From: dagbrown@... (Dave Brown)
Date: 2003-09-14T04:41:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in Systems Administration

In article <Law12-F77HixqDCZx4F000001d0@hotmail.com>,
Mike Wilson <wmwilson01@hotmail.com> wrote:
: I was just wondering if anyone had some really cool uses for Ruby in Systems 
: Administration.  Some examples of what I would consider to be really cool is 
: stuff like using drb or webrick to poll system status, gather inventory 
: information, etc.  

I use webrick all the time!

Well, I wrote a little script called "quickhttpd" which fires off
a web server on some high port which serves up documents in the
current directory.  This is very handy for all those software
packages which come with a pile of HTML, when I don't feel like
copying it to an actual web page.

Here it is, it's pretty tiny:

    #!/opt/bin/ruby

    require 'webrick'

    port=rand(2048)+8192;

    server=WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => port,:DocumentRoot => Dir::pwd,
        :BindAddress => '0.0.0.0', :AccessLog => [ [ nil, nil ] ],
        :Logger => WEBrick::Log.new(File.open("/dev/null","w"),nil)
    )

    trap "INT" do server.shutdown; exit ; end

    print "http://"+`uname -n`.chomp+":#{port}/\n"
    server.start

It outputs the URL of the web page which you can go to to read
whatever you were trying to read.  It's handy if you're running
Unix-type browsers because you can just double-click on the URL in
your terminal program, then middle-click on the web browser to go
to the URL.

In sysadminland, though, mostly I toss off quick one-liners.

--Dave