Run Cron Jobs at Arbitrary Intervals
Current versions of cron support sophisticated syntax making creating weird schedules a breeze. With older versions of cron you normally had to schedule multiple...
Monitoring Application Network Connections
A Java application on one of my servers has been causing problems by opening up too many network connections and not closing them quickly...
Finding Strings in Outlook PST Files
In this scenario, a user emailed some other user something that probably should not have been emailed. You don't know who the users are...
Extracting Email Addresses from TCP Streams
Here's a quick example of using tshark to extract email addresses from TCP streams. Let's say some application on your server is sending emails and...
Obfuscating Passwords in Shell Scripts
At the risk of repeating myself, I must say that this article is about obfuscating passwords - rendering obscure, unclear, or unintelligible - not hiding...
Export WP Posts and Sync to Sharepoint
Long story short: old wiki is overloaded and broken; new wiki is not a wiki but SharePoint - a glorified file server; people are...
Croncal – the Cron Calendar
The croncal is a clever Perl script that reads entries in your crontab and outputs a schedule, showing the time when cron jobs will run. This can...
Plotting Log Data
While I am on the subject of selecting time ranges from logs, a practical application presented itself. A lonely server in a far-away land...
Generating Random Text Files for Testing
Sometimes you need dummy folder structures populated with random data for testing your various scripts and processes - backups, file transfers, encryption, compression, etc....
