Detritus

Check Mail Flow Beyond SMTP Checks

Louis M. — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:24:20 +0000

Even if SMTP services are running, it cannot be assumed that mail is flowing. There are a number of reasons that mail may not reach its destination. This is a simple script that uses Gmail to send an email to an internal server, most likely Exchange, which should automatically reply to the message. For [...]

Get Your Post Seen on Twitter

Louis M. — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:16:16 +0000

Sometimes getting your tweet seen by a Twitterer with a lot of traffic seems like a matter of dumb luck. I don’t really believe in luck, so I wrote a simple script that looks for evidence a user has interacted with twitter and immediately sends a predefined message. While this won’t guarantee your tweet will [...]

Manage Twitter Followers

Louis M. — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 03:33:26 +0000

Here is a simple bit of code to keep track of your followers on Twitter. It will acknowledge them when they start following you through either a mention or a direct message. It also shows you who has stopped following you rather just seeing a count change. To run this script you will need to [...]

Backing up mySQL via email

Louis M. — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:29:35 +0000

I setup a simple set of scripts to email me an encrypted copy of a database run on a regular schedule.

First off I created a simple bash script that dumps all the databases from the local mysql server, tars it, encrypts it and then uses a simple perl script to email it to me, [...]

Combine Text Files from Command Line

Louis M. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:26:33 +0000

Looking for a way to combine files quickly? Using the example of exports from active directory where you export a number of different OU’s, you can quickly combine them into one file directly from the command line.

copy /b *.txt all.txt /b

This will combine all the files in your directory ending with .txt [...]

Backing up mySQL via email

Louis M. — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:38:19 +0000

Looking for the easiest way to backup a number of MySQL servers that required absolutely no intervention, I decided to leverage the ample email storage I have available to me and the power of cron. A simple bash script makes the magic happen.

First I needed to get the data out of MySQL. Might as [...]

List to CSV

Louis M. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:09:58 +0000

Sometimes you get data in a list format and you need it in comma separated format. Sure, you could open up Excel and then use the transpose function, but you could also paste it into a simple script.

#!C;\perl\bin use Win32::Clipboard; my $clipboard = Win32::Clipboard(); my $out; while (){ my $tmp = $_; last if [...]

Open Multiple Tabs in IE, Firefox and Chrome

Louis M. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:48:58 +0000

I often find myself working in the same browser windows day after day. Sometimes its at work where I have WLC, Nagios, Unity, CCM and a few others open and then sometimes its at home where I have my bank and a few other bills open in different tabs. Rather than do a bunch of [...]

Rogue DHCP Detection

Louis M. — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:08:56 +0000

Okay, so dhcp is a great tool. It can also cause havoc on your network when it shows up unintentionally. Since network access control isn’t always an option for some of us, we will have to find ways to detect an additional dhcp server.

Nagios’ default check_dhcp service check only makes sure that dhcp is [...]

Pseudo Random Password Generator

Louis M. — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:35:07 +0000

I’ve worked for companies that set up their user scripts to run in batch jobs. This is great, especially when there is a high volume of accounts to create and/or there are a lot of settings that need to be configured. But, when it comes down to generating the password a lot of people fail [...]

Nagios Bulk Config

Louis M. — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:34:22 +0000

About five years ago, I needed to get Nagios started on a moderately sized network. The proposition of having to configure a few hundred switches for monitoring manually wasn’t very appealing. That’s a lot of configuration files to create.

I decided that a Perl script would be the best option to get me going. I [...]