RDiff-Backup and Drupal.

I use rdiff-backup and I like it quite a bit. The only problem I have is finding a decent web front end for it or something. So having used drupal as my cms on my public and private network, I decided to start writing something that would allow me to glean some information out of rdiff-backup. Yes, sure..I could just have cron email me the reports...but I don't want to clutter my inbox. (it's all ready cluttered! ;)

To start my foray, I've created the following php snippet and made it a block inside drupal:
function get_dir($path) {
$dir = dir($path);
while ($file = $dir->read()) {
if (is_dir($path.$file))
continue;

if (!(preg_match("/^session_stat.*$/", $file)))
continue;

$filetime = filemtime($path.$file);
$filetimes[$filetime]= $file;
}
$dir->close();
return $filetimes;
}

$rdiffPath="/backup/rdiff-backup-data/";
$filearr = get_dir($rdiffPath);
ksort($filearr);
$file = array_pop($filearr);
print "".file_get_contents($rdiffPath.$file)."";
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This is nothing amazing.. it simply gets the newest session_status file created by rdiff-backup and displays it. I didn't write this myself either. I borrowed some code to get me started but completely re-wrote it to make it a little more elegant once I understood some of the php basics. Also helpful was the php quick reference that contains all php functions.

System Log Consolidation and Publishing

I was looking for a way to log events from one of my linux firewall/routers. It has been going down at strange times and I kept having to reboot it in the morning. After a bit of searching, I've settled on the following combination of software and technology to create a viable monitoring solution:

You could also use this in conjunction with another utility, https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/Resources/Documents/UNIX/evtsys, to consolidate your Microsoft Windows Server logs as well. (I haven't tried that yet, though.)

Set up a basic LAMP server, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.
Install the package syslog-ng. Configure syslog-ng to save all logs in a MySQL database. http://www.balabit.com/products/syslog_ng/
Install and configure php-syslog-ng. http://www.vermeer.org/projects/php-syslog-ng

There is some help available on configuring syslog-ng on the php-syslog-ng site.

You can search through the system log and look for specific events or even look for events from specific servers.

ActiveDirectory User Disable/Enable Script

use it like this: disable.pl --server domaincontroller.example.com --bindDN cn=privileged_user,dc=example,dc=com --password --searchbase dc=example,dc=com --infile

--server: one of your domain controllers
--bindDN: the DN of an account with appropriate privileges (e.g. cn=administrator,ou=built-in,dc=example,dc=com
--password: above accounts password
--searchbase: where the search should start, e.g. dc=example,dc=com, or ou=students,dc=example,dc=com
--infile: file with the list of users to be disabled