Welcome to the [VM]UnixDaemon website, the current home of Dean Wilson's things. This isn't really a holding page anymore as I'm actually getting around to adding stuff more often than I expected. The site does validate as HTML 4.01 Strict and uses valid CSS (What little I actually use) so I'm still basically standards compliant.
Two New Nagios Checks - Cert Expiry and File Ages
Over on my Nagios Plugins page I've added two new itch scratching scripts, check ages and Check Cert Expiry. Both are things I've needed recently and so I've written and deployed them.
The first is an (IMHO) improved version of the check_fileage script from
Nagios plugins. This version can deal with directories and selections of
files (defined by a base directory and a glob) in a single check. The
second uses certtool to report on local certs that'll expire
within the defined threshold. Which I seem to need a lot these days.
They've both been tested with Nagios 1 and are released under GPL v2 (and not above).
Posted on 'Wed Jun 20 22:18:36 2007' by Dean Wilson
Simple Nagios Visualisation tools
While Nagios comes with screens to show you whats's going on right now it's a little lacking in the area of longer term, aggregated overviews. To help myself find this kind of information I've written the Nagios Simple Trender and Nagios TagClouds scripts. Each of them runs through yours Nagios log files and produces HTML pages with some (hopefully useful) information.
They've both been tested with Nagios 1 and are released under GPL v2 (and not above).
Posted on 'Sun Jun 3 11:41:18 2007' by Dean Wilson
Basic Accessibility Analyzer IE Plugin
I'm happy to announce the first release of the Basic Accessibility Analyzer IE Plugin. This IE plugin wraps the service provided by Peter Krantz and has already found some quirks in my own site.
The full list of what it checks can be found here.
Posted on 'Wed Aug 23 00:41:54 2006' by Dean Wilson
frdns.pl - Forward and Reverse DNS Lint
The frdns.pl forward and reverse DNS checking script is one of those little mistake catchers that allow you to work with a safety net. In this case it checks that your deployed forward and reverse DNS records are present and correct; it checks the results from real DNS queries, not by zone file parsing.
frdns.pl accepts a CIDR range and polls each IP for a reverse DNS record. If it gets one it'll try to forward resolve the name and compare the two results. If the forward record is missing, or the two parts don't match, it'll print the problem. You can supply a flag to make it only display valid or broken records and with a little bit of shell wrapping it (and iterating through your networks) you've got a nice cronjob that'll give you a bit more confidence that your DNS is clean.
Posted on 'Sat Feb 18 14:23:00 2006' by Dean Wilson
GoogleSets and Blosxom Plugins
Another small batch of releases, this time I've got a perl script that provides a Command Line Interface to Google sets and three Blosxom plugins.
The Immediate Action Feeds plugin is a rollup (and slight tidy) of my previous plugins, "Add to del.icio.us", "Submit to reddit" and "Digg me!"; all of which can be found on the Blosxom plugin page. It adds a number of links to the bottom of each blosxom post; both HTML and RSS flavours. These links allow easy interaction with a number of online services. This version of the plugin adds links for del.icio.us, Digg and reddit. It can be seen in action over on my blog.
Posted on 'Sun Aug 21 12:31:40 2005' by Dean Wilson
Backup RCS Directories Script and add_to_delicious Blosxom Plugin
I've finally made the time to release two more short chunks of code I've been using recently. First up is the Backup RCS Directories Script. Which does pretty much what you'd expect. For more details see the Backup RCS Directories Script blog post.
You can now also get the add_to_delicious Blosxom plugin code, which I've been using on my own blog. It's GPL'd and does what I want. And hasn't hosed my site yet :)
Posted on 'Sun Jan 1 13:34:31 2006' by Dean Wilson
Blosxom TagCloud -- Initial Release
Ever wanted a tag cloud of your Blosxom posts? With just this blosxom_tagcloud.pl script (and three Perl modules from CPAN) you can have one that integrates itself with your Blosxom footer and even allows easy merging of the tag cloud and any static text/HTML you've used in the past.
I've uploaded the initial version of the code and I've put up a Blosxom TagCloud page with some more information.
