due to export regulations cycles greater than 1024 should not be used

January 3, 2009 2:18 AM

A small collection of special programs for system administration, written at a level suitable for senior admins.

Useful standouts include but are not limited to maybe, bottom, lsss, ged, pam happy hour, and jecho.

posted by 31d1 (37 comments total)

Let me be the first to say, typical perl coder.

//ducks.
posted by orthogonality at 2:36 AM on January 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

My God, it's full of stars. My favorite is osstat. "This program provides a convenient way to determine if your OS is upgraded, rebooted, reinstalled or BFU'd while you are using it." This is particularly useful for me, since I'm the only one with the root passwords and server access on a daily basis, so if I have a psychotic break in conjunction with multiple personality disorder, when I get back to the first personality this will be an excellent early warning signal.
posted by barc0001 at 2:46 AM on January 3, 2009

This is why Solaris is dying, GNU/Linux ships with these handy utilities by default!!!
posted by Skorgu at 2:46 AM on January 3, 2009 [2 favorites]

Skorgu writes "This is why Solaris is dying"

You forgot your "Netcraft confirms,".
posted by orthogonality at 2:50 AM on January 3, 2009

You forget to mention cdrewind. I've been manually rewinding my cds for years; this will save me literally seconds a day. It suspect it might work with dvds, too!
posted by wfitzgerald at 4:27 AM on January 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

ged.jar GUI-ed. A Java/Swing GUI front-end for the "ed" line editor. This enhances the classic "ed" tool by wrapping it in an easy to use GUI. The GUI provides tunable options such as sound effects and themes. This runs on any OS with Java 1.5 and a valid "/bin/ed" (Solaris/Linux/...). src.

Classic. Fucking classic.
posted by koeselitz at 4:39 AM on January 3, 2009 [2 favorites]

I also like lsss a lot. There are a number of files that I've been wrangling with for months that I have a sneaking suspicion are all Arieses.
posted by koeselitz at 4:49 AM on January 3, 2009

Someone should reimplement TECO in javascript.
posted by Skorgu at 6:29 AM on January 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Guvf zvtug abg or nf fnsr nf gurl pynvzrq.

Shpxvat uryy, lbh npghnyyl obgurerq gb jbex vg bhg.
posted by mandal at 6:59 AM on January 3, 2009

Well of course it's insecure, you only ROT13'd it once.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:10 AM on January 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Shame on you. Someday we will all be senior admins. These people changed your diapers without complaining, and you mock them?
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:03 AM on January 3, 2009 [3 favorites]

0010100010101110100010110100001000000001001011101001001001100011110010101.
posted by jimmythefish at 8:10 AM on January 3, 2009

Wolfdog: I believe the NSA standard for 3ROT13 is classified as a munition and restrained by US export laws. Back in the rest of the world we still have to use the old RSO 1455-80BC variant still if we don't want to anger the empire.
posted by public at 8:58 AM on January 3, 2009

This is excellent.
posted by musicinmybrain at 9:02 AM on January 3, 2009

man, it would be awesome if that xmanagerstat utility actually did what it said it was doing. Too bad that on a modern computer the blinkenlights would be going so fast that it would just look like they were on all the time.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:20 AM on January 3, 2009

How does NSA feel about ROT39?
posted by Wolfdog at 9:26 AM on January 3, 2009

0101011101101000011101010111010000111111
posted by brundlefly at 9:49 AM on January 3, 2009

I see there's a program to activate the 'turbo' button. What the hell was this for? I remember once going into an office where they had a whole bunch of PC's that had been built by some cowboy firm and they all had hardware turbo buttons on the front panel. Some kind of lame overclocking trick, perhaps?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 10:32 AM on January 3, 2009

I was actually reading about the turbo button somewhere a while ago. Seems it was more for turning off, when you wanted to run some software that used cpu ticks for timing, and would run unbearably fast on modern machines.
posted by 31d1 at 10:38 AM on January 3, 2009

Oh my gods these are complete genius.

At first I was completely confused, and tempted by the snark-side, but then I got to the PAM happy hour and almost died laughing.
posted by popechunk at 11:03 AM on January 3, 2009

I see there's a program to activate the 'turbo' button. What the hell was this for? I remember once going into an office where they had a whole bunch of PC's that had been built by some cowboy firm and they all had hardware turbo buttons on the front panel. Some kind of lame overclocking trick, perhaps?

