This doc­u­men­ta­tion update process took a lot longer than I expected. I had to learn the spe­cific style of our IT Con­nect pages and set up an edit­ing envi­ron­ment that worked for me. Then when mak­ing changes, I kept find­ing related doc­u­ments that were incor­rect, out of date, or totally vague. In a clas­sic cas­cad­ing effect, a… Read More

If your web­site uses .htac­cess files to pro­tect access, then apache sets the envi­ron­men­tal vari­able REMOTE_USER to match the user’s NetID that they logged in with. You can grab this vari­able using this perl script: #!/usr/local/bin/perl print “Content-type: text/htmlnn”; if ( $ENV{‘REMOTE_USER’} eq ” ) { print “Nobody is logged in, or direc­tory is not… Read More

Say you have a bunch of text you want to replace in a bunch of files. Sure you could use VIM or another edi­tor and do it one file at a time, but that just isn’t fun nor effi­cient. Just use this handy script and you’re good to go: Of course, please make a backup before… Read More

If our uni­form access clus­ters don’t include an appli­ca­tion that you would like to use, you can try com­pil­ing it from source and installing it as a non-root user. Before you start, there are a few things to keep in mind: 1) Every pro­gram is dif­fer­ent. Be sure to read all of the INSTALL and README… Read More

I had a client today inquire about installing Post­greSQL on dante, which was a really good ques­tion. Although MySQL is the most com­mon SQL server, there must be oth­ers who, as part of a class or their own curios­ity, want to try some­thing else. So I gave installing it a go. Note: installing data­bases from source… Read More

Cat­a­lyst ceased sup­port­ing Webal­izer (in con­junc­tion with sim­ple­site) a few months ago. Con­se­quently, webal­izer stats gen­er­ated by sim­ple­site stopped updat­ing. Luck­ily, in most cases the log files them­selves con­tin­ued to col­lect data. All you need to do is copy the webal­izer direc­tory to another loca­tion to pre­serve the data there, and set up webal­izer to… Read More