe
it’s an artifact of a particular setup.


Installation
This may work in Python 2, but many distributions of Python 2 do not
include urllib that has SNI support. Since this is a sysadmin tool, you
probably want it to “just work”, so “just use Python 3.4”.
Simple install: pip install sharepointcacheprimer


Usage
The pypi package installs an executable in the standard python location,
called ‘sharepointcacheprimer‘.
usage: sharepointcacheprimer [-h] config site [site ...]
example: sharepointcacheprimer myconfig.ini mysite.com mysite2.com
This will connect to a sharepoint site, authenticate and load a page
silently. It is suited to running as a cronjob/scheduled task.
The configuration file is formatted as a .ini. The packages ships with
an example file that is installed in PYTHONROOT/doc/, and described
below.


Configuration
>From the included doc/example.ini
Each section is either a site definition or a cookieset definition.

A Site Definition
This is a sharepoint site, with ADFS credentials and an optional
reference to a cookieset to use.
[example.com] ; Site: example.com
username = domain\user1 ; ADFS username
password = password1 ; ADFS password
url = http://example.com ; URL that for site to prime
cookielist = examplecookies ; Optional sectionname for Cookie Sets


A Cookieset Definition
Every line is a cookie, as “COOKIENAME = value1,value2,value3”. For each
value of each cookie, the site will be primed once. This allows a site
pool that uses a cookie-based load balancer to force iterating through
every web frontend via cookies.
In the below example, the cookie “LB-COOKIE” will be set for each of
three attempts, using the values abc1, abc2, and abc3 respectively. If
more than one list of cookies is below, that will just be an additional
iteration. For example, another line with 2 more values would cause a
total of 5 priming attempts with 5 unique cookie values.
[examplecookies] ; The label referenced above
LB-COOKIE = abc1,abc2,abc3 ; A cookie list, comma-delimited