automagick.us

Hello!

I'm Greg Boyington. I'm your basic nerd with lots of experience doing lots of different things. Mostly I do sysadmining (BSD, Linux, OS X, even Windows if you ask nicely) and webapp development. I like Perl, JQuery, music, coffee, video games, and books. This site hosts some tools that I've written over the years, mostly to make my life easier and/or solve a specific problem. In the Articles section you'll find write-ups of some tips and tricks I use at work and at home. I have a personal blog that I update occasionally with things of interest mostly to friends and family. I also twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.

Here's My Resumé.
I'm always up for new challenges, volunteering and side projects, so if you're doing something cool and think I can help, say hello!

Tools

rsync-backup.pl
This is a script I wrote to manage backups of local and remote systems using rsync. It is similar to rdiff-backup, but uses hard links for snapshots rather than revision control, and is highly configurable. This page is generated from the POD in the source, and includes extensive examples and best practice documentation.

ldap2zm
This is a small script I wrote to create user accounts in Zimbra Collaboration Suite for users found in an LDAP database (in my case, Active Directory). It supports LDAP search filters, authenticated bind DNs, and so on.

Soop.pm
Recently I needed a method of making a non-daemon process behave like a daemon. Specifically, I needed to ensure that an SSH tunnel was robust enough to handle transient network failures (route flaps, accidentally pulling the wrong ethernet cable, etc) and smart enough to restart itself when need be. First I wrote a small script to do it, which worked great. I then abstracted the concept into a reusable library. The module is built using Moose, because why not?

Articles

Creating Subdomains On The Fly Using Apache ^{* Updated!}
This article discusses how to combine the Apache web server's powerful mod_rewrite module with wildcard DNS to automatically create subdomain websites on the fly, with no configuration changes.

Persistent Remote Filesystems With MacFUSE and sshfs
How to access remote filesystems via ssh and keep them mounted, through network interruptions, sleep and reboots, while accounting for internal and external networks.

Detecting Wirless Network Changes in OS X 10.5
Detect when the wireless network connection drops or connects to a different access point, and automatically perform certain actions when it does.