my half-arsed attempt at blogging
scripts
cURL and Google Spreadsheets
Dec 6th
I failed to find a good example of something that worked to pull a spreadsheet from google-docs using cURL. All that I found didn’t work, in one shape or another.
A bit of playing, and quite a bit of reading got this
#!/bin/bash
PASS=`cat /path/to/0600/google-password-file`
SHEET="https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Exportkey=addyourownsheetIDhere&exportFormat=csv&gid="
AUTH_TOKE=`curl --silent https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin -d \
Email=foo@example.org -d \
Passwd=${PASS} -d \
accountType=HOSTED -d \
source=cURL-SpreadPull -d \
service=wise | grep Auth\= | sed 's/Auth/auth/'`
curl --silent --output /path/to/file --header "GData-Version: 3.0" --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin ${AUTH_TOKE}" "${SHEET}${TAB}"
seemed to do the trick
Exportkey could be defined in the script, as a variable, thinking about it. You’ll need to supply that; I typically grab it from the web-based URI, but there is a warning in the docs about that:
To determine the URL of a cell-based feed for a given worksheet, get the worksheets metafeed and examine the <link> element in which rel is http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#cellsfeed. The href value in that element is the cell feed’s URI.
YMMV.
I’ve added in &exportFormat=csv&gid= because I wanted CSV outputs, and gid’s value is provided via a for … and case deviation.
--header "GData-Version: 3.0" was needed to avoid the redirection.
Hopefully, this might be of benefit — as a working (when written) example of using curl and google docs/google spreadsheets.
apt-listbugs and suite-wide scripted upgrades
Nov 28th
Having finally got fed up with logging in, individually, to upgrade each of the no2id machines and jails, a bit ago, I decided to write a script to do the ‘hard work’ for me.
This worked fine, until today, when I noticed apt-listbugs complaining, and causing the script to fail to dist-upgrade.
Not a problem, thought I. I’m sure others have had this issue too. Being lazy, I thought first point of call would be the internets. I’d have thought something like:
"DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive" "apt-listbugs"
might have done the trick. It didn’t (that I could find).
So I went back to doing what a lot of the new-breed of ‘devops’ fail to do, and what I’m quite hypocritical of; looking at the manpage.
The manpage provides us with this gem:
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
o APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND If this variable is set to “none”
apt-listbugs will not execute at all, this might be useful if
you would like to script the use of a program that calls
apt-listbugs.
So there we go.
for M in $MACHINES
do
echo "Connecting to ${M}.no2id.net"
- ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
+ ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; export APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND=none; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
done
hopefully, this will help others, whose first port of call is the internets, and not manpages.
You may, however be sensible — and have had the time to roll out Puppet (ugh, when did they change their website! Why‽) or Chef though.
Transmission and Renaming Torrents
Sep 14th
I’ve recently (ish) started using transmission as my torrent client; the change-over comes from my switching-things-off approach; instead of keeping ktorrent running on the laptop (and caneing my bandwidth), I can have something mainly work on the NAS which is always on (bar power-cuts/maint).
One of the things that I noticed was the apparent lack of renaming within Transmission (and the curious way earlier tickets are marked as duplicitous of later ones).
So, erm, I’ve written something that works for me. And hacked out the mailer-script to something a little cleaner— at least in my view.
The premise is that you’re using a POSIXish operating system — my NAS runs on Debian — and that all of your exports are within the /nas directory, and your torrents directory is /nas/torrents.
The changes needed are (with transmission not running, apparently) to include /path/to/post-download as the value for
script-torrent-done-filename in settings.json
You’ll need to echo in "/path/to/store/the/completed-file" to a file named as per the torrent (see your incomplete directory for that), but with “.move” appended; the rest should all happen automagically.
You might find it useful to chown the directories you’ll be moving things to that of the user running the transmission processes; I tend to setgid to my GID too.
The other file, mvtor, is one for doing a manual move, specify the torrent as an arguement; e.g., ./mvtor "ubuntu-10.04.1-alternate-i386.iso"
arpinfo
May 20th
Ever wanted to know who the OEM/Supplier/Manufacturer of network devices attached to a machine were?
I did. And couldn’t see anyone else’s script to steal, so here’s a really ugly way to do it 
# arpinfo:
# pull hardware info from the arp() table
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 Adam McGreggor. Some rights reserved.
# Email:
#
# $Id:$
#
WEBSOURCE=http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
DOC=/usr/local/doc/oui.txt
curl --silent ${WEBSOURCE} -o "${DOC}"
arp | awk '{print $3}' | awk -F: '{print $1"-"$2"-"$3}' | while read ARP
do
grep $ARP ${DOC}
done
arp
Works for me… although it could do with a tidy-up. As a quick and dirty thing, mind…
