logintop10: Drum roll, please …

Here’s another one that will probably be more interesting to administrators or multi-user system fans: logintop10.

It should be fairly obvious what’s happening there: logintop10 parses through your wtmp file (which was at /var/log/wtmp on my Arch system) and comes back with an array of login statistics. Output is to an HTML file of your choosing, with very clean formatting and with a little color here and there.

As far as I can see, there’s no way to adjust the exact output that logintop10 shows, unless you’re willing to manhandle the results. There is an option to “dump raw data,” but that really only adds on a full list of logins to the output page. If you’re on a big system that would create a file of considerable length, so I can see why it’s not enabled by default.

Either way, wtmp is in a binary format that will require some sort of tool to read, so logintop10 is doing you a favor and sifting through the data file, then arranging it in a prettified fashion.

logintop10 comes from the same author as genstats, and so perhaps the two might be useful in tandem.

In AUR, but not in Debian. There is a prebuilt .deb file on the home page though. 😉

notifyme: Simple, small and clever

For a small tool that doesn’t do much, notifyme has a lot of potential. It’s a little tough to show it in action, but I’ll try to narrate the steps.

 

Starting notifyme doesn’t do much except show a few stats on recent logins for the target account. When the user logs in again though, or opens a terminal emulator under the same name, you get a message in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s what you see on the left.

On logout, you get another message, and that’s what you see on the right. The benefit of this over conventional tools — or more replete utilities like whowatch — is in its stealth approach: Unless there’s a login or logout, there’s no need for notifyme to take up your time.

And it’s also a lot more convenient than trying to keep an eye on an entire different application, waiting for your favorite misbehaver to show up. Of course, once your bad guy is logged in, you will probably want to shift to something like whowatch, for more information.

notifyme is in Debian, but only Squeeze and Sid that I saw. I transplanted the .deb file into Mint without a problem, which says to me it could find its way into any other Debian-based system, within reason. I didn’t see it in Arch.

I will admit on a single-user, quasi-desktop system like I use, notifyme has almost no practical use. After all, I know when I’ve logged in. 😛 On a larger system with more activity though, this strikes me as particularly useful.

who and whoami: Two more quick Five Ws

After the rampant indecision of whatis, whereis and which, even more uncertainty is addressed by who and whoami.

Only this time, there’s a better sense of uniformity between the two. But that should also be expected, since both who and whoami are part of that magical package called coreutils. Regardless, this will be quick.

who, as you might imagine, shows users logged in at the moment, when they signed in, and from what console.

kmandla@6m47421: ~$ who
kmandla  tty1         2014-06-28 05:08

who can show a little more information, which is probably a good idea.

kmandla@6m47421: ~$ who -a -H
NAME       LINE         TIME             IDLE          PID COMMENT  EXIT
           system boot  2014-06-28 05:08
kmandla  - tty1         2014-06-28 05:08 08:02         180

In this case, the -a flag prods who for the most information available, and the -H supplies the header line. So you know what you’re looking at, of course. 😉

whoami, in case you thought it impossible, is even simpler. It only does one thing — reminds you who you are — and its only options are --version and --help … and --help isn’t hard to figure out.

kmandla@6m47421: ~$ whoami
kmandla

As if I didn’t know that.

I debated leaving these tools out, since they’re from the same package and the latter one is hardly worth mentioning. But you never know, perhaps this post will help someone with their identity crisis some day. …

groups: As a courtesy, I include it

I have the groups command on my list of applications to share, and I was sorely tempted to leave it out, except I couldn’t think of a good reason. So here goes.

Best I can tell — and please, as always, let me know if there’s some sort of kung-fu master way to use this — groups only returns the groups a user account belongs to.

Ergo,

And I think that’s it. The man page is like four lines long, and I swear, there’s nothing there except groups [user], end of page.

Now if you want to know what groups are available on a machine, I usually cat /etc/group, which in Arch spits out a list.

groups is part of shadow, which is the go-to package for everything login-ish for Arch. For Debian, I think that’s passwd. And that … is all I’ve got. 😉

finger: Insert off-color joke here

I have any number of improper puns I could use here, to introduce finger. But what strikes me more than the potential to be marginally rude, is the fact that in both Arch and Debian, finger is not installed by default.

Maybe that was always the case, but I could swear years ago in Ubuntu, finger was included in some such or other package, and installed as part of the base system.

Maybe that’s just my memory skipping a rail, but it’s in Arch as netkit-bsd-finger, and in Wheezy as just finger.

I don’t think any less of finger for being thrown out of the default arrangement. There are other user polling tools available, some of which we will see in the years to come.

Either way, for fun and profit, you can see some statistics on your system’s users with just a simple finger kmandla -s or finger kmandla -l. No doubt system administrators would find that useful.

I feel obligated to mention that I occasionally see cautions against using finger, because it’s an opportunity for an attacker to get a user’s information by randomly throwing out potential names.

There are some safeguards against that — I think the .nofinger file helps prevent this — so if you’re worried about finger, but need it for a system, be aware of the risks.

And with that, I will successfully close this post without any lame finger jokes. Ta-da!