I was faced with a possibly mammouth spreadsheet task – making 2000 file permissions to be made into a Nessus audit file. Urgh, this was going to be a major copy’n’paste nightmare, a bad case of RSI was looming.

So putting the lazy hat on, I decided this had to be automated, fire up the editor…. tap, tap, tap…. #!/usr/bin/perl ….

55 lines of code later and I had the 2000 rows into a nice audit file, and had expanded on the capabilities of the script so that it now even fetched the
file permissions itself instead of using the spreadsheet, and was creating 22,000 file audits – I wonder how well Nessus4 will cope with that lot!

So that’s what, at least a day’s worth of copy’n’paste reduced to about an hour’s worth of coding, with eleven times the results. Back-patting all round please, group hug 😉

Reminds me of the time I saved a failing NT4 fileserver which hadn’t had a full backup in seven years (and the incremental backup software didn’t retain the group/owner data on the terabytes of files!) using a few lines of Perl and Samba on an old UltraSparc. Shiny new NetApp was ordered later that day!

Also I’ve been looking at VirtualBox 3.0.0 beta1, which adds SMP support to guests. It’s a little flaky in that if you eject a CD whilst using more than one CPU you crash the entire application! I have got Debian, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Windows using 2-4 cores now though.

I watched Night At The Museum 2 earlier, it was not as good as the original. I also watched Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which was better than the original Street Fighter, but still a typical great-video-game-becomes-average-movie failure.

Finally I watched the incredibly cornily-named Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which was pretty rubbish as I expected. The best bit was when the shark jumped into the air and ate a jumbo jet, good researching there guys – a 747 would be over three times the size of a Megalodon!