[Michael Foord] | Sorry for the intrusion.
Not often we see you around these parts! | I'm working on a book proposal about IronPython, with Manning. Excellent news. | I'd like to also include some sections about 'general' system | administration tasks (on windows computers and networks) that can be | achieved with Python. Personally I'm delighted to see attention given to this subject in a book. (Or anywhere, for that matter). Altho' I'm not a sysadmin, I've spent a fair amount of time helping our sysadmins here and answering admin-y questions on the Python lists. I think Python's potential here -- especially under Windows -- is hugely underrated. Of course Powershell may sweep that potential away; who knows? Unsurprisingly perhaps, a lot of my recommendations involve WMI. Now I've no idea if WMI is still a concept under .NET or how it's invoked if it is. At present, you use the pywin32 GetObject method to invoke it. Is that still possible under IronPython? Or is there some -- possibly built-in -- equivalent? Anyway, examples of some of the vaguely sysadmin-y things I've either done myself or helped with. I suppose people's definition of sys-adminy varies a bit. I think I've been quite generous here; some of the examples are more development-y than admin-y. + Copy details from Outlook Contacts to Active Directory fields + Run through an Exchange mailbox pulling out large attachments and replacing them with a link to the same file on some NAS. + (subsequent to previous job) Rip through a network drive finding (large) duplicate files and replacing them with links or stubs. We had intended to use Junction Points for this one but our understanding of them was vague at the time (and isn't much better now, I think) so we didn't. + Watch our two Citrix servers for the occasional rogue process which would take one CPU up to 100% until it was killed. (This was a WMI one). + Monitor hard disks which were approaching capacity. (This was WMI too). This was only a short-term measure as our IT Director was happy to throw money at hardware, in this case, extra disks. + Monitor the call queue on our helpdesk database and alert techs/managers when new/updated calls come in. This one's been running for about three years now. (Not without a restart). + For the same system, use CherryPy to generate a simple webpage version of the call queue and call details. + Lots of bits and pieces in AD, eg making department names align with a list from HR, making capitalisation consistent, bulk uploads etc. + Semi-automatic signature generation for Outlook with optional image and link. This is just about to be replaced now by some bought-in solution which is a bit more automatic, sitting on the Exchange server itself and hooking in after the user's sent an email. My version just allowed the IT/Marketing teams to generate an email shortcut to a Python script which would generate the signature file and set it as the user's default. + Rip through a Linux image store accessed principally by Macs using Samba (cross-system or what?!) converting filenames which differed only by case into some other system. + Find home directories belonging to users who no longer existed or whose accounts were disabled. + Finding Outlook Contacts without a company photo. + Generating a contacts page for the company intranet showing details from Outlook plus a portrait where available. (For the record, this one used -- and still uses -- Xitami's LRWP mechanism). This one's been running for five years now and is easily the most used part of the Intranet. + Dump the company's entire Exchange GAL to some format (CSV, I think) for export to some other part of the company. + Add everyone in a CSV list to a particular NT group (this was before AD; using the win32net functions). + Various things with Subversion hooks / Trac and so on. + Determine which users were still running Win98 / some older OS. (This was a WMI special) + Remove / archive user files from a network drive which hadn't been accessed for at least 12 months and/or which belonged to a user whose account was disabled. I'm sure there were some other things ("Oh, Tim, could you just...?") but at least this gives you something of a flavour. I know that at least one user is using the WMI module to monitor the Win32 servers in his ISP because we worked together on performance improvements in the last release. Food for thought, I hope. TJG ________________________________________________________________________ This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit: http://www.star.net.uk ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-win32 mailing list Python-win32@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32