The sys admin's daily grind: LUG Camp 2010 and Python

Good Morning Campers!

By Charly Kühnast

Last year, the President of the Schwabach LUG, Sven Velts, finally gave way to LUG campers' power play and created a registration website for the 11th camp. In May 2010, hordes of LUGgers set out from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and headed for Roth, a town that neighbors Schwabach, Germany (Figure 1) where the hard-working organizational team presented a Wilhelminian-period gymnasium as base camp.

Figure 1: Schwabach aboveground: Beaten gold, cables, and LUG Camp 2010.

The supporting program involved getting to know crafts that have been practiced in Schwabach for centuries. For example, a master goldsmith introduced us to the fine art of creating beaten gold. Formerly just as sought after, precision-made gramophone needles made in Schwabach could also be seen. The Bayerische Kabelwerke, whose premises are just a beer stein's throw from the camp, manufactures cables.

The town, which has a population of 38,000, has a system of underground tunnels reminiscent of a front garden after a root vole attack. The Franconians store their beer in underground cellars - a quick look at the town guide's plan of underground tunnels and cellars (Figure 2) seems to support the cellarmaster's statement that there must have been five or six dozen breweries in Schwabach at some time.

Figure 2: Beer brewers tunneled below the town for centuries.

Showing Off

Beaten gold, tour of the town, cellarmaster: I wanted to put my photos of these tours at the disposal of my fellow campers. For security and resource reasons, I was not going to hand over my laptop to an Apache server as a repository, so I needed an HTTPD alternative. I found a Python module that played to my preference for one-liners. After changing to the directory with the photos, I typed:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

This tells Python to launch a simple HTTP server on port 8000, thus granting access to the current directory. To use a different port, I just need to specify it:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

As long as the port number is above 1024, I don't even need root privileges to do this, and because it is a quick process, I had enough time to join other camp activities, such as improvised talks and midnight barbecues. Next year, the camp will be hosted by our neighbors in Switzerland, who were excellent hosts in 2007. I look forward to the alpenhorns sounding next year's one-liner from the top of the mountains.