If I recall correctly, the turbo button made my old 8086 (or was it an 8088) run at 8mhz instead of 4.77.

Why you'd want to run something at half speed- I don't know. Those were the days.
posted by xmutex at 11:09 AM on January 3, 2009

xmutex: well, it saves power, and a lot of software back then was sort of designed timed by hardware speed rather than a seperate clock. Think music, cursor blinking or typomatic repeat.

Today, the we still have computers that run at half speed. They just expose the setting in software rather than a physical switch. Power consumption in transistors is dominated by the number of transitions, so downclocking reduces the number of those a second.
posted by pwnguin at 11:35 AM on January 3, 2009

You ever try to play Qix or Pango at 8mhz when it was designed to run at 4.77?
posted by Wolfdog at 11:36 AM on January 3, 2009

ah wumpus!
posted by jessamyn at 11:59 AM on January 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

0010100010101110100010110100001000000001001011101001001001100011110010101.

10100110011000111010110101 !
posted by quarsan at 12:02 PM on January 3, 2009

HAPPY HOUR!!! I think someone on my shared host is running allslow.
posted by greensweater at 12:27 PM on January 3, 2009

I once wrote a little C program called blame. You could give it an argument, in which case that person would be blamed. If not, it expected to find a file in the user's home directory called .blamefile, otherwise it would default to use /usr/lib/blamefile. It would then choose a name at random from the file and print "It's all X's fault". The man page described its purpose as "Assign blame for the whole mess."

I also wrote a complement to sort(1) that I called shuffle. It actually had a purpose though - we used it to take files of first and last names and shuffle & merge them to create test data.

The examples on the page linked in the FPP are all first-class though. Excellent stuff.
posted by kcds at 12:35 PM on January 3, 2009

Brilliant. I loved the starsign idea. I'd know more about the stuff on my machine if I knew at a glance what its sign was, but I hadn't even thought someone brighter than myself would have already solved that problem.

This is what really good satire is like, bravo. Starts out just the other side of credulity and then proceeds from there without constantly nudging you in the ribs.
posted by maxwelton at 12:36 PM on January 3, 2009

I use ROT26 in all my communications.
posted by xorry at 12:45 PM on January 3, 2009

mkzombie.c

This program creates one or more zombies and a daemon their leader. It can be used to replenish system zombies, or to feed the init monster.

posted by odinsdream at 1:02 PM on January 3, 2009

sysadmins should not shout at their disks
posted by exogenous at 1:55 PM on January 3, 2009

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
posted by mr.marx at 3:50 PM on January 3, 2009

...built by some cowboy firm and they all had hardware turbo buttons on the front panel.

A cowboy firm called Digital Equipment Co. used to sell $100K VAX computers, with a $10K field upgradable turbo option, that entailed a technician coming on site and cutting a jumper wire.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:49 PM on January 3, 2009

Combined with economic advantages of the mating structure, it far surpasses any disadvantages in increased perversions. An infinite translated mathematics of tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary.
posted by basilwhite at 5:42 PM on January 3, 2009

awesome fpp, thanks.
posted by cmyr at 4:00 AM on January 4, 2009

Sweet - I'm using 4ROT13 for all my super-secret communications from now on, starting with this comment!
posted by dilettanti at 8:12 AM on January 4, 2009

I'm several days late to the conversation but when I wasn't writing my Jr High nuclear simulation opus, I (mis)spent my time creating a jokey OS simulator for the Commodore PET that incorporated many functions like these. It displayed the familiar "Commodore BASIC" banner, had a blinking cursor that accepted numbered line input for BASIC programs and emulated a number of built-in functions including Commodore DOS commands for disc directories. But after a while it started to go wonky; if you tried to RUN your newly-entered program it told you "I'd rather walk". I had hundreds of them, you get the idea. Unsuspecting students would sit down & spend 45 minutes typing in their homework solutions only to have the computer start spewing wisecracks & refuse to do what they told it to. I was the terror of the computer classes. Looking back, it was the first steps on the path for my chosen career of breaking into computer systems for corporate & government clients.

Incidentally, as I was looking up the banner text on Google just now I made the happy discovery that the PET is an integral aspect of the Global Consciousness Community. I always suspected.
posted by scalefree at 11:22 AM on January 5, 2009