Back to Newsletters DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 17 - Dated: Sun Feb 23 16:42:59 EST 2003 From the desk of David Clark If you are visiting our website you will see a few slight changes including our logo - gotta love eagles. I am on a personal web revamp project at the moment so come and visit every now and then. Two new pages are: http://www.davrom.com/scoofficemail.html http://www.davrom.com/inmarket In the last week we had some issues with getting e-mail through to us so if you e-mailed us and couldn't get through, please send them through again. (The same e-mail addresses to "@davrom.org" are fully operational as well which weren't affected by the recent hickup.) I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark Time and Attendance System In DAVROM Newsletter 13 we spoke of a new product that DAVROM had taken on, The Time and Attendance System. This is a Windows based staff workplace/attendance system that is ideal for those organisations who need to record staff work hours in a "clocking on/off" environment. The attendance records can then be exported to your payroll system and provide a perfect record for the purposes of Workplace Health and Safety. We are now pleased to announce that a new module has been added to the Time and Attendance System to not only include individual staff records but Job based records as well. This feature uses an additional software module and set of proximity cards that can be assigned to record staff working on specific tasks. This allows employers to track not only staff attendance but time spent on specific tasks or "works in progress". If you would like additional information on the Time and Attendance System you can visit our website at: http://www.davrom.com/inmarket or e-mail as at: sales@davrom.com The Time and Attendance System is a fully Australian owned and developed product. Instant Messaging with Linux Something I take for granted is keeping in touch with colleagues, customers and friends via Instant Internet Messaging. It is great to be able to strike up a quick conversation on-line with someone you know and even throw some tech questions around or catch up on the latest goss. I first started out some years back with an ICQ Java software client running on my Unixware7 CDE desktop. Despite having to re-connect a fair bit, it certainly gave me what I wanted. Now there are heaps of different IM clients available for the diverse IM offerings (ICQ,MSN,AIM,Yahoo). I ran Licq (Linux-ICQ) for a time and also tried out another ICQ based clients such as Ickle. Licq is often bundled with your Linux installation but it has its own download site as well. Ickle is hosted at SourceForge. Of course there are many others I haven't touched such as Gabber and Yahoo's own client for Linux. After some time I wanted to stay in touch with a few MSN contacts so then I switched to Everybuddy. Everybuddy allowed me to keep in touch with both ICQ and MSN based contacts via the one single IM client - I did find the ICQ side played up a bit for me but it worked for the most part. I currently use Gaim which is my favourite as it allows me to keep in contact with ICQ, MSN, AOL/AIM and Yahoo contacts. Gaim runs very well on my KDE desktop and once again I can keep in touch with a whole spectrum of contacts all via the one interface. Gaim is another client hosted at SourceForge. About the only annoying part now is the diverse identities for each IM host: ICQ - 16595618, MSN - dmcrmc@hotmail.com, AOL - dmclark61, Yahoo - davrom7. Why not Webmail I often speak to people who want to be able to access e-mail when they are out of the office, on holidays, overseas, interstate or working from home. Some have setup a remote web based e-mail accounts with providers such as Hotmail to fulfill this function. But if you have your own UNIX/Linux Internet Gateway - or at least a UNIX/Linux server that can be accessed from the Internet via your firewall - then why not look at running Webmail or Squirrelmail and keep your e-mail confidential and completely under your own control. There are a variety of webmail clients out there and we currently use "NWebmail" to access our e-mail here at DAVROM via web browsers at remote locations. We can also use Squirrelmail which is a PHP based web mail server and functions very much the same as NWebmail. Being Web based all you need at the remote location is a browser, your user name and password, and you can send/receive e-mail just as if your were sitting in your office. So why not look at hosting your own e-mail access via the web? Tech Tip Controlling the number of pings - re-visited. My thanks to two of our readers for keeping me on the "straight and narrow" with regards to my last tech tip on ping and grep. The previous line given was to set the variable PINGCOUNT to the number of pings specified by the "-c 3" option. The previous line was: PINGCOUNT=`ping -c 3 192.168.1.3 | grep icmp | grep -v grep | wc -l` but a more precise usage would be: PINGCOUNT=`ping -c 3 192.168.1.3 | grep -c icmp` There was also no need for the "grep -v grep" as this is only useful if we are trying to exclude the "grep" command from the result of a "ps" output such as: ps -ef | grep smb | grep -v grep Will promise to check man pages and brain before sending you more code. Back to Newsletters 
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