Driven Monkey

So recently I put some files up on a file server I rent with a couple of mates, mostly ones used in my CV so that prospective employees can check papers etc that I have written. In an attempt to try and figure out who has accessed these files I, with the help of my friend Paul wrote a smal script that uses the access log, grep and whois to figure out the domains that have accessed the file. To be honest its a small script, and if I had more experience with bash I probably could have written it myself. In fact, if Paul had wanted to, I know he could have written it no problems, but it was all experience. In case someone wants to use it, here it is.

#!/bin/bash

FILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).$RANDOM.$$.txt”;

echo Searching for access to files with $1;

sudo cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* | grep $1 > $FILE;

if [ -z "$2" ]
then
echo “no exclusions”;
else
echo “excluding files containing $2″;
cat $FILE | grep -v $2 > $FILE;
fi

cat $FILE | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 1 | sort | uniq -c > $FILE;

for i in $(cat $FILE)
do
echo -ne “$i    -       “; whois $i -H | egrep ‘OrgName|descr’ | head -n 1 | cut -d ‘:’ -f 2;
done

To use it, just copy the script (replacing the part that says *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* with your username) into a file, set it as an executable using  chmod +x, then run it. The first argument is the string you are looking for access to, e.g. pdf will show all pdf’s, and there is a second optional string for if you want to exclude files with names containg a certain string.

So it has been a while since my last post, and while thats nothing really unusual, I actually have things to post about, so I thought I better get round to doing them.

First off, my new job. As I said in my last post I had a pretty quick turn about from the first interview to starting work (phone call on the Tuesday concerning an interview, started work the following Monday). Things are going not too badly here, now that I’m settling into the role. The job is working for a company called TechCertain, who develop, maintain and operate a system which handles the paper work for insurance companies online (issue proposals and policies, automatic quoting/underwriting e.t.c.). My role is the companies Business Analyst. My main job is to work with the clients to determine what it is they need, and then work out how we are going to acheive this. I also do a lot of the companies research and development (more on that later), write the front end for the clients, and manage the development team (read: the other guy who works mostly on the backend haha). The language is VB .net and Microsofts SQL, which is actually pretty funny because the day I started this job I had never worked on or studied either of these, so I pretty much had to learn all of that on top of everything else that comes with a new job.

I mentioned before that the company had some R&D going on. Seems strange for a simple web application company like us to have R&D but it’s true. Currently we are looking into porting our code over to mono, and we are looking into running our service on a cloud rather than the server it is currently on, so at least that is keeping me busy.

In the next few weeks I am also moving into a house up here in Auckland, which will be great because I have been living in my friends parents garage since moving up here (it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds) but it’ll still be nice to have a real room e.t.c.

One last thing. I just wanted to say good work to the team that made Ubuntu Rescue Remix. A friend of mine has an 8 year old Acer Travelmate 240 sitting at home, and recently it started telling him that there was imminent drive failure, and refused to log into windows anymore. Using the rescue remix I was able to create a live cd, boot into the command line, plug in my flash drive, and rescue thousands of files off his laptop for him. Now all he has to do is go through and sort them all manuallly.