HOME | GIT Overview | Script-Archive: (docs) : (wiki) : (git) | ...

Peter's Script-Archive - System-Administration / Editing

Most of my old admin stuff is way too specific. Or else its waiting for a rewrite before being using again (all the while hoping to stay retired as soon as a suitable group-maintained pendant can be found :)).

The system flight recorder editor project sfre is a slightly different case, it's an itch from previous projects, where being unable to ask a collegue (night-time, holidays, whatever) repeatedly lead to time-consuming double-checks. Now wouldn't it be nice to find such information about already execute tasks, changes and modifications in a single location on the system in question; possibly regularly also archived on a central server by cron? Note that sfre substitutes for a versioning system or a tool like cfengine only in the most trivial of cases; it's real purpose is to complement proper system management tools, and in addition provide a fail-safe for those dusty corners for which use of proper tools like cfengine has been postponed and "will be implemented as soon when we have some free time". Read: probably not before a fresh install of the problem system in question, and certainly not when doing that in a hurry...

I'm currently using sfre as $EDITOR, $VISUAL and as a replacement for vi (albeit with a call to the real vi later on); it's quite painful to be asked all the time for sane log messages when opening a vi without files or doing a git commit. This translates into a growing list of changes like implementing a command blacklist for file locking and journaling. For now it's still a bit too annoying to be used for accounts other than root.

Commands

Git View of this section / Download

selectlines , a version of the classic copy a file and select/deselect lines according to embedded directives with variable expansion. Useful for trivial cases, provided you switch to more suitable tools for heavier lifting.
systemflightrecordereditor (sfre) - sfre tries to sequence file edits and augment group memory in concurrent file change scenarios like multiple root users plus cron jobs. For each edit (or more generally any arbitrary command given with the -e option) sfre logs a description to a journal, f-locks the plain file arguments of the command and uses changetrack to backup changes. It also supports lookup/diff of files from a changetrack backupdir by date, revision number or symbolic name allowing all options of the cat or diff commands (e.g. all GNU diff options instead of just the small subset of options available via rcsdiff). Dependencies: changetrack (changetrack.sf.net) and lock.pl/Flock.pm. (You may wish to set SFRESHELL to a Bourne-style shell that supports set -o pipefail). Published on freshmeat .
unescape.pl strips some of the line noise from script typescripts. Modified version with prompt guessing, tries to remove e.g. vim session. Using a tool like this may make typescripts somewhat more usable as a base for documentation.