Intro and two questions

[John Sechrest]

	Hello,

	I recently heard about this list and signed up a little
	bit ago. I am principle of a small ISP in Corvallis
	and I teach at Oregon State University (currently
	web design and system administration).

	I would like to ask you two questions:

	1) In my Unix System admin class, I like to do a bit of perl
	programming. I like to use that perl as a way to learn more
	system administration. I need to come up with 30 short
	perl scripts that I would use as an assignment. Every now
	and then I like to ask others for ideas about what scripts
	they can think of.

	Here is the scenario....

		We have 30 students. All of them like to do things
		by themselves. The assignment is to use 4 hours
		to write a perl program to do something...
		They are supposed to work together. I say 
		this but they don't do it. And so 
		in order to make working together work,
		I need to give each student a different task.

		Tasks are things like:

		1 Count the number of people in the password file
		using each different shell by looking at their passwd
		entry

		2 Check given a time, who was logged in at that time
		by looking at the out put of last

		3 Given a list of active tcp services run out of
		inetd, report if there are services other than this
		list running out of inetd.


		4 Print out the hardware ethernet address (check
		 /var/log/messages)(dmesg) for each ethernet card
		 installed.

		 5 Summarize the number of hours a user has used since
		 X where X is the dat e/time provided as an option
		 (last)

		 6 Given a program like mysql that should be running,
		  check to see if it is working, then restart it if it
		  is not. Report an error to root if it triggers a n
		  action.

		  7 Calculate the %uptime this month by looking at the
		  last log

		  8 Build a list of the number of email messages
		  processed each hour by the system over the last
		  day. (maillog) Make this plottable over time.

		  ....

		  The point is... 

		  1) they learn a bit of perl
		  2) They have to talk to each other to get
		     it done
		  3) The get useful bits out of the execise

		  So...

		  The question:

		      Do you have any interesting ideas for perl
		      programs that would ask people to do a
		      simple (5-20 line program) system administration
		      task?


	Question number two...


		 Thru a trick of fate, I have a system that has
		 perl 5.6.0 on it, but all the libraries are 
		 5.005.0... 

		 So when I go to /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl
		 I have two directories.

		 Rather than going bit by bit and getting the
		 parts I need, I wonder if there is a fast
		 way to say:

		 Go look at the 5.005 directory and get all
		 the same packages for the 5.6 directory....

		 Any fast oneliner solutions?



-----
John Sechrest          .         Helping people use
CEO  PEAK -             .           computers and the Internet
Public Electronic         .            more effectively
Access to Knowledge,Inc      .                      
1600 SW Western ,suite 180      .            Internet: sechrest at peak.org
Corvallis Oregon 97333               .                  (541) 754-7325
                                            . http://www.peak.org/~sechrest
								   
TIMTOWTDI