Archive for category Scripts

Remote printing at home via DropBox

Posted by on Sunday, 26 June, 2011

So, i want to often print things, however rarely am i at home to print, and by the time i get there i forget entirely about it. This is something i did one sunday evening to get printing on pretty much every device in the house to my home printer, at home or at work, or even on the road!

First of all, i setup myself a dropbox account (which is free). This is a file sharing ‘cloud’ style service which is fairly well known and popular.
I installed dropbox on my phone, my iPod touch, Work PC, Home Laptops or other computers and pretty much everything that supported it.

I used these Step by Step instructions to set it up on my gateway (which also has the printer attached) via a command line interface http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/TextBasedLinuxInstall#Step-by-stepversion.

Once i had it mounted on the gateway/printing box, i ran the following commands

cd ~/Dropbox/
mkdir printer
cd printer
mkdir new done

This gives me a directory structure to work with for printing. The idea was to have a script poll the ‘new’ directory, and anything in there got sent to the printer, then moved to the ‘done’ directory. Should it not print correctly i can grab it from the done dir and retry later on.
I wrote a script named ‘script.sh’ and looked like this

#!/bin/bash
for file in `ls /home/velofille/Dropbox/printer/new/`
do lp -d laser /home/velofille/Dropbox/printer/new/$file  | mail -s "Print Job"  liz@mydomain.com
mv /home/velofille/Dropbox/printer/new/$file /home/velofille/Dropbox/printer/done/
done
chmod +x script.sh

I ran a few tests to make sure this worked ok, and sorted out a few printer driver errors. Once i had that working nicely, i added the pipe to my email address so i could confirm it printed (and any errors), then setup a crontab
*/5 * * * * /home/velofille/Dropbox/printer/script.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, not overly complex or hard, the main thing will be making sure the Dropbox stays up and going.
To do this, i have the following shell script called checkdropbox.sh

#!/bin/sh
SERVICE='/home/velofille/.dropbox-dist/dropbox'
 
if ! ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE > /dev/null
then
/home/velofille/.dropbox-dist/dropbox &
echo "$SERVICE is not running! Had to restart it" | mail -s "$SERVICE down" liz@mydomain.com
fi
chmod +x checkdropbox.sh

I then also put another crontab exactly the same as the printer one to run this

*/5 * * * * /home/velofille/bin/checkdropbox.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Now i can print from pretty much anywhere in the world by simply dropping a file into a dropbox directory , then have an emailed report when that printed!


Finding and deleting duplicate files

Posted by on Wednesday, 20 October, 2010

Okay, so you have a huge pile of mp3s and somehow managed to copy them repeatedly somewhere and now only want one copy of each? (hey! i do this all the time copying them from machine to machine!).
Best way to check that they are “identical” is with md5sum. This is how i deal with my problem.

find ./ -type f | while read file ; do md5sum "$file" >> md5list ; done # this gives me a file called md5sum with all the filenames and their md5sum
cat md5list | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |grep -v 1\ | awk '{print $2}' >duplist # this checks for files with duplicate md5sum 
for i in `cat duplist` ; do grep $i md5list | sed "1,1d"| sed s/$i// >>rmlist; done # this outputs a list of files minus the first/top one so we are still left with one copy
cat rmlist  | while read line ; do mkdir bin ; echo removing $line ;mv "$line" bin/; done # this moves them all to a dir called bin/ which you can remove later
echo check bin/ for any files you accidently deleted # letting you know the above!

You probably want to remove the files md5list duplist and rmlist after you are done ๐Ÿ™‚


Virtual Hosting Hosting for the new sysadmin – Apache – Postfix

Posted by on Wednesday, 23 June, 2010

We have some users who own servers who dont want to fork out for automated systems like Plesk or Virtualmin, but don’t really want to deal with adding domains and email addresses all the time (and sometimes get lost)

I decided today after one such user emailed us to add another 3 domains and bunch of email addresses to write something simple to help him out, and thought I would share them with you.

I put the following in a plain text file in /root/adddomain.sh

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! $1 ];then
echo "Usage: $0 domainname.com"
exit 0
fi
 
echo Adding the virtualhost to apache
cat >/tmp/httpd.tmp < < EOF
 
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/CHANGEME/html
ServerName CHANGEME
ServerAlias www.CHANGEME
<directory "/var/www/CHANGEME">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</directory>
 
 
EOF
cat /tmp/httpd.tmp | sed s/CHANGEME/$1/g >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
 
echo Making the directory at /var/www/$1
mkdir -p /var/www/$1/html
 
echo reloading apache
/etc/init.d/httpd reload
 
echo Adding domain to mail
echo $1 /etc/postfix/virtual_domain # this was his postfix virtual domain name list

Then run

chmod +x adddomain.sh

Now I can add domains like this very easily

[root@hostname ~]# ./adddomain.sh
Usage: ./adddomain.sh domainname.com
[root@hostname ~]# ./adddomain.sh domain.co.nz
Adding the virtualhost to apache
Making the directory at /var/www/domain.co.nz
reloading apache
Reloading httpd:                                           [  OK  ]
Adding domain to mail
[root@hostname ~]#

Please note: do not add the โ€˜wwwโ€™ part onto the domain name. That is done in the script itself where required.

Since he had set up virtual hosting in postfix, i then created another text file at /root/addmailuser.sh โ€“ this was so he could add email addresses easily and quickly. The contents were

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ ! $2 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [username|destination] emailaddress"
exit 0
fi
 
if [ -z $(echo $1 | grep @) ];then
echo Looks like a username to me, adding the user
adduser -s /sbin/nologin $1
passwd $1
else
echo Looks like a redirect off site, adding it as such
fi
 
echo Adding the email address
echo $2  $1 >> /etc/postfix/virtual
 
echo Running postmap
postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
 
echo Reloading postfix
/etc/init.d/postfix restart

Again i run the chmod on it

chmod +x addmailuser.sh

This is how I can use it

[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh
Usage: ./addmailuser.sh [username|destination] emailaddress 
[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh julie.domain julie@domain.co.nz
Looks like a username to me, adding the user
Changing password for user julie.domain.
New UNIX password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is too short
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
Adding the email address
Running postmap
Reloading postfix
Shutting down postfix:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting postfix:                                          [  OK  ]
[root@hostname ~]#

Or I can use it to create an off site alias

[root@hostname ~]# ./addmailuser.sh james.someguy@gmail.com james@domain.co.nz
Looks like a redirect offsite, adding it as such
Adding the email address
Running postmap
Reloading postfix
Shutting down postfix:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting postfix:                                          [  OK  ]
[root@hostname ~]#

These were designed/written for Centos/RedHat based systems, let me know if you want it for Debian/Ubuntu based ones. Also, strictly speaking, things don’t need to be restarted, but it doesnโ€™t hurt and is a good way of testing things work ok.
There is no error checking in either of these scripts, feel free to contribute patches/fixes ๐Ÿ™‚