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I am making a remote Linux artifact collection script and would like to use the psutil module as it includes a lot of handy functions that would be a pain to rewrite.

The issue is that the computers this would be working on are not necessarily connected to the internet. Is there a way to ship the module through ssh so I can use it remotely?

drop table
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1 Answers1

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I tried this on my personal machine, without the SSH part. However, I will detail how to upload it using scp to another device, for completeness and ease of use. So, you may encounter some errors in this that I did not. You have been warned.

Step 1: Downloading the psutil package

On a machine with pip installed, download the psutil package using:

pip download psutil

Using ls (on Linux) we can see we now have a *.tar.gz file in the current directory. At time of writing, the current psutil version is 5.6.3, so the file name is "psutil-5.6.3.tar.gz"

Step 2: Upload the file to the desired device

Make sure that both you and the destination device are hooked into the same LAN and you know the IP address of the destination device. I will denote this IP address as "W.X.Y.Z".

To upload the file using SSH, run:

scp /path/to/*.tar.gz username@W.X.Y.Z:/desired/path/to/*.tar.gz

If you have the SSH key and want to use that to log in, pass it with the -i flag:

scp -i /path/to/ssh/key/file /path/to/*.tar.gz username@W.X.Y.Z:/desired/path/to/*.tar.gz

Step 3: SSH into the desired device

This step is pretty straight forward, but I make it it's own step because of how easy it is to get it wrong if you don't know what you are doing.

SSH into the device you uploaded the file to:

ssh username@W.X.Y.Z

If you do not have the SSH key, or it's not where SSH expects it to be, you may need to provide a password.

Step 4: Install the package we just uploaded

Now just install the package!

pip install /path/to/*.tar.gz

If you get an error that says:

ERROR: Cannot uninstall 'psutil'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.

Then you SHOULD already have psutil installed. You can check this by running:

pip list | grep '^psutil'

On the machine you are trying to install the package on.

EDIT

Also, if your Python script is in Python 3 instead of Python 2 (which it should be since Python 2 End-Of-Life is January 1st 2020), replace everywhere I just used pip with pip3.

Batcastle
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