Posted on 'Sun Aug 21 12:31:40 2005' by Dean Wilson
Blosxom Plugins -- cpan_module_tag and raa_tag
I've written two small plugins for the Blosxom (written by Rael Dornfest) blog engine I use to power my very own blog. Each one allows you to use shortcuts to link from blog entries to external sites.
They are called cpan_module_tag and raa_tag. They allow you to add quick links to CPAN and the Ruby Application Archive respectively. I've added both of them to the Blosxom Plugins page and hopefully some one other than me will find them useful.
Posted on 'Mon Jun 6 22:25:23 2005' by Dean Wilson
Whois.sc and Koders Mycroft Searches
I've added a whois.sc search to the Mozilla Searches page. It works fine in FireFox or Mozilla but doesn't work in the sidebar as it will typically return a single result.
I've also added some Koder.com searches. The Koders.com website crawls and indexes source code from a number of different sites and projects. It then lets you run queries based upon keywords, specific languages and/or licenses, returning the code that matches.
Posted on 'Sat Apr 2 00:13:34 2005' by Dean Wilson
Which package owns this file?
Filepkg.sh is another one of those scripts borne of a personal itch. I'm spending a fair amount of time cleaning up both Redhat and Debian boxes which have custom software installed, some of it by hand and some via the package management system (we build the packages ourselves).
One of the annoyances I've come across while determining which files are managed and which were left by us is that while both dpkg and rpm will tell you the package that owns a file, you need to provide the full path of the file you're asking about to get the information out. Well no more!
filepkg.sh takes a file name as an argument and tries to do a 'which' command on it. If this works then the full path is passed to the native package manager (filepkg.sh currently supports Redhat and Debian) and the owning package, if there is one, is returned. If filepkg.sh is called with a '-l' as the first argument or 'which' doesn't find a file with that name ('which' doesn't deal with config files for example) then the file is passed to 'locate'; it then looks up the file and passes it to the package manager to get a package name back.
The idea is simple, the code's easy to read and it works how I want it so feel free to do what you want with this little chunk of GPL'd code.
Posted on 'Fri Mar 18 00:19:36 2005' by Dean Wilson
Slashdot review of Pragmatic Subversion
Hello Slashdot people! I've just had a review published on slashdot and I'm sort of expecting this server to have some problems so please bear with me...
Also a small disclaimer, I did get a free review copy of the book early (thanks to the very nice Pragmatic Programmers) but this didn't earn any favouritism. In my defence I point to Building Linux Clusters. Most of my reviews are positive because I simply can't be bothered to read and review bad books. Anyway thanks for reading the review and visiting.
Posted on 'Thu Feb 10 23:10:44 2005' by Dean Wilson
del.icio.us Link Checker
I've written a short Perl script that, when run locally with your credentials, will retrieve all your del.icio.us bookmarks and attempt to verify if they still exist or not.
The Delicious Link Checker is written in simple Perl and should be quite easy to customise. I've added a Delicious Link Checker home page that contains the notes, the next batch of TODO tasks and other miscellaneous bits of information.
Posted on 'Mon Jan 17 23:33:51 2005' by Dean Wilson
Validate Sites HTML IE Plugin
I've added an IE plugin that allows you to validate the mark-up of an entire web-site, starting with the browsers current page, using the WDG HTML Validator tool.
The plugin is called Validate Sites HTML and can be found on the IE Plugins page.
Posted on 'Sat Jan 15 20:44:12 2005' by Dean Wilson
Display Feed Last Modified Date
I've added a short Perl script called Display Feed Last Modified Date to the miniprojects page.
This short (and by no means complete) script looks through a SharpReader OPML file (which can be generated by using 'Export' on the file menu) and then tries to obtain and display a Last-Modified date for each feed in the file (this is gathered from the header of the same name)
Posted on 'Sat Jan 15 15:21:27 2005' by Dean Wilson
Simple Link Information -- Short Script
I've added a short Perl script called linksinfo to the miniprojects page. When invoked with an absolute URL it will parse through the HTML and pull out links. The text in each href tag will then be displayed. If you use a '-l' then it will also display the target of the link.
