Excellent tool - A.F.9 Replace some bytes

A few months ago I needed to replace a number of object names in a number of files. My first thought was to load a file into a text editor, do a search and replace for each object name, save the file, and repeat for each file until done. It seemed this would be time-consuming and error-prone. I set out to find a tool that could do that in one step. Lo and behold, Alex Fauland had created just the tool I needed - A.F.9. This ingenious tool allows you to create a list of strings, and what string to replace each with. The list is stored as XML and looks like this:

<FIND TYPE=ASC>string1</FIND><REPLACE TYPE=ASC>newstring1</REPLACE>

<FIND TYPE=ASC>string2</FIND><REPLACE TYPE=ASC>newstring2</REPLACE>

<FIND TYPE=ASC>string3</FIND><REPLACE TYPE=ASC>newstring3</REPLACE>

Though I've only used it for ASCII (ASC), it also supports decimal and hexadecimal strings - and even lets you replace one type with another. It can overwrite existing files, or create new files. It reports how many times a replacement is made on each file.

IDM and Revealing Passwords

Aaron Burgemeister published a great tool to export eDirectory passwords to a CSV file using an IDM delimited text driver. You can find it here. But there may be times that you only need one or two passwords and you don't want to create a delimited text driver.

I've used a different method to reveal passwords in the driver log file. Though nspmDistributionPassword is not shown in the driver log file, local variables are - even when the local variable was set to equal nspmDistributionPassword!

I'll leave it to you to write a rule to set a local variable equal to nspmDistributionPassword, and to create a method to trigger the rule.

The name and the URL

I originally created a blog named "That Novell Guy", because that's what I often am at work. Some know me from when I worked for Novell while others know me from my current position with Enterprise Networking Solutions, where I'm the go-to Novell engineer. I decided to change it because I didn't want to risk getting in trouble with Novell. That, and I don't want to be seen as just the Novell guy.


I changed the blog's name to "Nothing Changed" as an homage to the nearly ubiquitous answer to one of the first questions we ask when told something stopped working. What changed? Was any software or hardware installed/removed/updated? Nope, nothing changed. :-)


As for the URL, well... I tried a bunch of different addresses and couldn't find one I liked, so I wracked my brain. "Something, something, something, Dark Side" from Family Guy popped into my head. I subtracted one something (RAID1 instead of RAID5), added my title, and there you have it.

Introduction

My name is Adam and I'm a Systems Engineer. I've been doing this for about 20 years, both as a pre-sales and post-sales engineer. My intent with this blog is to document issues that stymied me for a while, but was eventually able to solve. Also, I may post about nifty utilities and exactly what I've done with them.


A lot of my experience is with Novell solutions, especially NetWare, eDirectory, GroupWise, and Identity Manager. Even today many of my customers run Novell solutions, though most are working to migrate off of them. To that end, many of the issues I've faced and tools I've used have been in the service of migrating from NetWare and eDirectory to Windows and Active Directory.


Over the years, I've found that solutions are found in product documentation (RTFM), my peers, knowledgebases - but often from individual blogs and forum posts. I'm hoping that this blog will help others when they encounter similar issues. Also, feel free to add/correct/augment my posts as needed!