Monthly Archives: March 2008

Automated EIS outline builds

Here’s a little quickie that I thought of and put in the other day. If you use the “export script” feature in EIS so that you can use that in conjunction with EIS in order to script your outline builds, you get a script that is specific to a particular server. I like to keep my test machine automation totally synced up with my production machine automation, but if I needed different scripts for different servers, then I would have to have a different automation file. Well, here’s what I did:

Name the outline build script with thte name of the server in it. I have my server name already set in an environment variable (it’s used all over the place for various automation and logging things). So if the .cbs was normally foo.cbs, and the name of the machine (prod) is bar01, and the test machine is bar02, and I reference the outline build command as foo_%SERVERNAME%.cbs, then whichever machine the script runs on, it’ll grab the right script. Kind of a small thing but I like it!

More fun with Ubuntu Brainstorm

I haven’t tried my hand at Ubuntu Brainstorm again yet, but I have been keeping up on all the ideas.  I’m quite happy to see that the Brainstorm site has been beefed up a bit with categories  and some other goodies.  I’ve been going through and moderating on some ideas.  One thing of note, however… I am still quite amazed at how many posts have the words “by default” in them.  This tells me a couple of things.  One, a lot of the defaults suck.  Two, it must be perceived as rather inconvenient or difficult to change those defaults.  I would think that it’s really a combination of the two.  A lot of the defaults are probably picked by whoever wrote the particular piece of code, and the systems for managing options seem to be hit and miss.  All too often we have to drop to an esoteric .config file and change something, and on top of that, it takes everything up to and including a reboot to see the new default in question.  And still at other times, even if I have a GUI for managing options, it still generally seems to let me shoot myself in the foot.  But so it goes… for now.