Welcome to Gandolf's Utilities Site

This site is dedicated to utilities to make the lives of technology coordinators in our district easier.
The utilities on this site are made primarily for SuSE Linux as it is the platform I use on my servers,
however I will also post utilities for Win2k and Mac OS X.

Current projects

Alt Schools Account Manager

The alt schools account manager is a small program I am writing in Perl. The goal is to create a system to dynamically add, remove, and manage user accounts for students on the network. This project is currently in version 0.0.2 ALPHA. This means the features that are in it work however not all the features are in it yet. It can add and remove accounts from a download enrollment file or print enrollment printed to file from UAPC, can do basic tracking of IAUPC contracts and work may be posted on the Internet contracts, activate accounts, change passwords, lock and unlock accounts, and look up contact information. The account manager uses a search engine that allows you to narrow your search for student by multiple search parameters including but not limited to name, address, phone number, gender. Currently the account manager is only available for Linux but the next version should support Mac OS X and eventually win2k. Please go to the project page for further details.

Project Page

Webmin

Webmin is a web based administration system for UNIX, which includes Linux and Mac OSX. Webmin is written entirely in Perl and does not require a web server because it includes its own. In addition, it is built on a modular architecture that allows rapid development of new modules. There are over a hundred modules available for free over the web. All things considered, it is an extremely flexible and powerful system that is easy enough to use, so that even a novice can preform advanced system administration tasks. Most of my future projects will be based around webmin, including the next version of the Alt Schools Account Manager and Alt Schools VPN Proxy project.

Linux LDAP

LDAP stands for light weight directory access protocol. LDAP is the back end for Win2k active directory service, Apple net info, and can be used as a network authentication system for Unix and Linux. The point of this project is to create a single system for managing user names, passwords, logs, email address books, network permissions, and tracking of student activity. I have rpms for MIT Kerberos and LDAP however this project is not yet ready for use in schools but, hopefully, will be soon.