Tag Archives: hacks

Ten minute hacks: Process pause & resume

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I’m old school and still rocking an old X220 laptop because I didn’t like the new ones. My battery life isn’t as great as I’d like it to be, but it gets worse when some “webapp” (which I’d much rather have as a native GTK+ app) causes Firefox to rev my CPU with their websocket (hi gmail!) poller.

This seems to happen most often on planes or when I’m disconnected from the internet. Since it’s difficult to know which tab is the offending one, and since I might want to keep that tabs state anyway, I decided to write a little shell script to pause and resume misbehaving processes.

After putting it into my ~/bin/ and running chmod u+x ~/bin/pause-continue.sh on it, you can now:

james@computer:~$ pause-continue.sh firefox
Stopping 'firefox'...
[press any key to continue]
Continuing 'firefox'...
james@computer:~$ echo $?        # error codes work iirc
0
james@computer:~$

The code is trivially simple, with an added curses hack to make this 13% more fun. It sends a SIGSTOP signal initially, and then when you press a key it resumes it with SIGCONT. Here it is the code.

You should obviously substitute in the name of the process that you’d like to pause and resume. If your process breaks because it didn’t deal well with the signals, then you get to keep both pieces!

This should help me on my upcoming travel! I’ll be presenting some of my mgmtconfig work at DevConf.cz, FOSDEM and CfgMgmtCamp.eu! CfgMgmtCamp will also have a short mgmt track (looking forward to seeing Felix present!) and we’ll be around to hack on the 8th during fringe (the day after the official camp) if you’d like help to get your patch merged! I’m looking forward to it!

Happy hacking!

James

Ten minute hacks: Hacking airplane headphones

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I was stuck on a 14 hour flight last week, and to my disappointment, only one of the two headphone speakers were working. The plane’s media centre has an audio connector that looks like this:

airplane-headphones-jack

Someone should consider probing this USB port.

The hole to the left is smaller than a 3.5mm headphone jack, and designed for a proprietary headphone connector that I didn’t have, and the two holes to the right are part of a different proprietary connector which match with the cheap airline headphones to provide the left and right audio channels.

airplane-headphones-connected

Completely reversible, and therefore completely ambiguous. Stereo is so 1880’s anyways.

By reversing the connector, I was quickly able to determine that the headphones were not faulty, because this swapped the missing audio channel to the other ear. It’s also immediately obvious that since there are no left vs. right polarity markings on either the receptacle or the headphones, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll get reverse stereo.

With the fault identified, and lots of time to kill, I decided to try to hack a workaround. I borrowed some tweezers from a nearby passenger, and slowly ripped off some of the exterior plastic to expose the signal wires. To my surprise there were actually four wires, instead of three using a shared ground.

airplane-headphones-separated

Headphone wires stripped, exposed and ready for splicing.

With a bit of care this only took about five minutes. The next step was to “patch” the working positive and ground wires from the working channel, into the speaker from the broken channel. I did this by trial and error using a bit of intuition to try to keep both speakers in phase.

airplane-headphones-spliced

After a twist splice and using paper as an insulator.

A small scrap of paper acted as an insulator to prevent short circuits between the positive and negative wires. Lastly, a figure eight on a bight was tied to isolate the weak splice from any tension, thus preventing damage and disconnects.

airplane-headphones-knotted

All wrapped up neatly and tied with a knot.

The finished product worked beautifully, despite now only providing monaural audio and is about five centimetres shorter, which is still perfectly usable since the seats hardly recline. The flight staff weren’t angry that I had cannibalized their headphones, but also didn’t understand how my contraption was able to solve the problem.

This fun little ten minute hack helped provide some distraction in economy class, and maybe it will be useful to you since I doubt they’ve repaired the media system in the seat! If you work for Emirates, let me know and I’ll give you the seat and flight number.

Happy hacking!

James

One hour hacks: Remote LUKS over SSH

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I have a GNU/Linux server which I mount a few LUKS encrypted drives on. I only ever interact with the server over SSH, and I never want to keep the LUKS credentials on the remote server. I don’t have anything especially sensitive on the drives, but I think it’s a good security practice to encrypt it all, if only to add noise into the system and for solidarity with those who harbour much more sensitive data.

