August 2008 Archives

There are quite a few commercial systems management products out there for Windows. As with any product space, each has its strengths and weaknesses. Altiris, for example, offers incredible power. LanDesk may lack some of that power, but is far easier to use. As far as I know, there's no comparable systems management suite consisting of primarily open source software. I'm considering changing that situation.

In the past couple of years, I've begun learning a lot of new things about scripting for systems administration, deploying patches, repackaging and deploying software, and generally maintaining the health of systems on a network. I've shared bits of that knowledge here, as I've had the time and desire to write them up. But I've never taken things to the "next level" and actually converted that knowledge into a usable tool set.

For example, I have a DOS batch script which will deploy a specific Microsoft patch to a specific computer from the command line. I have another script which can simultaneously execute a command on multiple systems. Another set of scripts will run a CHKDSK on a remote system, examine the output, determine if any "significant" errors exist, instruct the system to repair errors on the next reboot, and reboot the system. Other scripts can check for impending disk failure, low disk space conditions, etc. Taken as a whole, these scripts would be useful for a small shop (say, 1000 PCs or less) to manage their systems. Extended a bit, they could probably handle a larger network of machines.

Because I'm starting to get the "itch" to create something, I'm toying with the idea of developing my own equivalent of an Altiris or LanDesk that's built using free or freely-available software. That way, the small organization with 20-150 PCs can manage their system like the bigger shops. And the bigger shops who may not have the money for one of the commercial products can still reap the benefits of automated systems management, without the expense.

This is still just the germ of an idea in my head. My existing scripts are too site specific and undocumented to be widely used without a lot of tweaking. And heck, I may not even have the programming and scripting skill needed to pull off some of the things I would consider critical to such a tool. (For example, minimizing network bandwidth usage by transmitting a software package to one machine on a subnet, then transmitting the package from that machine to others on the same subnet might be more than I know how to accomplish.)

Still, it's fun to think about...

Earlier today, they were handing out ice cream at the office. One of my co-workers saw a "raspberry and chocolate" ice cream item and said something like, "Yuck! Raspberry and chocolate don't belong together." I agreed instantly, because I can't stand any dish that mixes fruit and chocolate, or fruit and meat. Before I start sounding like too picky of an eater, you can feed me almost anything if you manage to comply with the following rules:

• No wild animals. I've had them slip onto my plate at different times and I've never liked any of them. This differs from many of my family members, who enjoy deer, rabbit, goose, duck, pheasant, squirrel, etc.
• Don't mix my meat with fruit. That means no "apple chicken" or "lemon shrimp".
• Don't mix my chocolate with fruit.
• Don't feed me fish. Can't stand it. (That includes trout, catfish, perch, cod, etc., but does not include shrimp, scallops, lobster, or crab.)
• Don't offer me pork, unless it's bacon, sausage, or ham
• Don't offer me the entrails of any creature (I've even been known to pick off a sausage casing if it bugs me).
• No desserts that include cheese, except for the Indian dessert Rasmalai.
• No raisins in anything. Period. Not breakfast cereals, not cakes or cookies, nothing.
• Salads should not include fruit or croutons, or any fruit flavoring.

That's pretty much it. I'm willing to try almost any food from any ethnic group on the planet provided it fits in with the above list.

The following picture was taken from the car on the way to our hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana, this past Wednesday.  My brother and I were in Indy to take part in the Gen Con 2008 game convention.  We stayed at the University Place Hotel on the IUPUI campus, taking the shuttle (or a cab) into town to the convention center each day and back each evening.  We had a good time and were a little sad to leave because it means another year of "game conventioning" comes to a close...

Earlier this year, I planted pumpkin seeds in the back yard.  They're of a variety designed to generate mammoth pumpkins like you see on contests on TV.  I've been threatening my wife that I would grow a really big one in our back yard, so it was amusing to pass this vehicle on our way to the Gen Con Indy 2008 game convention:

When I first created this blog, I used an open source content management system named Mambo to hold all the articles. Mambo is a free package, reasonably easy to learn, and certainly powerful enough. However, I began to have issues with it on two of my other web sites and decided it was time to look at others. One of my co-workers told me about Movable Type, another free open source package, and I decided to give it a look.

