System Administration Cookbook

These are little recipes that have proven useful in the context of the computer equipment at Tanzanian teacher colleges. Although the configuration of each college may be different, all have Sun servers and thin clients running Solaris, and most have PCs as well.

For the executable files (.sh, .pl, etc.):

1. Save the file to a location in your PATH, such as /usr/bin
2. Make the file executable:
   

   chmod 744 file

Recipies:

• Install Solaris on a PC using VMWare.

• Install a printer on a Solaris server cluster.

• Enable double-click access to OpenOffice files.

• Load users in bulk: bulkuseradd.sh

  Takes a tab-delimited text file with the following fields and creates user accounts:
  1- userID
  2 - password
  3 - full name
  4 - group/stream
  If disk quotas are in use, accepts a "template" user whose quotas are copied to the new users.

• Send pop-up message(s) to a thin client: sendxmsg.sh

  This allows root to send a message to any user on the local system. There is also an option to send the message to all users at once. The message will appear in a pop-up window.

• Reset student desktop settings: reset_student_desktops.sh

  Reset the desktop appearance to the default configuration - erase all preferences. Does not delete files in Documents and Desktop folders.

• Find the UserID of a user who has forgotten it:

  grep -i NamePart /etc/passwd

• Correct the name of a user:

  passwd -g USERID

Please send feedback to alingelb at yahoo dot com