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True Tales of Hands-on Hacks
PCM2 writes "InfoWorld is running a fun special report offering true tales of "enterprise hacks" -- real-world folks and how they solved IT problems in unorthodox ways. Can you beat the story about the tech who hacked a USB switch with a timer to bridge two air-gapped networks? Or the one who used Wi-Fi to track a missing tool cart? What's your proudest hack?" It's in PDF, but freely downloadable.
I'm hazy on the details, but during a power failure in server closet one admin wanted to get in to bring down the boxes gracefully before the UPS gave out. But the door was locked and the power failure prevented him from gaining access. So rather than his users losing lots of data and several hours of checking and rebuilding filesystems, he busted his way in with a big metal fire extinguisher and got the job done. His boss told this story proudly.
From the section on Home brewed email archiving:
For his part, Scott took two weeks to write a small C program that would FTP the Domino and Sametime mail logs to the Linux server while monitoring the size of the captured log files on a cumulative basis. When that starts amounting to what can be easily fit onto a DVD, the program kicks off a DVD burn job on the Linux box. If the burn is successful, the program removes the local copies of the logs from the Linux box, as well as the working copies on the production Domino and Sametime machines, to conserve much-needed disk space. Finally, it sends an e-mail notification to the systems administrator reporting on the status of the burn, whether the job needs to be redone or it's safe to drop a new blank disc into the drive.
This seems like something that would take about 1-4 hours to automate in most scripting languages. Also, using C would have beared no performance increase as the most time consuming operations (FTP files, burn DVD-R) are out of your control. I would have chosen BASH, Perl, or Python for this task.