Scripts & Guides

A small collection of automation scripts and setup guides I built for my own use and cleaned up enough to share. Everything here is self-contained — pick the one folder you need and ignore the rest.

Licensed under AGPL-3.0. Please credit t-philip if you use or share these. If you modify any of these tools and make them available to others over a network, you must offer those users the source of your modified version.

---

Contents

Folder	What it does	Platform
Ping_Monitor_Router/	Monitors your router's LAN IP and two WAN targets, logging outages to CSV with duration and a probable-restart flag. Runs as a systemd service.	Linux
WindowsOS_Install_Apps/	Automated fresh-install app setup via winget — one PowerShell script to rebuild a Windows machine's software stack.	Windows
network/eve-ng/	Step-by-step guide to running EVE-NG network emulation on VMware Workstation.	VMware
python/	pdf_search.py — search a PDF for lines matching text or a regex, with page numbers. formatted_print.py — an auto-aligning formatted print utility for tabular console output.	Python

---

Ping Monitor

Detects and logs internet and LAN outages so you can tell the difference between "my router rebooted" and "my ISP went down" after the fact.

• Pings your router's LAN IP and two public DNS resolvers independently
• Distinguishes LAN outages (router down/restarting) from WAN-only outages (ISP)
• Flags probable_restart when a LAN outage recovers quickly
• Writes a daily summary line
• CSV output, so it drops straight into a spreadsheet or a log analyser

Configure LAN_TARGET in ping_monitor.sh to your own router IP before running — the committed value is a placeholder default.

---

Windows Install Apps

Rebuilds a Windows machine's application set in one pass using winget, so a fresh install doesn't mean an afternoon of clicking through installers. Edit the app list in install-apps.ps1 to match what you actually want.

---

EVE-NG on VMware Workstation

A walkthrough for getting EVE-NG running as a VM under VMware Workstation, including the disk and networking settings that are easy to get wrong the first time.

---

PDF Search

python/pdf_search.py searches a PDF for lines matching some text and prints each one with its page number. Handy for pulling specific entries out of a long statement, report or export without scrolling through it.

Needs pdfplumber:

python -m pip install pdfplumber

# every line containing "Invoice" (case-sensitive substring — the default)
python pdf_search.py statement.pdf "Invoice"# case-insensitive
python pdf_search.py statement.pdf "invoice" -i
# only lines that START with the text
python pdf_search.py report.pdf "Total" --starts-with
# regular expression — any euro amount
python pdf_search.py statement.pdf "EUR ?[0-9.,]+" -r
# write the results to a file instead of printing them
python pdf_search.py report.pdf "Total" -o totals.txt

Option	Effect
-i, --ignore-case	Match regardless of case
-r, --regex	Treat the search text as a regular expression
--starts-with	Only match lines beginning with the text, rather than anywhere in the line
-o FILE	Write results to FILE instead of standard output
-q, --quiet	Print only matching lines, with no header or count

It exits 1 when nothing matched, so it composes with shell scripts:

python pdf_search.py report.pdf "OVERDUE" -q &&echo"found something"

Pages that contain no extractable text — scans and image-only pages — are skipped with a warning on stderr rather than failing the run. A PDF that is entirely scanned images will return no matches; that needs OCR, which this script deliberately does not attempt.

---

Design

docs/DESIGN_SPEC.md explains why each tool works the way it does, one section per tool since they're unrelated, plus an honest verification status for each. Ping Monitor's non-root setup was live-tested end to end on a real systemd host; the rest was reasoned about and checked by hand, since there's no Windows fresh-install or VMware instance available to test those against from the machine that wrote it.

---

Reporting issues

Found a bug, a mistake in the documentation, or want to suggest something? Open an issue — pick a template and it will ask for the details that actually help.

This repository holds several unrelated tools, so please say which script or guide you mean — the template asks. These were written for one setup and generalised afterwards, so environment details are usually the key to reproducing anything.

---

Built and maintained by t-philip.