For a while I've been wrestling with getting SSL to work with the Blackboard Collab tools. This article outlines how to take your existing IIS cert you use for Blackboard and use it for the collab tools.
Google Real Time Search on Any Query
Submitted by miked on Thu, 12/17/2009 - 13:02I was frustrated that Google didn't always display the real time search results for every query. I can understand it, however, that if a query doesn't have new updates in the last 10 minutes it's not worth displaying real time. Luckily we can do it ourselves. If you want force the real time search view of any Google query append &tbs=rltm:1 to the URL in the address bar. Easy as pie.
Personal Tweet Mailer
Submitted by miked on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 14:25I wanted to create a twitter feed of things my daughters were doing with the goal of easily updating the grandparents on what they were doing. Now, they aren't twitter users but I use twitter enough that it was an easy medium. I wrote a little python script that runs every few minutes and emails them the updates.
File Remover Script
Submitted by miked on Fri, 09/04/2009 - 12:03Here is a little file remover script I wrote for servers here. It takes either takes 2 arguments or can be run interactively. It looks in a directory specified and removes the files that are x days old. This is nice for servers that fill up with backup files or logs. This goes hand-in-hand with volume size monitoring, of course. Feel free to use/change or comment on the script. Enjoy!
/* * File Remover Program * Author: Mike Dunphy * Seattle Pacific University
Extend a Windows System Volume
Submitted by miked on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 09:08In this age of virtualization I typically try to size a Windows system volume to a realistic size. That is, a size that will provide a good cushion, but not over allocating space. Occassionally, I do screw up and I need extend the volume. Now, one cannot resize a live system volume with diskpart, even if you have sufficient space on that disk. With additional data type volumes, one can add the space necessary to the LUN, run diskpart and extend the volume.
SNMP Disk Used percent (PRTG)
Submitted by miked on Wed, 06/03/2009 - 09:03At the university, we use PRTG for all sorts of monitoring. I'd been working with porting our disk monitoring we currently do for Windows servers in perfmon alerts to PRTG. That seems to work fine and PRTG seemed like a good choice for monitoring Linux partitions seeing as we really hadn't had a good solutions for it yet.
cups-pdf in 9.04
Submitted by miked on Tue, 05/19/2009 - 13:59According to this bug report, one must create the pdf output folder prior to installing cups-pdf. If you don't, you'll get a "/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf failed" error in the printer status. To fix this issue mkdir ~/PDF prior to installing cups-pdf.
Cheers!
Reinstall Missing Ubuntu Packages
Submitted by miked on Tue, 05/19/2009 - 13:56In my stupidity, I hastily followed someone's recommendation to fix a printing problem (which I will post in a minute). This person suggested that to fix a cups-pdf problem, one should remove all cups stuff and then just reinstall cups-pdf. After having done this not only did cups-pdf not work but the envince document viewer (the default ubuntu pdf reader) was gone, plus a bunch of other cups packages.
Apparently, if you accidentally remove default packages in the desktop version, you can restore them as easy as:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
Mailman on Ubuntu 8.04
Submitted by miked on Tue, 03/31/2009 - 06:46Welcome! In an earlier post, I had mentioned that the university was in the midst of finding a new listserver software and that we had landed on Mailman. This article outlines our setup, taken mainly from the documentation but boiled down to the essentials for me and probably most people.
You could probably install mailman from the apt repos and be just fine, but I chose to do it from source so that I got a deeper understanding of it and to customize certain aspects.
Removing Exchange 2003 from your Org
Submitted by miked on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 14:23If anyone out there is looking for a good guide to removing Exchange 2003 from your Exchange org, this four part guide is it. Thanks to Neil Hobson for writing it!

