projects

drks — Wed, 2006-08-16 09:34

Public Projects

IUS Community Project

The IUS Community is a project I started as part of my day job at Rackspace Hosting. The project is aimed at providing stable and regularly maintained RPM packages for the latest upstream versions of PHP, Python, MySQL and other common software specifically for Redhat Enterprise Linux. IUS can be thought of as, "A better way to upgrade RHEL… if you really need to".

Project Pages:

Official Site: http://iuscommunity.org
LaunchPad Site: http://launchpad.net/ius

IUS Community Teams:

Members: http://launchpad.net/~ius-community
Core Developers: http://launchpad.net/~ius-coredev

Mailing Lists:

General discussion happens in the ius-community team: http://launchpad.net/~ius-community. Join the team, and then you can subscribe to the list.

Python Cement

Cement is a basic Python CLI Application Framework. Almost every command line type application has a number of basic pieces that have to exist before any real code and logic gets written. At a minimum, Cement easily sets up the following: Configuration file parsing, Command line arguments and option parsing, Logging, and Plugin support.

These four pieces are the most important for a fully functional command line application. Normally to accomplish what's listed above would require dozens of lines of non-reusable code for every application before you even begin coding. Cement doesn't re-invent the wheel, rather uses OptParse, ConfigObj, and Logger behind a number of methods that wrap them all together nicely. With Cement, the above pieces of a fully functional command line application are configured with more or less a single line of code.

Cement is most generally used as a starting point from which to begin developing a command line type application. That said, applications using cement can also share plugins with either cement or other applications using cement.

Cement adds two commands to PasteScript that can be used to easily create cement based applications and plugins. See 'paster cement-app' and 'paster cement-plugin'.

Project Sites:

PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Cement

Quick Installation:

$ easy_install cement

rb-parseconfig

rb-parseconfig is a Ruby class written to parse simple configuration files in the format of "param = value". The class was intended to provide simple parsing of standard Unix/Linux style config files.

Project Sites:

RubyForge Project Page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/parseconfig

Quick Installation:

gem install parseconfig

You might also want to go here to read more.

Deprecated Projects

As it happens with anyone who develops anything, some projects just don't make it anywhere and either their purpose is no longer relevant or there was never enough interest to make further development worth while.

The following are those projects.

pLsearch

pLsearch was written to assist SysAdmin's in grep'ing logs and other files for specific content, and then spitting it out in a pretty format which is generally easy on the eyes.

pLsearch uses the (s)locate database to search for specific files that the administrator wants to work with. It then accepts a query, and/or subquery, and/or inverted query which will then be used to grep through the located files for content. It is therefore a two way search. This is meant to be extremely useful for System Administration tasks such as attempting to track down exploitable FormMail applications that were being used to Send Spam as an open relay, or possibly used to search common files for a known exploits (such as "urldecode" in all files named "viewtopic.php" which is a well known phpBB exploit signature), etc.

Download => Sourceforge.net

quarReminder

Amavisd-new Quarantine Reminder. The 'quarReminder.php' script was written to assist system administrators with reminding their email users that they have messages in their Spam/Virus Quarantine. It was written mainly for usage with Amavisd-new, however a simple modification of the SQL query may allow it to work with other systems.

Download => SourceForge.net

installRDJ

This is a simple PERL script used to quickly install Rules Du Jour on a system. As you probably are fully aware, the Rules Du Jour installation is not difficult, however when you are performing installations on a daily basis, it is much nicer to do it in two redundant and memorizable steps (Note the --plesk flag if it is a Plesk box):

Usage:

wget http://devel.5dollarwhitebox.org/installRDJ/installRDJ
perl ./installRDJ.pl --install

Download:

Latest Release: installRDJ-1.2.0

ccdInstaller

This is a simple PERL script to automate the task of installing the Solaris Companion CD (for Solaris 8/9). It was originally part of a project I was working on to build a Linux based Solaris Jumpstart Installer.

This project was quite a while ago, and I haven't touched the ccdInstaller script in a while either, so feel free to flame me if/when it doesn't work.