Tech Computer Center User Consultant Handbook

Written by "Zephyr (Neale Pickett)".

You can run lpbiff on any machine with xbiff. It beeps and changes color when spruce has a printout.

Written by Zephyr:

I have finished the forms script. It will mail a user the standard form for:

Go ahead and play with it -- it asks for verification before it actually sends mail.

For more information read the man page on forms.

Written by Anaconda:

Use to inform a user they have rogue processes running and how to kill them.

It works on linux boxes and takes a command line argument for the amount of time they have to reply to the message. This is not a required argument though (the default is 1 hour).

Here is an example:

/u/uc/forms/proc anaconda 2h 30m

As may be guessed this gives me 2 hours and 30 minutes to respond or kill my processes before a UC does. The script will replace the "h" and "m" with hour(s) and minute(s) respectively in the e-mail it sends. Also, since it's just a line of sed that's replacing the letters, the order of the arguments does not matter and you do not need to have both of them there. However, the order they show up on the command line will be the order in which they are displayed in the e-mail. Just running /u/uc/forms/proc with no arguments will bring up a little usage note to remind you if you have any questions. Also, this script won't kill any processes. You still have to remember to check back after the allotted time and see if the user has done anything about the process.

Written by Anaconda:

Use to inform a user of processes of their's which we have killed.

The script for sending a user messages about a process you've killed is called killed_proc and is just a link to the forms script. This means you will need to use the -u username option to send the message to the offending user. Also, when it gives you the option to enter a one-line message, it would be a good idea to tell the user what process of their's you've killed. The machine name you run the script from will be the machine name that appears in the subject of the e-mail (because this is how lo and xlo were setup), therefore you must execute the script from the machine you killed the process on.

Find the script at /u/uc/forms/.

Another thing, it's now possible to set up the limit e-mails as well. This would basically just send a different e-mail to the user if that user has been warned quite a bit about rogue processes. Note, this would only work for how many times you've run the killed_proc script, not the regular proc script.

Written by Zephyr:

There seems to be a certain amount of demand for a standard interface to different kinds of lists (black list, process list, software list, gnu list, etc.) so I wrote a script to maintain lists.

All it does is let you view, add to, and remove from text files. But we could use it to keep info in a central location.

It's pretty simple right now, but try it out on templist. It's called /u/uc/bin/addlist running /u/uc/bin/addlist - -help will show you what you can do. Go ahead and play with the templist.

We're all using the forms script I-spent-so-long-writing-because-I-was-told-we-needed-one, right?     :-]