The Rockgarden

A vanity website on a home server

Software And Contributions

This page is a collection of some of my own software packages (mostly scripts of interest to fellow system administrators, but I’m beginning to develop some more “fun” stuff as well), as well as contributions I’ve made to other software packages. In some cases these contributions have been accepted into the packages by the software’s maintainers, and in others, either the package is not actively maintained to my knowledge, or my contribution was not of wide enough interest to merit being included in the official package.

There may be a few items here which are patches I developped for an existing package, but have yet to contact the maintainers to officially submit my changes as a contribution. It happens…

My own software

  • quick one-liners: This is currently a plain-text file containing a number of quick, mostly single-line “on-the-fly” scripts which I’ve found useful in my work as a system administrator. I hope to add regularly to this file.
  • Authstats: A Perl script I wrote to parse through daily system access logs, as recorded by Wietse Venema‘s Tcp_Wrappers package. This script produces a summary of the logfile, and emails it to the system administrator.
  • Newsyslog: A Perl script I wrote (from a colleague’s design) to rotate system logs, with an emphasis on not losing any log data during the rotation on a busy system. I think the design for this one was very intelligent, and the resulting script is better than others I’ve seen (or created myself) to do the same job.
  • HMarchive: A Procmail recipe, and a few support scripts for calling the HyperMail mail archiving program from Procmail at the time a message arrives.
  • perl_db_to_text: A small collection of very simple Perl scripts which can convert database files from the two “standard” Unix database formats to and from text.
  • Spambounce: A PERL script to send complaints about spam to the contact addresses for the site that the message came from.
  • mvspam: A very simple shell script to dequeue messages from a specific system, in the local mail spool(s). Useful for example if a local client system has been found to be sending spam through the mail server(s). This dequeues any remaining messages and preserves them for further investigation.

My contributions to other software

  • Slrn: A very easy to use, yet powerful netnews reading program.
    • contributed documentation; notably Introduction to Usenet News and the slrn Newsreader, adapted (with permission) from a document originally by Jon Bell for the Trn newsreader.
    • incorporated into main code-tree: Slrn score file now has an “include” directive. The official implementation differs somewhat from the one I submitted, so in the interest of avoiding confusion I’m purposely not linking the patch I originally submitted.
    • a patch with the original implementation of the “slrnpull operates setgid to news” feature that has been incorporated into the main code. The setgid.txt file included in the Slrn distribution contains my original description of the patch and its reasoning.
  • Wu-Ftpd: In my opinion this is still the best program to use when deploying an FTP server. It is powerful and flexible, yet provides the features required for ensuring server integrity.
    • wu-ftpd-2.6.2-lastlog.patch patch to track FTP logins via the system lastlog file.
    • wu-ftpd-2.6.2-paranoid.patch patch that splits the wu-ftpd “paranoid” configuration into individual compile-time configuration items, adds an option to check a user’s home directory against a configurable base directory, and adds an option to define an alternate home directory if a user’s home directory is either non-existent or outside of the base directory of the previous item.
  • Horde/IMP: Imp is essentially a web-based IMAP client, so it’s very easy to use as the basis for a custom webmail service.
  • Remote Tripwire: Mostly installation details, plus mkstemp() patch. (TODO: locate and link)