lights changing on your server's keyboard, to make you and others know it's alive
Simulates the (in)famous David Hasselhoff's[1] KITT[2] supercar's[3] front lights on the keyboard in tty12 to show that the server is operational, like old mainframes did: useful when the monitor is permanently switched off.
Note: to make this utility being automatically started at system's boot use the insserv(8) utility on /etc/init.d/kittlights, which is a custom script built to avoid hanging the system by the daemon it starts ('cause of the daemon's infinite loop).
Why tty12: I wrote this little utility to remember whoever got around the server that it was RUNNING, so to avoid switching it off pulling the power cable, cleaning it's keyboard and so on. As I'm used to configure syslog's facility to show all it's records to tty12 (so, when something goes wrong, like having an OOPS, I've just to switch server's monitor on), I directed this script's output there (but you can configure to have it at the tty you prefer, of course).
This is a monolithic all-in-one utility, with just a defaults starting parameters file (look into /etc/defaults/) and a (modified) starter script to make it to start at system's boot (look into /etc/init.d/)
20090131 - Luca "Sky" Coianiz
Additional note, to Git downloaders: this utility have been developed into a SUSE-based linux distro (maybe 6.0 or 8.0, I don't remember), then ported (and currently running) into a Debian 3.16 one. I'm not keeping it up to date with different/current init mechanisms: just looking that, on my system, the tool correctly works.
Just a final note: even if infinite-looping, it uses nearly no CPU time, 'cause of the 1 sec. "sleep" between actions (of course tailorable to your needs): if you omit the sleep, you most probably force the system to execute a tight loop, ending by using 100% CPU. To the other side, that will make the "scanning lights" effect totally unuseful.
Refs
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hasselhoff
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_%281982_TV_series%29