Not Stupid SSH Tricks: Automatic ssh-add
If you password protect your SSH keys (and you should) and you don’t store those passwords in your macOS keychain or Linux equivalent (slightly paranoid, but...
tips
How I Start Rails Projects v2
An update to my somewhat popular How I Start Rails Projects post. As before, I start with:
Sleepless Mac
Ever put your Mac to sleep only to come back find it’s still awake? This happens because something is telling the power management subsystem it can’t sleep y...
Grabbing SSH Keys from GitHub
A quickie this week. When I’m wearing my Ops Hat (I totally need to make me an “Ops Hat”, something with lights and a grappling hook), I often find myself se...
Better Whois
whois is a command line tool to look up registration information for domains, things like owner, location, and contact info. WHOIS (all caps) is a protocol f...
Secret Rails Configurations
Last time, I looked at keeping environment specific configuration using YAML files and Rails.application.config_for. One big issue with this approach is secu...
Custom Configuration for Rails Environments
Previously, I looked at the simply way of creating Rails stages that shared same configuration with Production by simply importing production.rb into the new...
Quick and Dirty Rails Environments
A quick tip — When I’m deploying Rails apps to Staging or Beta I try to keep the configuration as close to Production as possible. I’ve gotten bitten one too...
These Are the Inodes You Are Looking For
Ever gotten a disk full error, only to run df and not see any full disks? After banging you head against the wall for a while, you remember to run du -i and ...
The iOS Simulator 2016
An update to an older post about using the iOS Simulator from the command line.
Getting the ngrok URL
A quick addendum to my previous ngrok post. If you are not using subdomains, it can be useful for your app to know what ngrok’s dynamically generated URL is....
Autostart ngrok with Rails
I’ve been using ngrok on quite a few projects lately. I’ve written about it before, but in short, it solves to problems for me.
How I Start Rails Projects
Everyone has their patterns, here’s mine for starting a new Rails project:
Best Chrome Extension Ever!
I was recently shown the Best. Chrome. Extension. Ever.
Cheap SSH VPN
Recently (I seem to start a lot of posts with “Recently”), I was on the road needed to access a server that was behind a firewall. There was no VPN and acces...
Dotfiles II: Choosing BASH Startup Files
A post or two back, I looked at having BASH detect if I was on my “desktop” (for lack of a better word) or a server and decided the best approach was to hard...
Sudo, Rsync, and Authentication Forwarding
rsync will happy copy files between servers and will keep the ownership and permissions the same. However, if you aren’t the owner of all of the files then o...
Invalidate CloudFront and Wait
In my occasional series on waiting for things, I setup a BASH function to wait for AWS CloudFront invalidations. I mentioned it would be possible to invalid ...
Fun with pushd
Here’s about as esoteric a post as I ever write, my love of pushd and it’s little abused directory stack. If you don’t live on the command line, move along, ...
SSH - Too Many Authentication Failures
If you have a lot of SSH keys loaded you may run into the dreaded:
BASH Autocompletion
A couple of posts back, I showed off some functions to pop up notifications when a host became pingable again or when a port became reachable. Today’s (semi)...
Waiting on AWS CloudFront Invalidations
Lately, we’ve been playing with AWS and waiting around - let’s combine the two.
Is the Server Up Yet?
I hate waiting, but I have to do a lot of it. Waiting for servers to restart. Waiting for services to come up. Waiting around for a Yes or a No. To that end ...
Using Signals to Display Process Status
A couple of posts back, I wrote about how you can get status info out of a long running dd process by sending it a signal. The functionally is something you ...
That One Stupid dd Trick and the Ballad of SIGINFO
dd is the *NIX byte copying utility. It’s typically used for copying disks, creating disk images, or initializing disks from images. It can also be using to ...
Stupid ssh-add Tricks
If you are reading my blog, odd are you already know how to use ssh-add to manage you SSH keys. If not, you can read up on it.
UNIX User Management
This is one of the blog posts to set something in my mind that I’m always looking up. Linux has lovely tools for adding and managing users, but I can never r...
Unix Timestamps Explained
Every wondered what the timestamps on files on UNIX sytems mean?
xargs
How to you take a list of files and do something with them in the UNIX shell? xargs is the key.
Arguments For Your Shell Aliases
I’ve touched on shell aliases and functions a few times, today I wanted to get in to a little more detail on passing arguments to them.
Web-Scale HTTP Tail
Previously while talking features of the HTTP Range header I wrote:
More Fun with the Range Header
In my previous post about codeless APIs I made use the HTTP Range header to download only a portion of the file from a web server or cache (byte serving).
Renaming Files
A quickie today, renaming a bunch of files in the shell. Unix gives you million ways to do it, here are a few that will help you understand your tools better.
Managing SSH Keys
To securely access your servers you use SSH keys. Passwords can be guessed, just look in your logs to see all the people trying. But, you know that. You’ve g...
iTerm Tear Off Tabs
I like iTerm 2 (and I can not lie). I use a Mac and spend most of my days in the terminal (and Emacs). When a window system first came into my life, it was X...
Backups With Rsync and launchd
Previously, I wrote about backing up files to Dropbox with rsync. I automated the process with cron the ancient UNIX “time-based job scheduler”. While OS X s...
Quick and Dirty Backups with rsync
One simple way to back up files is to copy them to Dropbox. However, manually copying files does not constitute a good backup, you’re going to forget.
Launchy
In my last post about an alias that opened a URL from the command line, I said:
Open Github Repos From the Command Line
If you’re ever sitting in a Git repository in the shell and want to view it on Github, here’s some quick laziness.
Open the iOS Simulator from the Command Line
When I need to test web apps on an iPhone or iPad, I use the iOS Simulator that ships with Xcode1. The Simulator is intended for developers testing native ap...
Laziness with Make
I have lots of shell aliases/functions for repetitive tasks. Copying files to and from servers, removing editor backup files, connecting to specific database...
SCP Between Servers
TL;DR - This won’t work:
Laziness: SCP Alias
I often find myself needing to download files to my local box via SCP. Which means entering the hostname, the path, and the filename in to my terminal window...
Laziness: Remote SSH Usernames
I’m lazy and I’m always looking for ways to avoid any unneeded typing. Here’s a little OpenSSH configuration tip that can save you up to 16 characters (if yo...