Under African Skies!

I recently had to create a list of about 200 usernames. Doing that by hand/manually will have taken me some time. I searched on the net and the help files of both excel and openoffice calc.

Here are the fomula’s I used,

=LOWER(CONCATENATE(MID(A3;1;5);MID(B3;1;2)))

and

=LEFT(A3,5)&LEFT(B3,2)

The first is rather difficult and took me some time to figure out,
the “lower” is used to change the text to all lower case characters,
then comes “CONCATENATE” with the specified fields, A3 and B3,
after that I used the “MID” function to specify the beginning character ‘;1″ and the amount of characters to follow “;5″

That formula took the first 5 characters from field A3 and the first 2 characters from field B3. Joining them together with no spaces in between.

This formula worked for me in OpenOffice 2.3

The second formula worked both in Excel 2002 and OpenOffice 2.3

To explain the second formula,
the “left function was used to start reading the field from the left,
using field A3 and using the first 5 charaters,
the ampersand (&) is used to join the two fields A3 and B3,
the goes for the second field B3, using the first 2 characters.

I then used the followign formula to create the users home directories,

=”/home/”&C3&”",

this prefixed the current text in field C3 with the value “/home/”

Then I used this data sheet to import into webmin to bulk create new users. There are some more data needed to do the bulk users creation from webmin, which I didn’t mention here. Check the webmin documention for more info on that.

I have no idea why I spent 400 N$ on an Omni Antenna.

Last night I decided to finally build an Cantenna from cans lying around inmy office, which I have collected over the past few months. Mind you that is like only 4 different size cans.

Some time ago i spent 50 N$ on the N-type connector. It was just lying around till last night. Following a guide that I got off the net a couple of months ago. Well according to the measurements, my tin was was to short as in height. But the diameter as almost there, just 1-2 millimeters out. Looking at an image of guide, I just estimated where to punch the whole to insert the N-type connector. This being a temp experiment I only used double sided tape to fasten the connector to the tin. For the copper wire the gets attached to the connector on the inside of the tin, I remained with the 3cm length. I just attached the pictail I got with the other antenna, and test the signal reception using Netstumbler.

Behold it worked. I was able to get the same signal quality, more or less, with the cantenna than I get with the omni-antenna. Accessing an AP a good 300-400m away Having line of sight offcourse. Tonight I will actually point the cantenna at the other AP, to check if the signal improves. At the moment it is pointing in a 90 degree angle away from the AP.

Here is some images of the cantenna and the omni-antenna.

So this project cost me no more than the tin and the 50N$ for the N-type connector. Much better option that the commercial antenna, money wise.

May I make an assumption, hell it is my site after all

Surely you must be using some kind of open source software right? How otherwise will you stumble upon my blog. Or perhaps your one of the lucky folks searching for an African Safari, getting to my site. Doesn’t really matter to me, I am pretty sure you make use of a computer. So the question is still relevant.

Do you like/use Firefox, GAIM, Pidgin, Open Office or any other kind of open software on your personal or work computer?

Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear what everyone uses.

Just a note, if your comment isn’t displayed immediately, don’t be alarmed, Akismet will be keeping it until I have approved it. Just keeping spam away

What a way to start the morning…

First Google requires the image verification to continue and it happens about 3 times before I actually get to the results. Then when I switch over to Yahoo, it was temporarily unavailable Great Stuff !!!!

Searching the web has just become a pain.

The Yahoo error should clear up shortly I am sure. However the Google problem has been persistent for some time now. The problem seem to be with a provider upstream.

Hopefully they sort it all out pronto.

This is just for reference as per usual. I got my hands on a Netgear ADSL router DG834 that was configured for SA. I tried it here with normal settings PPP over ethernet.
But it just did not want to work. When I had a look in the router status, it was connected but no data was transfered, or atleast non that I could use

After a phone call to SA, I was informed that I must check the VPI, VCI setting and the Multiplexing method. Now the VPI was set to 8 and the VCI 35. I changd the VPI to 0 and left hte VCI at 35. The multiplexing remained LLC-Based. Settings gotten from another Huawei router.

That enabled me to get to use the ADSL router on our lines.

When you are in the office say for about 20 minutes. You haven’t even finished the first cup of coffee, it’s still hot and steaming next to your keyboard(talk about dangerous). Those are the last words you want to hear.

Guy pops into the office and starts off with “Good morning, I don’t know what happened…..I just wanted to add….”

That’s is NOT how I want to start the/any morning. I’m just clad it’s not Monday!!
I don’t think I would have survived, he definitely would not have.

For future reference

the correct syntax to copy a file TO your/another server
scp file.txt user@host:/dir/u/choose

That works just fine

I have scoured the web for an answer. Alas I have found it, but I have lost the URL

Luckily I am able to pick it from the history, if have mailman installed uner /usr/local/mailman, yours might differ.

There you’ll find all the files relating to mailman, the one of importance here is “list_members” which can be found under the bin directory.

eg: /usr/local/mailman/bin/list_members

That is the file that will export the list of members from mailman. To get the list run, ‘/usr/local/mailman/lists’
this will give a list of mailman lists currently on the system.

Then all you need is to run the following command,

‘/usr/local/mailman/bin/list_members listname > “textfile” ‘

make the textfile of your choice, that should print it all into a text file for you.

Next time when you want to change a user passwd, make sure to type the username… especially when you are logged in as root. You may not be so lucky to find that you just hit ‘enter’ after passwd and then continued to change the user account.b I have managed to log myself out for 3 days yeah it took me that long to realise my mistake

SO BEWARE, especially if its a remote server that you do not have access to all the time??

Why does it have to be such a bitch, I need to get that “Routing for Dummies” if there even is a book like that.

Anyone with with routing experience…linux…Iptables.