Category: linux

Keep your home dir in Git with a detached working directory

Many posts have been written on putting your homedir in git. Nearly everyone uses a different method of doing so. I’ve found the method I’m about to describe in this blog post to work the best for me. I’ve been using it for more than a year now, and it hasn’t failed me yet. My method […]

Keep an archive of all mails going through a Postfix SMTP server

All too often I get asked questions about emails which I can’t answer because I can’t actually see the emails. While mail logging goes a long way, I’d really like to keep an archive of all mails sent via an SMTP server on that machine. Here’s how to do that with Postfix. This was tested […]

Script to start a Chrome browser with an SSH Socks5 proxy

Socks5 proxies are great. They allow you to tunnel all traffic for applications that support Socks proxies through the proxy. One example I frequently use is starting a Chrome window that will do everthing as if it was an a remote machine. This is especially useful to bypass firewalls so you can test websites that […]

BBCloner v1.4: Bitbucket backup tool

I’ve released v1.4 of BBCloner. BBCloner (Bitbucket Cloner) creates mirrors of your public and private Bitbucket Git repositories. It also synchronizes already existing mirrors. Initial mirror setup requires you manually enter your username/password. Subsequent synchronization of mirrors is done using Deployment Keys. This release features a new flag: –tolerant (-t). It prevents bbcloner from complaining about […]

Host inventory overview using Ansible’s Facts

UPDATE: I’ve written a fancier version of the above script as a separate project called ansible-cmdb. It uses templates and can generate a feature-laden HTML version and text versions. It also lets you extend the information from your hosts very easily; even adding completely new hosts. Packages are available for Debian, Redhat and other operating systems. Ansible is a […]

Can’t save imported OpenVPN configuration in Network Manager

I ran into an issue where I couldn’t save an imported OpenVPN (.ovpn) configuration in Network Manager. The “Save” button remains disabled: It turns out I need to enter a password for the Private Key. Ofcourse, this particular private key doesn’t have a password, but you can simply enter a single space as your password. […]

Bexec v0.8: Execute a vim buffer and capture output in split window

I released v0.8 of my Bexec vim plugin. The Bexec plugin allows the user to execute the current buffer if it contains a script with a shebang (#!/path/to/interpreter) on the first line or if the default interpreter for the script’s type is known by Bexec. The output of the script will be grabbed and displayed in […]

Work around insufficient remote permissions when SCPing

Here’s a problem I often run into: I need to copy files from a remote system to my local system. I have root access to the remote system via sudo or su, but not directly via SSH. I don’t have enough permissions to read the remote files as a normal user; I need to be […]

Scripting a Cisco switch with Python and Expect

In the spirit of “Automate Everything” I was tasked with scripting some oft needed tasks on Cisco Switches. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do anything even remotely related to switches, so I thought I’d start by googling for some ways to automate tasks on switches. What I found: http://ciobota.web.cern.ch/ciobota/project/sw_script/ https://trigger.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ Both seemed […]

Upload a file by command line via sftp.

If you want to upload a file by commandline via SFTP, you may end up on this StackOverflow page. The answer there is WRONG. Those are not using the SFTP subsystem, they use SSH and process output redirection. Using scp will result in an error if the server only allows the SFTP subsystem:  This service […]

Search this blog: