Create and Update OTRS Tickets from the Command-Line

October 24, 2012Updated on June 8, 2026 JS Morisset OTRS, Perl, UNIX (Generic)

I recently wrote a notification script for Centreon / Nagios to create and update tickets in OTRS. The ticket details and OTRS connection settings are all defined on the command-line. The GenericTicketConnector.yml must first be installed in OTRS, and a user (aka “Agent”) created for the script. I used perl’s taint mode, so had to hard-code the various log file locations ($logfile, $csvfile, and $dbfile). The Log::Handler module allows the script to output and log different amounts of activity detail, and the DBD::SQLite module is used to keep a local database of the Ticket ID (from OTRS) and the Problem ID (from Centreon / Nagios) associations — so the OTRS ticket can be updated with follow-up notifications from Centreon / Nagios for the same issue.

Change Passwords with SSH and Expect

October 14, 2012Updated on June 8, 2026 JS Morisset Expect, UNIX (Generic)

A few years ago I was supporting a very diverse environment with Solaris, AIX, and Linux servers; some with password logins, public/private key authentication, and several with SecurID passwords. All accounts were local, passwords expired every three months, and the accounts locked after three failed logins — so you can imagine the mess this created if you didn’t go around every server at least every three months. After I’d accumulated about half a dozen passwords, I wrote an Expect script to login and change my password and wrapped it with a bash script to try every old password I had. Since some servers needed a SecurID number to login, the bash script would pause on those and prompt me for the token before continuing.

Wget with Firefox Cookies

October 11, 2012Updated on June 9, 2026 JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic)

I recently found myself needing to scrape information from a website that uses login credentials. The authentication and session information was available in several cookies, which Wget could use, if the cookies were stored in a plain text file. I used Firefox to login and set the cookies, but Firefox saves it’s cookies in an sqlite data file, which must be exported before Wget can use it. A quick Google search turned up a few possible methods using sqlite3, which I’ve adapted here to use with Wget. I’ve also added some additional (example) code to extract hrefs and print them out, along with the webpage url. The script is called with the target url as the only command line argument.