lpstat is used to print the CUPS (Common UniX Printing Service) status info. The command lpstat -a tells you all the installed printers in your system, specifically, it will tell you the printer names–which you will need for the lp command.

How to batch print from a command line

$ lp -d “Name of Printer” /path/to/files/*.doc

The lp command is used to send files to the printer, the ‘-d’ flag is used to specify the destination of the print job.

Printing from the command line may not be something you would do everytime–there are times though that you will need print lots of files and you would prefer to just get a cup of coffee, walk away and come back when the print job is done, printing from the command line is a good way to do that.

You will need to have installed either MacPorts or DarwinPorts to follow this exercise because we will get the unrar utility from the ports collection.

$ sudo ports install unrar

You should see something like this.

$ sudo port install unrar
Password:
--->  Computing dependencies for unrar
--->  Fetching unrar
--->  Attempting to fetch unrarsrc-3.9.10.tar.gz from http://distfiles.macports.org/unrar
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for unrar
--->  Extracting unrar
--->  Configuring unrar
--->  Building unrar
--->  Staging unrar into destroot
--->  Installing unrar @3.9.10_0
--->  Activating unrar @3.9.10_0
--->  Cleaning unrar
$

You can now start extracting .rar files using the command

$ unrar e FILENAME.rar

The ‘e’ flag means you would like to unrar the file in the current directory.

Other ways to unrar in OSX

StuffIt, at the time of writing, it has a USD 79 price tag–you can try it for 30 days though.

UnRARx – this is a Cocoa application that allows you to expand rar files. If you are looking for a GUI way to handle rar files, you might want to give this a try. It appears free for use, the landing page has a PayPal donate button.

RAR expander is another GUI app in the Mac that allows you to manage you rar files.

The way to do it in Ubuntu (or Debian or Mint)

$ sudo apt-get install ocsinventory-agent

You will be asked to choose whether you would like to install the ocsinventory-agent as either ‘local’ or ‘http’, since you have installed the OCS Inventory server somewhere else, choose ‘http’

Next, you need to type in the address of where the OCS Inventory server is setup–including the port number.

Please enter the host name of the OCS inventory server

OCS Inventory server host name:

NameOftheServerHere:portNumber

         Ok

Next window is just a tag, it’s not critical for the installation to proceed, but fill it up if you think it’s useful for you.

The agent should start working by then. Just in case you think it’s taking too long to communicate to the server, you can nudge it a bit.

$ sudo ocsinventory-agent NameOfServer:PortNumber

In case you messed up on entering the servername and port number, you can restart the configuration of the agent by invoking the dpkg-reconfigure in Ubuntu

Related Posts:

• Putting a software inventory management system in place
• Change date setting in Ubuntu server using NTP
• Install git on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope
• Setting the root password in Ubuntu
• Fixing up grub in Ubuntu | Debian
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

PdfToHTML is available on a variety of platforms, the ones I’ve tested for this post are in Linux (Ubuntu , Mint and Debian), Windows 7 and OSX (Snow Leopard).

PdfToHTML usage

Let’s look at some usage scenarios for PdfToHTML

pdftohtml version 0.36 http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/, based on Xpdf version
3.00
Copyright 1999-2003 Gueorgui Ovtcharov and Rainer Dorsch
Copyright 1996-2004 Glyph & Cog, LLC

Usage: pdftohtml [options]
 [ ]
  -f           : first page to convert
  -l           : last page to convert
  -q                : don't print any messages or errors
  -h                : print usage information
  -help             : print usage information
  -p                : exchange .pdf links by .html
  -c                : generate complex document
  -i                : ignore images
  -noframes         : generate no frames
  -stdout           : use standard output
  -zoom         : zoom the pdf document (default 1.5)
  -xml              : output for XML post-processing
  -hidden           : output hidden text
  -nomerge          : do not merge paragraphs
  -enc      : output text encoding name
  -dev      : output device name for Ghostscript (png16m, jpeg etc)
  -v                : print copyright and version info
  -opw      : owner password (for encrypted files)
  -upw      : user password (for encrypted files)

Getting pdftohtml for Windows

Download PDFToHtml at sourceforge, double click the installer, make sure that the executable file pdftohtml.exe is part of your system PATH, that’s it.

Getting pdftohtml for Ubuntu (and Debian and Mint)

Get a terminal window.

$ sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

Getting pdftohtml for OSX

Launch the Terminal.app–you will need to have installed either MacPorts or DarwinPorts for this to work.

$ sudo port install poppler

• Do you know all the devices connected to your IT network? – [Yes, but the list needed to kept up to date manually, using the fixed assets inventory report]
• Do you know which software or hardware component is installed on a computer- [not really, we used to list down manually all the software installed on each workstation by looking at the Add/Remove programs of the Windows workstations]
• Are you able to deploy software or configuration scripts on your computers.

These 3 questions plague systems administrators, and it can get out of hand quickly as you add more workstations to your LAN. The first 2 questions above, I think OCS NG decently addressed,  I haven’t tried out the software deployment portion as of yet.

There are commercial alternatives to OCS NG like the TPS software management system (found it by quickly googling “software management system”) — but for now, it seems like OCS NG is decent enough for my needs, and it’s free.

There is a pretty good documentation and howto on OCS NG Main documentation, I intalled a test server on my now aging EEE PC 700 running Debian Lenny–not recommended if you’re going to use this for your office LAN, get a decent, at the very least, workstation grade PC to serve the OCS NG Management server.

In order to display the routing table in OSX, you can use

$ netstat -nr