Essential Android Tools

I've been slowly migrating off of doing remote administration from a laptop, and moving almost exclusively to my Android device. I've got a screen in Launcher Pro set up exclusively for system administration related items.

This is what's on there:

• Adao File Manager: Keep PDFs of documentation in a folder right on your system administration screen
  
• Barcode Scanner: Use it to read those service tags
  
• Bubble Level
  
• Calculator
  
• Calendar: You do keep a calendar, right?
  
• Camera: Take snaps of screens with error messages on them, use it to note where things are plugged in before you take them apart.
  
• CamScanner: Uses the camera as a scanner to create PDFs
  
• Color Flashlight: Either use it to illuminate that hard to see part of that rack in that poorly lit closet, or turn it into a rave.
  
• ConnectBot: Great little SSH Client, also lets you access the console on your phone
  
• DNS Lookup
  
• Evernote: Keeps any random notes on both your phone and the web
  
• K-9 Mail: Best email client out there for IMAP on Android
  
• LED Light: Turns on the LED flash on your camera. Great for nice bright light when you need it.
  
• Maps
  
• Messaging: Nagios notifications
  
• Miren Browser: Best browser currently available for Android
  
• Overlook Fing: Network scanner and port scanner
  
• Ping
  
• PocketCloud: Wyse is apparently still around. Free version allows you to connect to one host (either RDP or VNC!) and the Pro version allows multiple hosts.
  
• Remember The Milk: Task list on both your phone and the web. You'll need to subscribe to get the Android client, but it is so worth it
  
• Trillian: Multi IM Client. Most stable I've tried so far.
  
• VPN Show: Just puts a shortcut to your VPN connection on the screen, so you don't have to go digging through the menu
  
• Wifi Analyzer: Shows pretty graphs of signal strength. Useful for both analysis and explaining to users why they can't connect to the wifi from the Faraday cage that is their tiny office.
  
• WoL Wake On Lan Wan: Send magic packets to turn on your (appropriately configured) computer
  

LTO Barcodes, for free!

Seriously, $100 for *barcode labels*?

Instead, pick up some sheets of 8"x11" Avery label stock, and print your own.

This site generates an appropriate PDF to print right on label stock:
http://tapelabels.librelogiciel.com/

Quick tutorial on using vi

Open your favorite text file in vi:

% vi myfile.txt

Navigate to the text you wish to change using hte h, j, k, and l keys

j goes down
k goes up
h goes left
l goes right

Don't worry...it gets super intuitive after a while!

To jump to the last line of the file, type G

To jump to the first line of the file, type 1G

To insert some text starting at your cursor, type i, then type your text. Press Escape when you're done with your insert.

To delete the character under the cursor, type x

To undo what you last did, type u

To save your file, type :w

To save your file and quit, type either :wq or ZZ

To save without quitting, type :q!

To overwrite a file, even though it's listed as read-only, type :w!
The ! means you really, really mean it!!

To delete the rest of a word from where your cursor is, type dw

To change the rest of the word from where your cursor is, type cw. Press Escape when you're done with your insert.

To delete from where your cursor is to the end of the line, type d$

To change the text from your cursor to the end of the line, type c$. Press Escape when you're done with your insert.

To repeat your last command, type .

To search for a string in the file, type /, then type your string. Example: /Target
You can use ^string to find a string only at the beginning of the line, and string$ to find a string only at the end of the line.
To repeat your search, type n


NOW HERE'S WHERE IT STARTS TOTALLY ROCKING!!!

To delete from wherever you are, all the way to the next occurance of a string, type d/

To change the text from your cursor to the next occurance of a string, type c/

Global search and replace.

Type %s/string/somethingelse/g to find all occurrences of "string" and to change it to "somethingelse"

The /g on the end makes it do it to the whole file. If you leave that off, it will just do it to the current line.

You can also add multipliers to your commands.

To delete from your cursor 5 characters, you don't need to type xxxxx. Just type 5x, and it will do the x 5 times.

Same works for changing/deleting words. 4dw deletes 4 words starting at the word you're on.

Microsoft’s User State Migration Tool

(This is not a Unix trick)

USMT is the User State Migration Tool from Microsoft. It allows you to move whole user profiles from one system to another, copy them from one user account to another user account, or move someone on or off a domain. It's everything I've always wanted in a small-scale user profile manager for Windows. However, USMT is very hard to figure out, and it does not support newer versions of Firefox by default.

I've written some batch files to handle the actual command line options for the purposes of copying a domain user's settings from one PC to another, and added an additional configuration XML file to handle Firefox 2.x settings.

First, install USMT 3 on a computer. Any computer will do, it doesn't need to be the one you are ultimately using USMT on -- you just need the extracted files.

USMT can be downloaded from here.

The default install will put the files in C:\Program Files\USMT301. Then copy the USMT301 folder onto a USB drive. The whole thing.

Put this custom.xml file into the USMT301 folder on your USB drive, and put the these two .bat files into the root of your USB drive: restore-user.bat save-user.bat (rename the files from .bat.txt to .bat).

Modify the 2 .bat files, and replace the two "YOURDOMAIN"'s in each file with whatever your domain name is.

What you wind up with is a user migration USB drive. For large user profiles, you'll need a large drive. You could specify a network location in the batch files if you like, but in my environment it would be unnecessarily complex to also connect to the network drive while migrating an account (from a possibly dead/dying machine), and we don't necessarily want to be copying large files over the network if we don't have to. Some of my users do video and audio recording, so the profiles can get huge.

To use your new user migration USB drive, log in as Administrator on the computer you want to move the user off of, and open the USB drive. Run the save-user.bat file, and type in the user's name. Wait until it is done.

Then take the USB drive over to the new machine, log in as Administrator, open up the USB drive, and run the restore-user.bat file, and type in the user's name you want to import the profile into.

That is it!!

It should restore all the things that USMT is supposed to restore, and it will also do versions of Firefox newer than 1.8.

I've tested it with settings for Outlook, IE, Firefox, My Documents files, Desktop files, desktop pattern, and the Windows theme.

Setting a lot of user passwords at once

Say you have a whole class of users who have lost their passwords. Or perhaps you've just created a set of users with some automated method that doesn't allow you to easily set their passwords (such as a scriptfile full of useradd commands).

You'll want to use a file containing the following information:

user1:passwd1
user2:passwd2

Then run the command:

cat passwords.txt | chpasswd

Don't forget to delete your passwords.txt file just after you're done. Seriously bad idea to leave this file hanging around.

If you're looking for a way to automatically generate a whole bunch of passwords that your users won't balk at, the pwgen command may be installed on your system already!

If not, and you don't want to go hunting for one, try this: http://www.multicians.org/thvv/gpw.html

So, it's not a Unix trick, but it's very useful.

We've got a bunch of users that we're converting over to Windows domain users. It's tough to move the profiles manually, as there are all manner of shortcuts, Outlook stuff, etc that point to the files in the spot they are now.

We found moveuser.exe (in the Windows Resource Kit). But it doesn't work with Administrator accounts! Oh noez!!! Some of our users are logging in as Administrator!

The way around it is thusly:

1. Rename the Administrator account (say, to barbarella)
   
2. Create a new administrator account
   
3. Make the old administrator account that the user is using a Restricted User
   
4. Put machine on the domain
   
5. Reboot! not only does the machine need this to get onto the domain, it needs this to see that the old administrator account is no longer an administrator account.
   
6. run 'moveuser.exe barbarella DOMAIN\barbarella'