Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Remotely Recursively list files on the network

Bash single line:
for i in `cat workstations.txt`; \
do echo "========="; \
echo; \
echo $i; \
smbclient -p 445 -k //$i/c$ -D 'Documents and Settings/All Users/start menu' -c 'recurse;ls';\
done > Output\ Report.txt


This gives me the flexibility to see what desktops have whatever file I wanted to look up.

Bill Gates Upset about Windows Filesystem and Registry

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

This is a great quote from Bill Gates about how hard it is to keep implementations of good ideas both usable and organized.

I can see how the Windows Registry started as a great idea. On Linux the /etc folder is the system configuration and could potentially be improved by placing all data into a database. Gnome is using something similar to Windows Registry called Gconf. Some people dislike Gconf because it is reminisent of Windows Registry but Gconf is a grand idea. The trick will be if open source can do a better job keeping the cruft out of Gconf and /etc.

Pidgin and Gtalk behind a firewall

Google didn't include instructions for how to set up Pidgin when you are behind an ISA 2006 firewall.

I needed to change the normal port 5222 to port 443 to get through the firewall and then I had to enable the old SSL protocol. I don't understand why the SSL/TLS failed. Maybe it had something to do with the Debian SSL certificate problem.



How do I configure Pidgin for Google Talk?