XMarks replacement

Sad news: XMarks is shutting down soon, which is a spew, since I found it really handy to sync my bookmarks across several computers and my iPhone.

Fortunately, Firefox Sync will sync my bookmarks (and history) across several computers all using Firefox. And the neato Firefox Home will enable me to access the bookmarks on my iPhone. So I'm happy-ish again.

Still a pity that XMarks is going away, though.

Set DRAC network config remotely

So I had a DRAC at a remote site that refused to play nicey-nice - I was pretty sure the default gateway was set wrong so it was unable to get out to anything beyond its LAN. I was able to SSH to a Unix host on the same network, and from there I could ssh to the DRAC in question, and do the following magical incantation:


racadm setniccfg -s 192.168.0.120 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.3


Those three sets of numbers are IP address, netmask and default gateway - setting the last one correctly... wait 10 seconds or so, and hey presto, DRAC plays nicey-nice with the network again.

A neat trick for when you can't get to the web UI.

Getting the track listing for a K3B project

This was harder than I expected. However...

Get your .k3b file, which is really a zip file:

$ unzip -l can-u-pick-em.k3b
Archive: can-u-pick-em.k3b
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
17 2106-02-07 17:28 mimetype
10623 2106-02-07 17:28 maindata.xml
--------- -------
10640 2 files

and extract the only useful part:

unzip -p can-u-pick-em.k3b maindata.xml > tmp.xml

That's an XML file that contains the project data. Then we feed it through an XSLT processor, using this stylesheet:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet
version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8"/>

<xsl:template match="/k3b_audio_project">
<xsl:apply-templates select="contents">
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="contents">
<xsl:apply-templates select="track">
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="track">
<xsl:value-of select="cd-text/artist"/>
<xsl:text> - </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="cd-text/title"/>
<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>


like this:

$ xsltproc stylesheet.xslt tmp.xml
Eleni Mandell - Pauline
Neko Case - Star Witness

etc

EDIT!
Another option which I tried initially was using dcop to interrogate K3B while it has the project open - there are tons of suggestions out there to do this, but I could never get it to work. It turns out that dcop doesn't work in KDE4, and has been replaced with DBUS. Ah, so here's some examples using DBUS to talk to amarok - so maybe this will work... though this suggests otherwise


WSUS, GPO and OU, oh my

I've been wrestling with WSUS - for testing, I only want to apply auto updates to a couple of test victims... err, I mean systems. So I thought I'd create an OU for WSUS, and a sub-OU called test, then create in that a security group, add a couple of test computers to that group. Then apply a GPO to the test OU and hey presto, it would all work. Not so! But along the way I discovered some handy tools to find out why not:

gpupdate /force - force the group policy to update from the DC right now
gpresult - show the set of policies that apply to this computer (and user)

I finally ended up moving the computer's account to a new OU (where the GPO is applied) and it all came good. Annoying, but do-able. Now, to get it detected by the WSUS server:

wuauclt.exe wuauclt /ResetAuthorization /DetectNow - forces the Windows Update agent to trot off to the update server right away. Of course, it doesn't then show up until you manually refresh the view on the WSUS admin console - took me a while to realise that.