This means that every time the server reboots or whenever I want to mount the drives, I have to log in and go through the series of luksOpen and mount commands before I can access the data. This turned out to be a bit laborious, so I wrote a quick script to automate it! I also made sure that it was idempotent.

I decided to share it because I couldn’t find anything similar, and I was annoyed that I had to write this in the first place. Hopefully it saves you some anguish. It also contains a clever little bash hack that I am proud to have in my script.

Here’s the script. You’ll need to fill in the map of mount folder names to drive UUID’s, and you’ll want to set your server hostname and FQDN to match your environment of course. It will prompt you for your root password to mount, and the LUKS password when needed.

Example of mounting:

james@computer:~$ rluks.sh 
Running on: myserver...
[sudo] password for james: 
Mount/Unmount [m/u] ? m
Mounting...
music: mkdir ✓
LUKS Password: 
music: luksOpen ✓
music: mount ✓
files: mkdir ✓
files: luksOpen ✓
files: mount ✓
photos: mkdir ✓
photos: luksOpen ✓
photos: mount ✓
Done!
Connection to server.example.com closed.

Example of unmounting:

james@computer:~$ rluks.sh 
Running on: myserver...
[sudo] password for james: 
Sorry, try again.
[sudo] password for james: 
Mount/Unmount [m/u] ? u
Unmounting...
music: umount ✓
music: luksClose ✓
music: rmdir ✓
files: umount ✓
files: luksClose ✓
files: rmdir ✓
photos: umount ✓
photos: luksClose ✓
photos: rmdir ✓
Done!
Connection to server.example.com closed.
james@computer:~$

It’s worth mentioning that there are many improvements that could be made to this script. If you’ve got patches, send them my way. After all, this is only a: one hour hack.

Happy hacking,

James

PS: One day this sort of thing might be possible in mgmt. Let me know if you want to help work on it!

Fixing dropbox “conflicted copy” problems

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I usually avoid proprietary cloud services because of freedom, privacy and vendor lock-in concerns. In addition, there are some excellent libre (and hosted) services such as WordPress, Wikipedia and OpenShift which don’t have the above problems. Thirdly, there are every day Free Software tools such as Fedora GNU/Linux, Libreoffice, and git-annex-assistant which make my computing much more powerful. Finally, there are some hosted services that I use that don’t lock me in because I use them as push-only mirrors, and I only interact with them using Free Software tools. The two examples are GitHub and Dropbox.

Today, Dropbox bit me. Here’s how I saved my data.

Dropbox integrates with GNOME‘s nautilus to sync your data to their proprietary cloud hosting. I periodically run the dropbox client to sync any changes to my public files up to their servers. Today, the client decided that some of my newer files were older than the stored server-side versions, and promptly over-wrote my newer versions.

Thankfully I have real backups, and, to be fair, Dropbox actually renamed my newer files instead of blatantly clobbering them. My filesystem now looks like this:

$ tree files/
files/
|-- bar
|-- baz
|   |-- file1
|   |-- file1\ (james's\ conflicted\ copy\ 2014-09-29)
|   |-- file2\ (james's\ conflicted\ copy\ 2014-09-29).sh
|   `-- file2.sh
`-- foo
    `-- magic.sh

You’ll note that my previously clean file system now has the “conflicted copy” versions everywhere. These are the good versions, whereas in the example above file1 and file2.sh are the older unwanted versions.

I spent some time with find and diff convincing myself that this was true, and eventually I wrote a script. The script looks through the current working directory for “conflicted copy” matches, saves the unwanted versions (just in case) and then clobbers them with the good “conflicted” version.

Please look through, edit, and understand this script before running it. It might not be what you want, and it was designed to only work for me. It is available as a gist, and below in the body of this article.

$ cat fix-dropbox.sh 
#!/bin/bash

# XXX: use at your own risk - do not run without understanding this first!
exit 1

# safety directory
BACKUP='/tmp/fix-dropbox/'

# TODO: detect or pick manually...
NAME=`hostname`
#NAME='myhostname'
DATE='2014-09-29'

mkdir -p "$BACKUP"
find . -path "*(*'s conflicted copy [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]*" -print0 | while read -d $'' -r file; do
    printf 'Found: %s\n' "$file"

    # TODO: detect or pick manually...
    #NAME='XXX'
    #DATE='2014-09-29'

    STRING=" (${NAME}'s conflicted copy ${DATE})"
    #echo $STRING
    RESULT=`echo "$file" | sed "s/$STRING//"`
    #echo $RESULT

    SAVE="$BACKUP"`dirname "$RESULT"`
    #echo $SAVE
    mkdir -p "$SAVE"
    cp "$RESULT" "$SAVE"
    mv "$file" "$RESULT"

done

You can thank bash for saving your data. Stop bashing it and read this article instead.

