Nick Klauer's questions

So the problem I want to find a tidy solution for is that when I log into a server (I have some Solaris and RHEL instances about), I try to find out what applications are running:

$ ps -auxww | grep <thing I look for, usually Java>

And I get a nice list of processes, PIDs, extra details, and with the entire process name and parameters that executed with it. While this generally provides enough information for me to find out what is running, some servers are run differently. I might have a server that has multiple instances of an app server used for different purposes. Other processes are remnants of a hung process that I have mixed with non-frozen processes. I don't want to shut down all java instances because I can't find out which process needs killing.

The solution I'd like to provide is during my start-up scripts, I'd like to prepend or append to a process some text that lets me throw a short description in. Is there anything that might let me do this?

If what I'm asking sounds impossible/silly/completely-off-his-rocker, I am open to alternate solutions that give me some ability to accomplish the same thing. I'm open for ideas, but this one popped up as being doable.

At our company, we receive a laptop that is mostly pre-configured for a new employee using their own software provisioning tool. However, with our development teams, there tends to be a number of additional tools and settings that we need to set up on a computer before the employee can be "ready to go". This differs on a team-by-team basis, so a common solution for all development teams is to get the computer and manually install/setup the missing pieces for that laptop.

Are there any personal software provisioning systems for Windows-based computers that would allow our team to be able to keep our own software up-to-date across our team?

I was thinking something that wouldn't be limited to new computer setups, but would allow a team to apply patch updates that would let them get the latest version of their dev environment set up so that the team can make assumptions about "it works on my system" meaning "it works on our common dev environment".

Is it possible to embed anything other than hyperlinks and pictures in a Sharepoint Wiki? I was trying to insert a client-side .swf flash video, but I am having some trouble, since it seems that <object> tags are being removed. If I can't embed .swf files, are there video file types I can embed (such as Windows media types) in a wiki?

I believe we are using an older Sharepoint interface (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0), so I'm not sure how much of this applies in Sharepoint 2007 or other Sharepoint versions.

I have various Solaris and Linux servers that our team would like to create a common layout for installations and locations of our customized installations. Essentially, we aren't given root access to blindly install wherever, but we do have enough access to install many apps locally or in our /opt/ directory folder, but would need to do so across most of our servers.

What I want to be able to do is set up some common solution for synchronizing a common set of tools to install across our servers, with possible customizations that select servers won't install x-1.3.0 on server y-prod, for instance.

Additionally, it would be useful to include setting up and/or synchronizing .ssh keys across servers so that they can communicate to each other without passwords. The same would go for various .profile, .bashrc, and any additional .dot files needed for a common-setup.

Our team isn't given blind root access to these servers, but we can install to our local /home/ or /opt/ folders, so we should theoretically be able to script out a large majority of server setup. I don't think it'd be hard to do this manually, or even to script something out in Ruby or Python, but if there is a tool out there that already does this, it would be excellent to stand on the shoulders of giants for this particular task.