A set of useful tools for managing a Linux system.

I could have named this project admin-tools, but that would have been too boring. Fortunately, an online thesaurus helped me derive a better name. Of all the possible synonyms for admin and tools, I thought captain and contraption made the funniest project name. That's all there is to the name.

captain_contraption is my attempt to formalize and share some of the scripts I have used over the years. This is really an eclectic mix of scripts with no real overarching plan. I hope these will be useful when you are managing the contraptions (computers) over which you are the captain (admin). Of course, please feel free to help me grow this project.

nft-edit is a simple wrapper to reduce the tedium of editing, checking, and reloading firewall rules. It loads the rules in your preferred text editor. When you exit your editor, it checks the rules for errors. If no errors are found, it loads the new rules, and prints them for visual inspection.

To prevent accidental overwrites or deletions, immutable files are useful. However, running chattr twice is tedious. This script takes the file to edit as a commandline argument and opens it in your preferred text editor. If the immutable attribute is set, the script will clear it before editing and set it after editing. If the file is not immutable, then the file is left immutable. In this way, this script can be an all-purpose synonym for your preferred text editor.

These scripts simplify rotating databases, etc. when running aide.

• aide-init creates a new database and rotates any existing database (e.g., aide.db.gz -> aide.db.old.gz).
• aide-update reports changed files, creates a new database, and rotates databases (e.g., aide.db.gz -> aide.db.old.gz and aide.db.new.gz -> aide.db.gz).
• aide-check only reports changed files. No changes to databases.

Restarts an interface that is controlled by Network Manager (using nmcli) with a three-second pause between down and up operations.

The Apt package manager will not automatically remove generated data and altered config files. This is good; however, sometimes you really want to remove everything. This simple tool will list the packages that have residual files. Those packages may be then manually removed using the apt purge command.