Charles Gardner’s Effective IT Blog

I recently found a little gem that needs listing in the Is Your Friend series.  I really appreciate single discrete tools that do a job and do it well.  OldCmp from joeware.net is a great example.  OldCmp is a command line tool to cleanup old accounts from Active Directory.  Within that function the tool has quite a strong set of features to slice and dice through the discovery and disposal of old accounts.

Here is a basic run of the tool to find and list computer accounts that haven’t been accessed in a year:

oldcmp.exe -report -age 365 -llts -sh

When working with a client I am very cautious to delete, so I would disable those accounts and move them to an Archive OU in AD:

oldcmp.exe -disable -age 365 -llts -newparent “ou=Archive,dc=xxxxxxxx,dc=local” -excldn “Archive” -safety 10

If everything looks OK with that, add the -forreal flag to actually do the work and adjust the -safety flag to a reasonable value:

oldcmp.exe -disable -age 365 -llts -newparent “OU=Archive,DC=xxxxxxxx,DC=local” -excldn “Archive” -safety 20 -forreal

If after a couple months no one has squawked about problems, it is probably safe to delete those accounts.

Once the initial disable and move to Archive is done, you can run this to find accounts that may need attention:

oldcmp.exe -report -age 180 -llts -excldn “Archive”

Is Your Friend, Windows

I just upgraded the main perl port on a FreeBSD box from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9 and a perl based service promptly died, complaining of problems locating dependencies.  D’Oh!!  That’s not good.

After a bit of crunching away I found that each perl module port (each p5-* port) needed a ‘make deinstall && make reinstall’ to align with the new perl version.  The only bugger is that this machine has 54 p5-* ports installed.  Now I’m basically lazy so I wanted a better way than manually reinstalling each port or even writiing a script to handle these specific ports.

Thankfully a little deeper google exercise turned up pearl-after-upgrade.  From the man page:

The standard procedure after a perl port (either lang/perl5 or lang/perl5.8) upgrade is to basically reinstall all other packages that depend on perl. This is always a painful exercise. The perl-after-upgrade utility makes this process mostly unnecessary.

The tool goes through the list of installed packages, looks for those that depend on perl, moves files around, modifies shebang lines in those scripts in which it is necessary to do so, tries its best to adjust dynamically linked binaries that link with libperl.so in the old path, and updates the package database.

Brilliant!! Just what I was looking for.

I ran perl-after-upgrade followed by perl-after-upgrade -f, and it did all the heavy lifting of getting things straight.  Just for good measure I ran a rebuild on mimedefang (portmaster mimedefang), and it was back off to the races for that system.

So I must say….  perl-after-upgrade is your friend!

FreeBSD, Is Your Friend

I am starting a new category of posts, called Is Your Friend.  Frequently when talking with Todd Long (of the Jireh Consulting blog), one of us will find a cool tool or technology and inevitably it is said that <blank> is your friend.

Recently, Todd said that “OpenDNS is your friend.”  I have to agree.

It seems that every few weeks or months another tool saves my bacon or another technology finds a home in my world.  I will be filing these away under the Is Your Friend series.

Do you have a particular tool, program, gadget, widget, or whatnot that qualifies for Is Your Friend status?  If so, let me know, and I’d be glad to include it here.

Is Your Friend