Special collection of freeware tools for system administration | Hacker News Reader

Special collection of freeware tools for system administration

brendangregg.com

46 pointsColinWright15 comments

>> pam_happy_hour.c PAM happy hour module. This creates a happy hour on Solaris during which passwords aren't required, any will do. Full example here.

Now we know what caused the Dropbox issue...

> bottom This is the opposite of top, it displays processes that are using the least CPU.

This is exactly what I need! I've been planning an awards ceremony for the developers of the most efficient software running on my systems (measured in CPU cycles, obviously). This will make selecting candidates so much easier.

Anyone know where I can get #!/usr/dt/bin/dtksh? I NEED xmanagerstat.

Thanks!

It only exists on Solaris AFAIK, as part of the CDE window manager environment.

Hah - learned something. Thought it was part of the joke.

Rewind cd-roms?? Is this a joke!?

>3ROT13

yes.

Well, if you look at the source, it does exactly what it says. Seek to the beginning.

No it's not a joke. If you forget to rewind your CD-ROMs before storing them, the next person using it might start reading at the wrong position. This can result in incomplete or corrupted data.

He forgot one that I use all the time: http://xkcd.com/221/

He had something in the same spirit: (though this one outputs a decidedly non-random number)

http://www.brendangregg.com/Specials/notrandom.c

The same spirit in the way that a closed door is similar to an open door. XKCD generated a random number to return, notrandom.c did not.

I fail to see similar spirits here.

You can easily write your own:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  #The following was generated by a fair dice roll,
  #guaranteed to be random
  exit 4

A few programs I would like to see:

  * an automatic 'why-is-the-system-down' excuse generator plugged into procmail
  * suid-root 'system cleaner' (kills all processes but the user's own bash shell)
  * an ld_library hook (fix_all_errors.c ?) to force exit() to always return true
  * a vi plugin for Emacs
  * a program that forces the admin to type the entire 100-bottles-of-beer song before
   - logging in as root
   - editing sudoers
   - implementing NIS or RSH
   - starting any process with a listening tcp/udp socket as root

makezombie.c is a fake. No processes called "zombie" are running on the system after I invoke this. Also, a real zombie program should randomly chew on other processes until the other process itself is a zombie. This needs more work.

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