As it turns out, Movable Type needed certain services (specifically, the use of Perl CGIs) that weren't part of my hosting account on any of the three sites I ran with Mambo. I upgraded to the "next level" of hosting, and gained an additional feature - the ability to point all of my domain names at a single account with my provider.

After giving Movable Type a try for a while, I decided to take the plunge and migrate all my sites over to it. The problem was, the two sites didn't have any common formats for exchanging my data. I had to fire up the old text editor and create my own. I wrote a simple PHP program to dump the articles, with a thought to doing some kind of copy/paste arrangement. When I figured out how long that was going to take me, I abandoned the idea. Instead, I decided to try to use the "Import" feature of Movable Type. I looked up the documentation online and create a sample article in the Movable Type editor. I exported that article to get a look at the file format. It looked pretty straightforward.

After studying the PHP code I had written and the Movable Type documentation, I created a PHP program to dump all the content from the old system into the Movable Type format in a text file on my PC. I fed the output into Movable Type and it claimed that everything imported successfully. Unfortunately, when I went to look at my content, there was nothing there.

Finally, I realized that Movable Type is primarily a Linux-based system. Text files on Windows and text files on Linux/UNIX have a different way of indicating the end of a line of text. Since my file was coming from a Windows PC going into a Linux system, the Linux system was having trouble interpreting where the lines of the file were indicated. I found a free program called "EOL Converter" that changed the file into Linux/UNIX format. I imported that, and Movable Type was much happier. This time it actually showed me the names of the articles it was importing. I thought that would be the end of it. I was wrong.

Unfortunately, when I looked at all those articles I'd imported into the system, everything was there except for the body text of the article (i.e., the part you're reading right now). I compared an article I'd exported from Movable Type earlier with one that I'd output from Mambo. Going over it line by line, space by space, I finally found a minor difference. At the beginning and end of the article body, you're supposed to have 4 dashes, to help Movable Type know where your article really ends. I apparently had a mix of 4 and 5 dashes in the output I generated from Mambo. I changed it to 4, per the documentation. That didn't work. I changed it to 5, and it did.

At this point I could import articles from the old system, but I realized that just pulling the HTML over wasn't enough. The old articles had references to graphics files that weren't on the new system. I had to do a huge "find and replace" job over the Mambo output to correct these broken graphic references. I also realized that the links to other articles on my site would be broken as well. That, I was going to have to handle manually because the old content system referenced articles by a number, while the new one uses names.

All told, I probably invested 20-30 hours getting the content from my old systems to the new one. The most visible thing I'll gain from this is a cost savings. I had been paying $4-7 a month to host each of my four sites, totaling around $20-24 a month. The new $6.99 a month account will host all four sites (and more), saving me $13-17 a month in hosting costs. I also gain some consistency, in that all my sites are hosted on a single server with a single content management system. That should make it more efficient to work with.

I've also gained another benefit. I wrote a Visual Basic 6 program that allows me to input articles like this one and output them in Movable Type input format in a text file. That text file can later be imported into Movable Type and the articles posted automatically for me. Using that program, I'll be able to blog anywhere I have a computer (it can run off a USB memory stick)... even if I don't have Internet access. Later, when I'm back online, I can just upload the file and the articles go online.

Well, I'm about to head off to the Gen Con Indy 2008 game convention in Indianapolis. You may, or may not, read more from me over the next few days. Rest assured there will be words and probably pictures when I get back!

Blackberry Cobbler

In less than an hour you can serve this very simple yet excellent dessert. (Serves 6)

4 - 6 cups fresh blackberries
Juice of one Lemon
1 large fresh egg
1 cup white all-purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
6 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 375F.

Place the fresh blackberries in a lightly greased 8 inch x 8 inch square baking pan. Sprinkle the lemon juice over top of the berries. In a separate bowl, stir together one large egg, one cup of sugar and one cup of flour, blend and stir mixture until the ingredients resemble coarse meal. Sprinkle the sugar/flour mix over the berries. Drizzle 6 tablespoons melted butter over the topping. Bake at 375F for about 35 minutes or until lightly browned and bubbly. Remove, and let stand 10 minutes. Serve hot with ice cream or whipped cream.

Garnish with fresh mint.