Extra88

Tip for accidental programmers

Say you're writing a script, in Perl for instance, that calls a program on the system. The script works fine when you run it manually but when it's scheduled to run via cron, the program isn't called. Check to see if you used the full path to the called program. Chances are the script will not have a $path to check when run via cron.

Enabling Sendmail as send-only

This is something I've been wondering about for a while but never got around to hunting down. This Mac OS X hint explains how to set up Sendmail to start automatically at boot but to only be available locally on the machine. This is very good for setting up automated functions to email updates to you or to use it as a quick 'n dirty way of sending info or files by email from the command line. These instructions were written for OS X but I'm sure can be adapted for any UNIX.

Radmind reaches 1.0

From MacInTouch:

Released after an extended beta-testing period, Radmind 1.0 is a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. It can detect changes to any managed filesystem object (files, directories, links, etc.) and can optionally reverse the change. For Mac OS X, Radmind Assistant provides a graphical interface to the command-line tools. Radmind is free for Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris.

Lookup NetBIOS names from OS X

This falls under so many categories. MacOSXHints has this storyAn AppleScript to look up NetBIOS names. but Real Men use the Terminal. Here's the command line bit that does the real work:

nmblookup -T -U <WINS server IP> -R <NetBIOS name>

Here's an example for work and its output:

cwcx% nmblookup -T -U 128.151.209.155 -R esmdc
querying esmdc on 128.151.209.155
esmdc.esm.rochester.edu, 128.151.209.155 esmdc<00>

In this case I used the WINS server to look up the WINS server's NetBIOS name.