Why?: This is the first of a couple of scripts I'm writing to help maintain certain meta-data about a website I'm responsible for.
Posted on 'Sat Nov 27 13:32:04 2004' by Dean Wilson
Find Duplicate Filenames -- Short Script
I've added a new script to the Unixdaemon Miniprojects Page. This short chunk of shell and awk, imaginatively named Find Duplicate Filenames, does exactly what you'd expect. It scans the mounted file systems and prints a list of files and the number of times each name (with the path part stripped) was found.
Posted on 'Thu Nov 18 23:50:56 2004' by Dean Wilson
View In Lynx IE Plugin
I've added another plugin to the IE Plugins page. This one allows you to right click and view the output as if it'd been run through Lynx. Imaginatively I've entitled it 'View In Lynx'
To make this work the plugin calls upon the nifty script that lives on delorie.com. Now all you Windows users have no excuses when you skip the site testing in a command line browser.
Posted on 'Wed Oct 13 23:10:44 2004' by Dean Wilson
restamp and findbig.sh
I've added two small scripts to the Mini Projects page. restamp stores a files modification time stamp, opens the file in your editor and then when you exit your session it restores the files time stamp. I'm using this to stop Blosxom picking up my corrections to older posts. The second one, findbig.sh, scans a Unix machine and email's a list of files over the given size. It also logs to syslog and allows you to create an exclude file of files to ignore every run.
Posted on 'Sun Sep 19 22:34:44 2004' by Dean Wilson
Get Page Rank
I've added a new page to the site, it's called Mini Projects and i'll be uploading my smaller scripts, hacks and code snippets to this page. The first one (getpageranks) is already up and ready for use. The script accepts a file of URLs and then retrieves the page rank for each page. What makes this useful is its batch nature, it's easy to schedule a monthly update of how your sites are performing with a short config file and a single script.
Posted on 'Fri Sep 10 22:06:29 2004' by Dean Wilson
Wayback Versions IE Plugin
I've recently been doing some near archaeological digging through old and broken on-line documentation, thankfully the Wayback Machine was on hand to help. This site maintains a number of previous versions of web pages and allows easy access to them. After using it for the hundredth time I decided to make my life a little easier and created the Wayback Versions IE plugin.
I've also discovered that documentation covering "Linux Kernel version 2.0 and above" typically doesn't cover 2.4 and 2.6 :)
Posted on 'Fri Aug 27 22:00:40 2004' by Dean Wilson
Validate P3P Policy Internet Explorer Plugin
After receiving a very polite request i've put a Validate P3P plugin together, not sure if it'll ever be of use to more than the one person but you never know.
Posted on 'Mon Aug 16 22:42:38 2004' by Dean Wilson
View In Avant Internet Explorer Plugin
I've added another 'View in...' extension to the IE Plugins page, this one was a reader request (I have readers!) and allows two click access to a webbrowser called Avant that looks like a themed version of IE.
Due to the fact that Avant calls its own executable iexplore.exe this plugin requires an absolute path to avoid calling raw IE. This created a problem in that the plugin only looks for the executable in the default install location but for now it.s good enough (and can be hacked to work on non-defaults, see the 'Hacking' section in the readme for further details. This version works with a known limitation so I'm invoking the release early release often rule. ;)
Posted on 'Thu Jul 15 22:12:27 2004' by Dean Wilson
View In {Mozilla,FireFox,Opera} Internet Explorer Plugin
I've added three new (but related) extensions to the IE Plugin page. Each one lets you fire off a different browser and loads the current IE page in it.
This should make viewing layouts and styles in other browsers faster and a little less painful. There are three plugins, Mozilla, FireFox and Opera, and they can all be found with source code under the View In ... section of the IE plugin page.
UPDATE: The executables were unavilable for a little while due to a mistake on my part. They are now back up and available.
Updated on 'Fri Jul 9 23:53:14 2004' by Dean Wilson
BugMeNot Internet Explorer Plugin
I've added another new entry to the IE Plugin page, while I'm now IE free at home my employer still requires it to be used in the office. Not wanting to be too far from one of my favourite features i decided to implement it.
