So I rewrote an 'sshall' script I had been using for some time to use xapply instead, I don't know if I'll keep it this way.

I added screen support to, so doing:
sshall -s
in a screen session will open each ssh command in a new screen window. Woot?

xapply 'ping -t 1 -c 1 %1 > /dev/null 2>&1; A=$?; echo -n "%1 - "; [ $A -eq 0 ] && echo "ONLINE" || echo "***DOWN***"' `cat hostlist`

Outputs:

project1 - ONLINE
mokey - ***DOWN***
boober - ONLINE
wimbley - ONLINE
doozer - ONLINE
felix - ONLINE
red - ***DOWN***
sprocket - ONLINE
henchy - ONLINE
falcon - ONLINE
talon - ONLINE
junior - ONLINE
doc - ONLINE
eagle - ***DOWN***

I got bored and went a'googling in search of wireless shenangians under linux. I came across iwconfig(1) and iwlist(1) for rough equivilants of wicontrol(1). I also need to yank someone's cisco aironet cards and add ancontrol(1) support.

I might aswell make "modules" for each wireless situation, since I seem to be constantly coming up with more possibilities.

It still makes me happy when I walk back from class and by the time I get to my room my laptop's already associated to csh's network without any action on my part. It still needs a few more features; downing/re-upping the device if there is a network change so programs such as gaim and ssh will acknowledge connection drops.

More updates later...

syslog output reminding me of the sexiness of wiconf. I really ought to try and convince more people to use this thing. I'm going to make it linux friendly as soon as I can find someone with a laptop running linux.

nightfall pccardd[59]: wi0: NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC (Card) inserted.
nightfall wiconf[7517]: The following access points were found: 
nightfall wiconf[7517]: cshnowires / 00:30:ab:14:fe:eb 
nightfall wiconf[7517]: cshnowires / 00:80:c8:ac:fe:5a 
nightfall wiconf[7517]: rit / 02:04:23:cf:bc:3c 
nightfall wiconf[7517]:  
nightfall wiconf[7517]: Setting SSID to cshnowires 
nightfall wiconf[7517]: Running dhclient. 
nightfall dhclient: New Network Number: 129.21.60.0
nightfall dhclient: New Broadcast Address: 129.21.61.255
nightfall dhclient: New IP Address (wi0): 129.21.61.24
nightfall dhclient: New Subnet Mask (wi0): 255.255.254.0
nightfall dhclient: New Broadcast Address (wi0): 129.21.61.255
nightfall dhclient: New Routers: 129.21.61.254
nightfall wiconf[7517]: Associated with cshnowires 
nightfall wiconfd[7550]: Writing pid to /var/run/wiconfd.pid. 
nightfall wiconfd[7550]: Reading in the config file 

Since my laptop likes to have sound issues that I can't fix due to hdd issues, I decided that my Ultra1 would be my new speshul mp3 player. Since my desktop is still at home I don't have any mp3s myself, so I just mount a friend's directory using smbfs under FreeBSD - Solaris 9 doesn't have this feature in it's base and requires 3rd party shenanigans to do it.
Samba's smbmount is linux-specific, so that was out of the question. I found a project called Sharity which allows not only the root-user to mount samba shares, but users aswell. They had a Sol9/sparc package already available to me so I downloaded and installed that. It uses a daemon (run as root) to manage mounted file shares and such. What is neat and mention-worthy is a default mount of /CIFS which is browseable and works the same way the "my network neighborhood" thing does in Windows. You can also set an external program to prompt for passwords, for instance if you try to cd to a password-protected machine/share it will pop up a password dialog in a gui of your choice. Neat.

cifsmount -u [user] //machine/share /mountpoint

Passwords are saved by default so once you enter the password for a share it never asks you for it again.

As far as speed goes, it seems as fast as smbfs under FreeBSD or faster (I can't tell at this time: 2mbps/366mHz laptop vs 10mbit/143mHz ultra1). But as far as finding a viable solution for mounting CIFS shares under non-linux (and non-freebsd), Sharity is what you want. I'm sure it has more cool tools that I can play with, but I haven't really explored anything yet.