I have an application I support that often needs to have one of it's job services stopped then restarted in order for the end users to continue processing within the application. The vendor of the application has released a fix in newer versions of the software but my employer is not interested in upgrading for now.
for the moment, I log into the server, stop the job that is running, start it, stop the job a second time and start it a second time (it sounds weird but I promise it only works if I do it in this manner, weird flaw the vendor acknowledges.
I'd like to create a simple web html page showing the service is running and include a stop and start button to allow the end user to perform this mundane task them selves instead of having to email me to do this. I know this only takes a second but i want to know if anyone has ever built this soft or web app or know where to begin to build this.
One way (and totally insecure, and disastrous, but technically a possibility) is to use something like Flash, Java Applet or Silverlight (or any other plugin technology), they have SSH and/or VNC libraries, that can allow you to use plugins to connect to you backend, however while it's a possibility and something I did when I was young and foolish I would advice against it!
Proper way would be to have a backend, that exposes simple restful api, and will execute local commands when certain endpoints are triggered. Though again, you will have to spend some time securing it and probably shell out for SSL/TLS certificates to make sure that somebody can't sniff your Authorization details.