The new plugin is for the BugMeNot site, here's the the short explanation of the sites purpose, taken from the sites own FAQ: "BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times)."
The original FireFox version, written by Eric Hamiter can be found at Roachfiend. My version of the plugin, BugMeNot IE should do pretty much the same job.
Posted on 'Sat Jun 19 23:28:16 2004' by Dean Wilson
Webpage Speed Report IE Plugin
I've added a new entry to the IE Plugin page, this one allows two click access to the quite neat page profiler at WebSiteOptimization.com. Here's the direct link to the SpeedReport plugin.
Posted on 'Sun May 9 11:49:42 2004' by Dean Wilson
Vim URL Shortener
As the amount of content available online grows the length of the URL's required to access it seems determined to keep up. This little bundle of a vim script and some Perl code will convert a long URL into a shorter one (Using MakeAShorterLink) at the press of a single button.
While the masl.pl script can be used on the command line to shorten URL's if you're lucky enough to use mutt as your email reader and vim as the editor within it you can easily shorten target addresses so they slip under the magic 75 character limit that differentiates visited URL's from my home pages. But I'm not bitter.
The source code, compressed archives, documentation and more of my ramblings can all be found here: Vim URL Shortener
Posted on 'Tue Apr 13 23:13:45 2004' by Dean Wilson
Amazon and CompMan ISBN Bookmarklets
This is my first post in a fair while, my (no longer new) job is for a financial data provider who are watchful about intellectual property so I've had to cut back on anything not work related while working on proprietary 'stuff'. These little snippets however i can post with impunity, a lot of the sites i read occasionally point to very interesting books. The only problem is they all point to American sites i don't use.
While its possible for me to find and copy the ISBN, open a new Amazon UK window and paste in the search term it lowers the odds of impulse buying. These bookmarklets grab the ISBN from the URL and open it at my favourite site ready for quick purchase. My overdraft will love this!
Posted on 'Mon Apr 5 21:10:54 2004' by Dean Wilson
Validate Links (W3C) IE Plugin
I've added a new entry to the IE Plugin page, this one allows two click validation of any links on the page using the W3C's online link validation service.
I've also added another couple of searches to the Mozilla / Firefox Search page.
Posted on 'Thu Jan 1 13:20:39 2004' by Dean Wilson
Mozilla / Firefox Addressbar Customisation
Next up in my adventure through the features of Mozilla and Firefox is address bar customisation. I've already written about this (and given examples) for IE on my IE addressbar customisation page so i won't go in to a feature by feature comparison. I will however point you to an excellent article on how they work in Moz and Firefox.
Once you've read that introduction you might find these additional query strings useful, to add them just follow the instructions on the page linked above. The short version is you bookmark the link, edit the book mark and add a keyword (in the bookmarks property dialog box) you can enter to invoke the search. What makes this powerful is that if you have a '%s' in the bookmarks query string then your input is interpolated in its place. This allows the dynamic part of the search. After all a search that only allows one word is a little pointless!
| Bookmark | Suggested Keywords |
|---|---|
| Mailinator | mail, mailin |
| CPAN module search | cpan |
| MySQL doc search | mysql, mysqldoc, mydoc |
| PHP search | php, phpdoc |
| Perldoc search | perldoc |
Of course if you use Windows you already have a more powerful (but less browser integrated) tool available for these types of searches, the DQSD. If however you use Moz on a non Microsoft platform these little snippets can make life a lot easier.
Posted on 'Sat Dec 13 20:49:55 2003' by Dean Wilson
SudoSnooper
After some discussion on a mailing about establishing which users had which Sudo and su access the suggestion of watching the process table for PID's that had different owning user than their PPID's came up. On the sudosnooper page i present a proof of concept Perl script and some of the background about the how, why and WTF?
As a warning the content of sudosnooper assumes you have at least a basic knowledge of processes and their component parts. This was added about 'Tue Aug 26 21:42:17 2003' by Dean Wilson
If you are really bored have a look at my Googlism bookmarklets