Far From Perfect Forum

Medical Hassel

2008-09-24T05:43:48-09:00

Now I am sure this is something that everyone has to deal with but that still does not make it any less annoying. Since its my job to monitor the medical readiness of the company and make sure that it doesn’t get out of hand I watch MEDPROS and let the platoon leaders know when there is a Soldier that need to can handle whatever their deficiency might be. That is not the problem but more the response I get. I understand the round the clock PMCS on every vehicle day after day after day is very important but if it is something that makes it so they are non-deployable I thought that would be just as important. I was evidently very wrong. E5 and below do not really say much about it but I have noticed that most of the complaints come from the platoon leaders themselves. More officers have lectured me on so many different occasions because of me reminding them about a vision test that they are over due on or a shot they need to get. The most surprising was when the company commander started screaming about it telling me to worry about the other 180 people first and how he should not be that big of a problem. Now I have stood my ground with many people even though I am just a PFC but I had no idea how to handle that. Of all people, I thought he would have understood but I was wrong. After he made his opinion know about the situation, every other officer in the company has acted as if they are immune to the medical readiness process. I know it will catch up to them once they hit SRP but it is just insulting the way they act. I had an LT tell me to get the SOP for my aid bag and bring it into the motor pool for a rock drill for a range so it could be inspected. When I asked who was going to be inspecting it he told me it was going to be one of his NCO’s… One of the ones I teach CLS to. Once again I have no idea how to handle that one and explaining it to him is a waste of time because for a math major who went from PFC to LT he lacks all logic and common sense. Any suggestions?

AID BAG PACKING LIST SOP

2008-07-31T21:16:44-09:00

Does anyone have a standard packing list SOP for a AID BAG?
I have my own packed to my specs but just trying some ideas…

Thanks!!

Theme?

2008-05-31T09:38:53-09:00

Love the new theme on the frontpage, but why’s it switch back to the old one when you go through addy’s place and back to the home page?

Need A Gag Gift

2008-04-13T12:14:38-09:00

PoopSenders.com
Yes they will send real Cow, Elephant, or Gorilla crap to whomever you choose. You can send just a quart or a whole gallon of the stuff - anonymously!

Twitter

2008-03-29T14:21:44-09:00

Playing around with this Twitter thing because I’m bored. Can’t really figure out a good use for it as regular SMS, email, etc pretty much takes care of anything you could do with twitter. Anyway, If you want to follow or join me or whatever I am at www.twitter.com/combatdoc.

Backup Bash Script

2008-02-09T20:04:19-09:00

Yes, more Geekness, but this time hopefully useful to someone. In my boredom, I decided to create a backup script for my important Linux directories. This way hopefully next time I upgrade my OS or experiment a little too wildly, I will have backups of all the stuff I trashed. I figured it would be easy enough to do. I mean all I really had to do was copy the directories with all the attributes and permissions to my external drive. In Linux its as easy as cp -a <whatever you need to copy>. So I generated a simple little script that copied my home directory to the backup drive. Then I discovered I need to test for whether or not the external drive was mounted. Turned out that was pretty easy to do with test -d.

Then things got complicated. Mind you, I know diddly about BASH scripting. I wanted it to be interactive when ran manually so that I would know exactly what was happening at what point. So I researched and discover read. So I had a great little backup script, but I wanted to add directories that had root access. So I had to test for root access and abort if not root (later I will just run it as root). So I had to research how to test for uid. Finally, and as it turned out the most frustrating part, was determining backups older than Xdays and deleting them. I tried a bunch of complicated find commands, but in the end all I needed was a simple date -d “7 days ago” string since the directories are structured by date in the backup.

Anyway, in the end, the script turned into a uch of if:then loops, but it seems to work well. So I figured I’d post it up here in case anyone was looking for such a thing. I also created an automatic running version of the script that requires no user-input and logs output to a file so I could run it in a cron easily. Anyone know how to test for whether or not the script is running from a cron or not?

Backup script version 0.000000001 after the jump (hopefully not eaten by the CMS) . I’ll put the automatic one in the discussion forum.
CMS ate the structural tabs

#!/bin/sh
#User Input needed. 
BASEDIR=/directory for backups
HOMEDIR=your home directory
DATE=$(date +%G-%m-%d)
DATEOLD=$(date -d '7 day ago' +%G-%m-%d)

clear
echo -e "Manual Backup Script for /etc and /home/$HOMEDIR.
Script removes backups older than 7 days."
#Check for root user login
if [ ! $( id -u ) -eq 0 ]; then
echo "You need to login as root to run this script."
exit
fi
#TEST for presence of drive/dir
if test -d "$BASEDIR" ; then
 #1 If $BASEDIR/$DATE exists delete it
   if test -d "$BASEDIR/$DATE"; then
   read -p "Delete Old Backup - $BASEDIR/$DATE? <y/n> "
   
   if [ "$REPLY" == "y" ]; then
   rm -rf $BASEDIR/$DATE
   read -p "Old Home Backup for $DATE Deleted! Continue Backup? <y/n> "   
  if [ "$REPLY" == "n" ]; then
   echo "Backup Aborted.  Exiting..."
   exit 1
  fi

   else
 echo "Directory Kept Intact. Exiting..."
 exit
 fi  
 fi   

   
  
