Explored some options for print station kiosks and print accounting.
Accounting’s relatively easy — LPRng can run a command at filter time to grab the current pagecount off the printer via SNMP. In fact, I’ve already done that for some printers. It’s only a minor stretch to stuff that info into a database where we can track it and charge if that’s the word.
The kiosk station is a little trickier. There seem to be a few weird, dead, or otherwise untenable projects that set up kiosks at the printers (well, aside from commercial systems, which seems to be what almost everybody uses). I’m probably going to end up writing my own web interface to the LPRng queue system which will, among other things, look nice, work properly, and hopefully not require some monster set of dependancies that don’t fit our environment. Hmm… it’s a wheel — maybe I can make a better one.
Read several of the LISA ‘04 papers last night, and got interested in some of the ideas from autoMAC.
Mainly, the practice of sending VLAN information as part of a MAC RADIUS authentication dialog to configure the port on the switch. I can see incorporating this into our NetReg system to good effect. Not sure on the details for our site yet.
Heading out for LISA ‘04. May post some updates while there, may not…
After looking at a number of interesting IRC bots, I decided to just extend our own local bot, Gabrielus, that I wrote last year.
Supybot looks quite nice, but I’m not much of a Pythoner, and don’t tend to have it installed on servers as a general rule. Infobot is nice in that it’s in Perl and works out of the box — but it has practically no doco (and what is there is slightly obtuse), and the code is so messy that I’d need rubber waders to make any sense of it…
Gabrielus has been managing a couple of channels and auto-opping us for a year now, and since I wrote it, I understand it. And since it uses Net::IRC, it’s pretty straightforward. Adding a basic module architecture on top was pretty simple, and with the reload command, I can even dynamically add and remove modules (or update them). Woot. At this point it does basic math (bc and dc), provides a SnipURL service, does DNS lookups, dig-style, and spouts random Zippyisms at inopportune moments. More to come when we feel like it.
Was at the IHETS Tech Summit in Indy yesterday.
Didn’t get a whole lot out of it other than an update on the ILight2 project, which sounds promising. The network security sessions were a bit underwhelming, and the first of them — network security policies — clearly needed to check out the SANS’ security policy page. The wireless session was also underwhelming, but then we already know that wireless is insecure.
Futzed around with a few IMAP synchronization tools. All have problems, and it mostly made me rethink how I’m handling mail archiving, at least a little.
Not much to say. OfflineIMAP seems the best, but it has problems with UW IMAP when you empty a folder. What I really need to do, though, is spend some more time figuring out how to properly archive my own mail. Maybe next year.
Finally got around to implementing the performance graph database for NetBackup that I saw in SysAdmin last spring.
The SysAdmin code was pretty basic and needed a lot of tweaking to make it useful. I also ported it to PostgreSQL from the MySQL base (needing to create some SQL functions along the way). Then built a simplistic PHP front end around it to generate graphs for any given client, policy, and graph type — backup speed, number of files, number of KB, and backup time.
The result is at http://monitor.earlham.edu/netbackup/.
I’ll probably extend it so that I can specify a time period as well.