It’s been a while since I’ve had to do any basic sysadmin stuff on a Linux box… seeing as I had to google the answers to this I thought I’d better write them down!
useradd syntax
useradd [options] {username}Useful options are:
- -d
- declare the users home directory
- -m
- force ‘useradd’ to create the home directory
- -D
- accept the system defaults for account settings
An alternative for ‘useradd’ though is ‘adduser’:
This will then prompt you for all the information needed to set up the account.
making the user an administrator (with sudo)
As the root user…
Then underneath the entry for ‘root’ just add in an entry with the desired user name:
Here’s the slides of another presentation I gave at work just before the Christmas break - this time on some of the development tools and resources that i’m using in my work: git and github.
The general gist is a basic introduction to both git and github, for developers who are already using version control (i.e. cvs or svn) but have yet to try distributed version control tools such as git.
I’ve always fancied trying my hand at a bit of home brewing but never actually found the guts to get myself a kit. Well, this time I finally went through with it and I’m now the proud owner of a starter home brewing kit!
I got the kit from the folks at The Happy Brewer in Bedford, it was very reasonably priced, and they were very friendly and happy to explain what was needed to be done to a complete novice. If you live near the Bedford area and fancy having a go yourself I’d happily recommend them.
That there is potentially 40 pints of Woodfordes Wherry, a very tasty beer sold at the local near the Sanger Institute - fingers crossed I’ll do a good job of it. This is the first fermentation step, in about 4-6 days I can move it into the barrel, then it’s a 3-4 week wait for the finished product. Will update with news on whether I killed myself (and anyone else brave enough to try it) soon! 
Last week I enjoyed some time up in Edinburgh for the International Workshop on Portals for Life Sciences (IWPLS ‘09), hosted at the e-Science Institute. It was a good workshop - there were good presentations, lively debates, and good social planning for the evenings!
I have to admit that quite a lot of the content of the workshop was completely irrelevant to me and went straight over my head at times, but I did enjoy it, and it’s good to hear what other people are doing.
I was there for two reasons, first was an interest in the content of the workshop, and second was that I was one of the people presenting a lightning talk! The content of my talk was pretty different to most of the other presentations - they were mostly about grid computing and development of portal interfaces for said grids - whereas mine was about the architecture I developed for the new Sanger Mouse Resources Portal.
It seemed to go down pretty well, it got a couple of laughs, no one fell asleep and quite a few asked questions at the end, so I was quite happy at that. Here’s the slides from the talk, just in case anyone would like to take a look. Copies of all the presentations from the workshop can be found here.
A lot of my work these days involves building and querying biomart datasets. Interacting with the webservices (for queries) is pretty simple, you just have to post a piece of xml at the right url, but I found myself reusing a lot of boilerplate code in each and every new script.
So, to make my life a little easier (and hopefully some others) I packaged all of the code up in a module with classes to handle all of the monkey work for me and decided to release it as a gem.
The source code is available from github, and the documentation is on rdoc.info.
For more details, check out the release anouncement.
It’s my first ruby module so any advice or pointers on how to make things better would be most appreciated.
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