[Puppet Users] Best practice for calling commands

Hello!

I hope someone might be able to give me some directions on this
problem. The search didn't come up with something useful because it's
some kind of a corner case i think...

I am trying to implement an integration of HP System Insight Manager
into Puppet. Unfortunately the HP SIM is running on a windows box to
which I only have SSH access and cannot install puppet on it (otherwise
Exec would be easy).

My idea was to write a provider and type that i could do something like

node server1 {
simnode {"$hostname":
ensure => present,
simserver => "hpsim.example.com",
}
}

In the background the provider issues an command over ssh to make sure
it is in SIM:

<snip>
Puppet::Type.type(:simnode).provide(:ssh) do
confine :manufacturer => [ "HP", "Compaq" ]
commands :ssh => "ssh"

def create
ssh @resource[:simserver] "mxnode -a @resource[:name]"
end

def exists?
output = ssh @resource[:simserver] "mxnode -ld
@resource[:name]"
if output =~ /The node specified does not represent a node in
this system/i
false
else
true
end
end

def destroy
ssh @resource[:simserver] "mxnode -r @resource[:name]"
end
end
<snap>


Of course this is more or less pseudocode but I guess you see what I am
intending to do. On the other hand the "mxnode -ld" command also spits
out some very interesting information about support status and features
that I would like to put into facts respectively there is an XML Output
of mxnode which I could use to cache the state if a node has already
been added to SIM.

Before I start writing this provider is there any kind of generic SSH
wrapper for this something i could start from?

Thank you very much for your help in advance!

Best wishes
Hannes