linux

Fixing Name Resolution in Ubuntu 18.04

We have a server (really a powerful workstation) running Ubuntu Linux that sits in the corner of a professor’s office which we use for teaching the Modelling Materials course. It had been on Ubuntu 16.04 since we installed it last year, but I upgraded it to 18.04 about a month ago ahead of the start of term. Everything worked fine, except for one pretty annoying thing: it quickly became clear that primary group names weren’t resolving.

Parsing System Info

When I began at Imperial, I inherited management of a fairly large cluster of workstations of various ages and specifications. Every so often, we’ll get some new ones and retire some of the lower spec ones. This is one of the reasons I wanted a quick, command line script to gather useful information about the system and output it in a fairly compact format. The main things I wanted were details on: