use Perl

A few notes:

• My initial experiences with RedHat 9.0 bolster my long standing suspicion that RedHat hates Perl. Out of the box, perl 5.8.0 had trouble writing makefiles. This is related to a unicode issue that may be solved by setting one's environment variable to LANG=en_US. Rasberries to RedHat.
• New Egg is a good place to buy computer parts CHEAP. I assembled Hillary from parts costing $343, including shipping & handling. The 400W power supply came with the LED-enhanced mid-tower case for $29. I bought the Biostart motherboard (LAN/Video/Audio on board) for $56. The CPU was $90. The 512MB DRR PC-2100 RAM was $72. The 80G Maxtor/ATA133 was $66. Good stuff. Unforuntately, debian's current stable release, Woody, is too freakin' old to recognized the onboard LAN. This makes it hard to use apt-get. Perhaps the fine folks running debian might consider shipping a 2.4 kernel before the 2.6 comes out. Woody ships with a 2.2 kernel from 2002.
• I've taken to keeping a lot of system-y things in my home directory, like my DNS files and mon. This turns out to be really useful when you need to rsync your home directory. I also have a crazy perl script that starts personal services, like ssh tunnels, VNC, apache and mon. As a kind of a kludge, a cron job attempts to rerun the script every 2 minutes to make sure that these services are running, even if the machine is rebooted. I've included the script below, in case someone is interested. It's essentially a steroid-enhanced version of a shell script.

File: setup_jjohn

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# -*-cperl-*-
#
# start|stop processes that I need
#
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Basename;
use Getopt::Std;

our $HOME    = "/home/jjohn";
our $LASTRUN = "$HOME/etc/.jjohn_setup";

our %PROCS = ( '01 SSH tunnels' => { start => "$HOME/etc/ssh_mail_tunnel start",
                                     stop  => "$HOME/etc/ssh_mail_tunnel stop",
                                   },

               '02 MON' => { start => "$HOME/etc/mon/start_mon",
                             stop  => "killall mon",
                           },

               '99 VNC' => { start => "$HOME/bin/start_vnc",
                             stop  => "/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :1",
                           },

               '04 Fetchmail' => { start => "/usr/bin/fetchmail",
                                   stop  => "killall fetchmail",
                                 },

               '03 Apache'=> { start => "/usr/bin/sudo $HOME/src/apache-current/bin/apachectl start",
                               stop  => "/usr/bin/sudo $HOME/src/apache-current/bin/apachectl stop",
                             },

             );

my $opts = {};
getopts('h?fv', $opts);
$|++;

my $action = (lc pop @ARGV) || 'start';
my %dispatch = ( 'stop'   => \&stop,
                 'start'  => \&start,
                 'usage'  => \&usage,
                 'status' => \&status,
               );

$action = 'usage' if $opts->{'?'} || $opts->{'h'};

if (exists $dispatch{$action}) {
  $dispatch{$action}->($opts);
} else {
  start($opts);
}

exit;

#-------------------------------------------------- -------------------

sub start {
  my ($opts) = @_;

  # Skip the LASTRUN check if the force flag is set
  unless ($opts->{f}) {

    # compare the boot time (/var/lock/subsys/local) to our last runtime
    if (-e $LASTRUN) {
      my $sysboot = (stat "/var/lock/subsys/local")[9];
      my $lastrun = (stat $LASTRUN)[9];

      # if we have run after system boot, bail
      if ($lastrun > $sysboot) {
        warn "Already ran since boot.  Halting.\n" if $opts->{v};
        return;
      }
    }
  }

  for my $proc (sort keys %PROCS) {
    printf "Starting %-25s:", $proc if $opts->{v};

    my $ok = "OK";
    if (system("$PROCS{$proc}->{start} 2>&1 > /dev/null")) {
      $ok = "FAILED";
    }
    printf "%15s\n", $ok if $opts->{v};
  }

  # print out PID to LASTRUN
  open my $pid, ">$LASTRUN" or die "can't open '$LASTRUN': $!\n";
  select(((select $pid) => $|++)[0]);
  print $pid $$;
  close $pid;

}

# stop the services above
sub stop {
  my ($opts) = @_;

  for my $proc (reverse sort keys %PROCS) {
    printf "Stopping %-25s:", $proc if $opts->{v};

    my $ok = "OK";
    if (system("$PROCS{$proc}->{stop} 2>&1 > /dev/null")) {
      $ok = "FAILED";
    }
    printf "%15s\n",$ok if $opts->{v};
  }

  unlink $LASTRUN;
}

sub usage {
  my $name = basename $0;
  print "$name - control services for jjohn

USAGE:

  $name [OPTIONS] [ACTION]
  \$ $name -v start # start services with verbosity
  \$ $name stop     # stop services silently
  \$ $name status   # show boot time vs. last run of this program

OPTIONS:

  h  print this screen
  ?  print this screen
  f  force start, regardless of LASTRUN file
  v  turn on verbose messages
";
}

sub status {
  my ($opts) = @_;
  my $lastrun = (stat $LASTRUN)[9];
  my $boot    = (stat "/var/lock/subsys/local")[9];
  my $name    = basename $0;

  my $ltime = (defined $lastrun)
              ? scalar localtime($lastrun)
              : "NEVER RUN";

  my $btime = scalar localtime($boot);

  printf "%16s: %-20s\n%16s: %-20s\n",
          "system boot", $btime,
          "$name ran", $ltime;
}