January 11, 2014: BASH and cURL Automation

The weekend is here. I felt like I really needed it this week.

Dominica went grocery shopping this morning and then came home and made breakfast. I spent the morning mostly down in the basement. I have a few projects that I am working on today.

My first project of the day was decomming an old instant messaging server. Not a big project, but needed to be done and there is no time to do side stuff anymore. I was feeling the need for proactively, though.

Second project was building a Splunk server. I built a Splunk server once, it feels like a decade ago (but probably was not) but one way or another it has been nearly forever since I have worked with Splunk. So to get some exposure to it again, I decided to install the free version and start playing with it. That took a little time but I managed to get it up and running and two systems sending data to it, one Linux and one Windows. I will be playing with that more over the next week. It is a really large and complicated product so takes quite a bit of time to actually learn to use in any meaningful way.

I have not used the Amazon Cloud before. I have been using cloud products for years but not Amazon’s AWS. So since they give out a free year of micro-instances, I decided to get one and to give it a try. It took most of the day for Amazon to get around to provisioning my instance so I did not get to actually log in and do any work with it until late tonight. Once it was actually working I got a base install of Nagios onto it but did not set it up yet. My plan is to use the instance for monitoring as it is external to everything else that I have. Will be a good use case for the platform.

My big project for the day was figuring out how to query the Spiceworks Community using cURL and then programmatically automating that with BASH on Linux to pull a report of activity for the day. That took a few hours and was a lot of fun. I got something really useful out of it too. And something that, as far as I know, no one else has.

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