Just another bit of shell glue which took about twenty minutes but yielded lovely results as it occurred to me that the DICE-wide inventory tools can now locate (at least in theory) any machine.
Being able to find out what office I’m in is more useful a feature than you might think. Primary of those is the ability to advertise my whereabouts to colleagues, for example on entering a server room, in case I can be of button-pushing assistance to others. Whenever I move around, I make an effort to update my Jabber status to point this out.
In fact, the glue was very straightforward and I learned about a particularly useful new tool: the Python DBUS libraries. DBUS is the message bus adopted by most modern “freedesktop”-compatible environments, and the Python library provides a quick and easy way onto the bus.
First, I hacked together a tiny script to establish where I am. Continue reading