So OE-Cake now has a beta for windows – but not OS X.

We still have the binary from their old version that expired some time ago – we were launching it with ARD with the below trick, but now I’ve moved it into a read-only applescript application that the students can launch themselves:

try
    do shell script "sudo date 1103100008" user name "admin" password "*****" with administrator privileges
end try

do shell script "open /Applications/OE-CAKE\\!.app"
delay 10
do shell script "launchctl stop org.ntp.ntpd" user name "admin" password "*****" with administrator privileges
do shell script "launchctl start org.ntp.ntpd" user name "admin" password "*****" with administrator privileges

First off we have a student web proxy that works based on a whitelist concept. So we have to allow any web traffic explicitly. With the help of little snitch and one incomplete help page from google, here is what I’ve added to our global whitelist and seems to be allowing all the features:

• kh.google.com
• www.keyhole.com
• mw2.google.com
• earth.google.com
• auth.keyhole.com
• maps.google.com
• khmdb.google.com

It also want access to www.google.com – but we don’t allow students to full google access – but Google Earth still seems to run fine.

The next annoyance was Google’s softwareupdate which wants to run for all users and update Google Earth on launch.

Adding the following to our loginhook fixed that:

mkdir -P $nethomedir/Library/Google/
touch $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
chown root $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
chmod 644 $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

the $nethomedir var is fetched from dscl earlier in the script

Students need to have stored the proxy password in their keychain – but most have already done that when visiting a web page earlier. They then just need to allow Google Earth to access their keychain.

Note that these are not strong passwords as they are the definition of “dictionary” passwords…

import sys
import os
import random

dfile = '/usr/share/dict/web2'

def main():
    for x in range(130):
        winner = False
        MAX = 234936
        suffix = random.randint (10,100)
        while not winner:
            choice = random.randint(1,MAX)
            f = open(dfile)
            for i,l in enumerate(f):
                l = l.strip()
                length = len(l)
                if i < choice:
                    continue
                if length > 3 and length < 7:
                    winner = '%s%d' % (l,suffix)
                    break
        f.close()
        print winner.lower()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

These are documented here:

http://www.list.org/site.html

They are located in /usr/share/mailman/bin/

so you may want to add that to your path in .bash_profile

most have decent help summary with –help arg at command line

while the remove_members command accepts addresses on the command line itself:

remove_members [options] [listname] [addr1 ...]

remove_members staff frank@foo.com

The add_members command specifically wants file input. Sometimes I just want to add 2-3 so I use this trick:

add_members -r - staff <<-EOF
>sue@foo.com
>bob@bar.com
> <cntl-d>