Category: Hacking

ssh asking for password when it shouldn’t 0

Hacking

ssh asking for password when it shouldn’t

After a recent Ubuntu upgrade, one of my frequented remote servers stopped accepting my public key and was prompting me for my password.  The password is gross and unwieldy and I was most put-out, I must say.  So, I googled the title of this post.  Mostly suggestions to check the permissions of various files.  All of mine were locked tight to user-only, including my home directory. Of course, I’d already tried ssh -vvv to get all the debugging output.  Unfortunately,...

Shell Nuggets: Quickie Tabulizer 0

Hacking

Shell Nuggets: Quickie Tabulizer

I’m real bad about things lining up.  Used to go out of my way to ensure variable declarations were columnized by access mode, type, name, equals sign and initial value. final BufferedImage mapImg = MapImageFactory.newInstance(width, height); final int count = ad.getPosition() * 2; mapImg.composite(adImg, 25 , (this.adHeight + 20) * count + 20, Over); mapImg.composite(adTxt, 25 + this.adWidth, (this.adHeight + 20) * count + 20, Over); The Tabularizer plugin for vim was a boon for productivity.  Well, mine.  For everyone else,...

Why 80 characters? 0

Hacking

Why 80 characters?

Searching for reasonable values for the *.vt100.geometry[5-6] xterm menu font-menu options in my ~/.Xdefaults file, I re-stumbled a gem of computing history as the top-answer to a question on StackOverflow, and this pretty picture of an old IBM punch-card. Inspired by a perl script within the comments, I ran this shell pipe: 2015-07-23 10:30:00 :: ~ rons@rons-VM$ find /usr/share/terminfo/ -type f -printf ‘%f\n’ | xargs -n1 infocmp | egrep -o ‘cols#[0-9]+, *lines#[0-9]+’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head 489 cols#80, lines#24 58...

Shell Nuggets: Musing on Dates 0

Hacking / Whimsy

Shell Nuggets: Musing on Dates

Nigh ever day I happen across some gem tucked away in the opaque vista of the *nix command-line shell.   While attempting to contrive the proper arguments for a date command interpolation, the following editorial injection from its GNU info entry caught my fancy. 28 Date input formats ********************* First, a quote: Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some...

ssh: no matching cipher found 0

Hacking

ssh: no matching cipher found

After a recent Ubuntu upgrade on my home machine, ssh attempts to it from the VirtualBox instance at work stopped working.   Here’s what ssh spewed back at me: no matching cipher found: client blowfish-cbc,arcfour server aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com   Impatient, I just logged in from another machine.  The VM runs CentOS 5.10 so that its environment is comparable with what [used to be] present on the majority of our production servers.   I’m an anti-RedHat bigot in the first place, and didn’t...

Rabbit-hole: From DNS To Hacker Wisdom 0

Hacking / Whimsy

Rabbit-hole: From DNS To Hacker Wisdom

Waiting for a DNS change today, using <tt>dig</tt> to check the propagation, did a `man dig`, found mention of Chaosnet and Hesiod classes, the latter having been developed within the Athena Project, which also gave us the X Window System: In 1984, Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys set out the early principles of X:[2] Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it. It is as important to decide what a system is not as to...

Thunderturd! or: How I Learned To Stop Griping and Allow Remote Content 0

Hacking

Thunderturd! or: How I Learned To Stop Griping and Allow Remote Content

I’m working from home, and our company’s outsourced webmail leaves much to be desired.  My desktop is Windows 7, since it offers the compatibility necessary in the corporate world, while most of my work is done through an xterm launched from my Linux box over CAT6. Rather than keeping up multiple webmail windows or collecting them all through one service (which usually leaves me with duplicate synchronizations across devices), I decided to choose an email client.  First, it was Windows...

Stuffing Text Into All Screen Windows 0

Hacking

Stuffing Text Into All Screen Windows

Various pagers have been giving me question marks in boxes and hexadecimal codes.  This is probably because I didn’t have the right font in the past and inserted various hacks into my ~/.bash tree to get around them, e.g. aliasing a LANG=C before every perldoc command. Well, now I’ve just about got everything right and proper in UTF-8 mode using a uxterm, but those little nigglers still pop up.  Today I did a man less and found the LESSCHARSET environment...