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.

Having just moved over to a windows XP box to check out a site in IE. I was reminded why I moved to linux and firefox combination.

Running about 4 windows of IE6, they just suddenly vanish into thin air. No error, no pop-up “send to Microsoft”, nothing just gone.

Note that I don’t claim that firefox doesn’t crash, or my linux installation don’t go a might crazy now and then. But at least when firefox crashes, it helps me to “recover session”, no need to go in the history to find the last accessed URL’s. Just makes life a little easier, that is why we use computers in the first place isn’t it.

What a lovely way to end the working week, with a rant

But i didn’t go about it the same way i just removed the two last updates and rebooted. so those machine are running fine. I am keeping an eye on the updates to check for an fix that will correct “their”mishap.If you have problems with the KB908531 update. Hvae a loook at the follwing link to get a work around, Claydawg

ok here it is, the first WoW (Words of Wisdom)…

Never forget an Administrator Password… and defintely not the Admin password for W2k3 Active Directory Server, you will pull your hair out. Beleive me it has been a week, that i have been trying to fix this mess. Sure there a couple of threads online with nifty tricks, and programs that claim it can be done, if your willing to fork out a couple hundred US$ But not all tricks work on the different kinds of setups.

finally got it working again, reset the the AD Domain Administator password. Took me more than a week to get done…

again it seems to me the same problem. hopefully the last solution will work again.

i just had this problem. finally got an answer:

“A virus called F-Nimda can cause this.

Info here…

ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.txt

Download the fix…

ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.reg
or
ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.zip”

thanks to Krystyna [Sydney, Australia]

got this from, http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/132877.html

sure worked well

hell yeah !!
i think that is the best OS they made so far.
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