When I joined the Internet back in 1989-1990 or so, I honestly thought I had seen the greatest invention since mankind discovered fire. Now many years later I've seen a few things that proved me wrong, but just maybe also some things that proving me right.

In portage we have -9999 packages thats SVN based, so you don't get notified when they need recompiling, since I don't have time to write a more complicated detection system, I've made a dumb script that recompiles anything that has a -9999 version.

Just some small helper tools for selecting a color based on numerology.

ansicolorpicker returns a color code, you can use in a CLI PS1 prompt and elsewhere, it uses the numerology script to generate a number from whatever string you give it on the command line.

Example:

HOSTCOLOR=$(ansicolorpicker $HOSTNAME)

if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
PS1='\[\033[01;91m\]\h\[\033[${HOSTCOLOR}m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] '

One feature I'm missing in Portage is the ability to recompile packages when my CFLAGS change, so I've created a small tool to address this issue.

Porticron is a script for automating running emerge --sync (or eix-sync).

It mails a report to root about what files need updating and with eix-sync enabled it also includes the difference between the old and new sync in the report.

A small configuration file (/etc/conf.d/porticron) allows you to set some settings related to it's use.

The kernel comes with a console screen blanker, it's default configuration is hard coded into the kernel.

Gentoo users tend to do a lot of emerge's and most of the time your using the same command line options. To make life easier you can use EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS to set your favorite command line options as defaults.

Note: Some of the options used is only available in Portage 2.2.

The attached file contains updated copies of what I use on my production systems.

genlop -c mode is a good tool for watching the progress of the noisy emerge, but it lacks the ability to repeat the call to genlop in a loop.

This little tool wraps around genlop, so you will get updates every second. If you like me is using X/Windows you can make a mini terminal window having the tool run with a little status.

Technical and usage details:

It's a simple bash script using tput (from ncurses) and grep.

It's released under GPLv3

Replicator – Rough Project Draft #1 - 2007-09-03

This tool is trying to automate the process of maintaining duplicate files across two or more machines. It has a control file that it uses to generate SVN commands to retrieve or store files.

The package debian-goodies, has a great little tool that allows Debian/Ubuntu sysadmin's to check if any software is using code thats been upgraded.

I've hacked the tool to support Gentoo Linux.