Yarr! Thats not line noise, it's Perl (me hearties)

Avast Ye Salty Sea-dogs - It be the glasgow upgrade day today (as well as international talk like a pirate day). Graeme gave me a minor task to do - come up with a new userid/groupid/passwd/shadow/yaim config generator script for the pool accounts. Simple enough, should only take half a day or so....

Much swearing at Python later, I gave up at 1AM this morning and resorted to trusty Perl. Done in 48 lines (including comments) and 2 hours. I think Python and I are going to take a looooong time to get aquainted properly.

I'm sure G will blog in more detail - Worker nodes went fairly smothly, few niggles - seems that about 24 simultaneous installs cause tftp timeouts. Discovered the Sandbox dirs on the RB needed their ownerships changing - again another Perl script to the rescue with the trick I learned from Steve Andrews - just get your script to print the command line you'd like to stdout, then once you've checked it looks reasonable, run it again piped through | /bin/sh

Jabber Dabba Do!

OK, So in between taking the kids to an Intellectual day out (The new Barnstormer's ace BTW) I have registered a new gmail account for uki.scotgrid.glasgow and played with Net::Jabber on svr031. Took quite a few Perl dependancies to get it working, as you need the IO SSL working for when google switches to TLS.

The supplied nagios "notify_via_jabber" doesn't work out of the box, but I have a simple test script by Thus0 I lifted from the web that works fine - Now all I need to do is rewrite the notify script with the correct incantations from the test one.

Plan is then to have Jabber notifications for certain classes of nagios alert.

UPDATE: Success! added a new test on the disk servers as I knew there were some non-dpm boxes amongst them. Screenshot of gaimPidgin popup below