  #test for old directory#
  if test -d "$BASEDIR/$DATEOLD" ; then
  rm -rf $BASEDIR/$DATEOLD
  echo "Backup from $DATEOLD Removed."
  else
  echo "No Backup for $DATEOLD exists. Continuing..."
  fi
  
  #Create New Backups of /etc and $HOMEDIR
  echo "Creating Backup Home Directory for $DATE"
  # VERBOSE MODE cp -PRuv $HOME /media/brain
  #cp -a same as cp -dpPR (preserve attrib, no follow symlinks, recursive)
  
  if test -d "$BASEDIR/$DATE"; then
  echo "$BASEDIR/$DATE exists.. continuing"
  cp -a /home/$HOMEDIR $BASEDIR/$DATE/$HOMEDIR
  echo "Done Backing Up Home Directory to $BASEDIR/$DATE/$HOMEDIR!!"
  cp -a /etc $BASEDIR/$DATE/etc
  echo "Done Backing Up /etc to $BASEDIR/$DATE/etc!!"
   exit
  else
  echo -e "$BASEDIR/$DATE does not exist.. creating.
  Backing up /home/$HOMEDIR to $BASEDIR/$DATE/$HOMEDIR."
  mkdir $BASEDIR/$DATE
  cp -a /home/$HOMEDIR $BASEDIR/$DATE/$HOMEDIR
  echo -e "Done Backing Up Home Directory to $BASEDIR/$DATE/$HOMEDIR!!
  Backing up /etc to $BASEDIR/$DATE/etc."
  cp -a /etc $BASEDIR/$DATE/etc
  echo "Done Backing Up /etc to $BASEDIR/$DATE/etc!!"
   exit
  fi
else
   echo "Directory $BASEDIR not present.  Is the Drive Plugged in and mounted?" 
   exit
fi 

MacBook Earth, Water, and Fire

2008-01-31T15:08:11-09:00

Gave me a chuckle.

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/01/macbook_earth_w.php

Sudo Insults

2007-09-26T04:51:35-09:00

Found this cool little hack somewhere on the net. I didn’t even know that Linux sudo commands had an insults file. If you enter the wrong password or make some other mistake with the sudo command this option will tell it to insult you for your mistake. It is wise to have cursory knowledge of vi before editing this file.

Initially I found it for Ubuntu:

sudo visudo
(always use visudo when you need to edit your sudoers file as it has a self-check system that won’t let you screw it up.)
Find the line that begins with Default and append insults to the end. (Any addition to that line is comma separated.) Your entry will then look like this:
Defaults !lecture,tty_tickets,!fqdn,insults
to clear your sudo session and be required to enter the password again try:
sudo -K

To get this working in openSuse the following changes are needed:

sudo visudo doesn’t work so su into root:
su root
then type
visudo

Instead of all the Defaults being on one line they are on separate lines in the openSuse sudo file so just insert a new line:
Defaults insults

then :wq to write and quit.

New Army Combat Shirt

2007-09-20T07:54:04-09:00

I first read about this way back in the spring. Its sounds like a great idea, especially when it can be upwards of 140 -150 degrees when wearing Body Armor, ACU Jacket, shirt, ACH Helmet, and sitting in an Armored vehicle. I wish they would dump the darned “Army of One” logo on the chest though.

They were supposed to start getting them to us in July, now the “shirt is still a developmental garment, and further fielding will be determined by the Department of the Army.” Means we will probably never see it. Not to mention some Fobbit CSM with no clue about life “outside the wire” will probably outlaw its use on HIS FOB just like they did here with the Army Fleece Jacket this past winter. Screw what the Army or 670-1 says…

Army Gets Sweet New Combat Threads

PEO Soldier has now begun to outfit its troops with a sleek new “combat shirt” that is comfortable under body armor and also has flash-resistent properties to stave off the severe burns that can result from roadside bombs.

It looks pretty cool, and I know from interviews with PEO Soldier officials that they put a lot of thought into this new uniform item. I gotta say, one thing that’s been a result of continued combat operations with such an adaptable enemy is the near-constant refining of services’ gear. The Soldier of today looks pretty darn different from the Soldier of Kosovo days - or even from those of the kick off of OIF.