Happy hacking,

James

 

Pushing Puppet at Puppet Camp DC, LISA 2013

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Hi there,

I hope you enjoyed my “Pushing Puppet (to its limit)” talk and demos from Puppet Camp D.C., LISA 2013. As requested, I’ve posted the code and slides.

Here is the code:

https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-pushing

This module will require three modules as dependencies. The dependencies are:

Each example doesn’t require all the dependencies, so if you’re only interested in the FSM, you only need that module.

Here are the slides:

https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-pushing/blob/master/talks/pushing-puppet.pdf

Here is the bug fix to fix my third Exec[‘again’] demo:

https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-common/commit/df3d004044f013415bb6001a2defd64b587d3b85

It’s my fault that I added the fancy –delta support, but forgot to test the simpler, version again. Woops.

I’ve previously written about some of this puppet material. Read through these articles for more background and details:

I haven’t yet written articles about all the techniques used during my talk. I’ll try to write future articles about these topics if you’re interested.

If anyone has some photos from the talk, I’d love for you to send me a copy.

Special thanks to Kara, Dawn and Puppet Labs for asking me to present.

If you’d like to invite me to teach, talk or consult, I’d love to come visit your {$SCHOOL, $WORK, $CITY, etc}. Contact me! I’ll be around in D.C. till Friday if you’d like to meet up and hack on some of the code or examples that I’ve published.

If you’re interested in looking at some of the “real work” modules that I’ve written, have a look through my github repositories. Puppet-Gluster and Puppet-IPA, are two that you might find most interesting.

There are a few that I haven’t yet published, so if you’re looking for a fancy module to do X, let me know and I might be a few commits away from something helpful that I haven’t made public yet.

I hope you enjoyed hacking on puppet with me, and please don’t be shy — leave me a comment about my talk, and ask questions if you have any.

Happy Hacking,

James

 

Renaming a GNOME keyring (for seahorse, the passwords and keyrings application)

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The GNOME Keyring is a great tool to unify password management across the desktop. Sadly, Firefox is the one application that doesn’t support this natively. (Chrome actually does!)

Seahorse is a useful tool to browse and manage your keyrings. Each keyring is physically stored in: ~/.gnome2/keyrings/$something.keyring

Usually the “$something“, matches the name of the keyring, however the real name comes from within the file. I had an older ubuntu machine running GNOME, and I wanted to import my keyring. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Copy ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring (from the ubuntu machine) to ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ubuntu.keyring (on the new machine)
  2. Open up seahorse and change the keyring password of this “login” keyring to the empty string. This stores the passwords in a plain text format, which is briefly necessary.
  3. Edit the ubuntu.keyring file. There will be an obvious “display-name” section at the top of the file to edit. I changed it to: 
    [keyring]
display-name=ubuntu
  4. After restarting seahorse, I now changed the password back to something secure. If this process worked, you should already see the new keyring name in your keychain list.

Obviously this is a bit of a hack, and a proper rename function would be preferable, but until that exists, hopefully this will fill a niche if you’re stuck and you want to pull in an old keyring into your already populated $HOME.

Happy hacking,

James

recursion in puppet (for no particular reason)

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I’m working on some fancy puppet “code”, and I realized recursion could be very useful. I decided to try out a little hack to see if I could get it to work. I’ll jump right into the code:

#!/usr/bin/puppet

define recursion(
    $count
) {
    notify { "count-${count}":
    }
    $minus1 = inline_template('<%= count.to_i - 1 %>')
    if "${minus1}" == '0' {
        notify { 'done counting!':
        }
    } else {
        # recurse
        recursion { "count-${minus1}":
            count => $minus1,
        }
    }
}

# kick it off...
recursion { 'start':
    count => 4,
}

In theory, this should now work because of local variable scopes. Let’s see if we’ll blow up the puppet stack or not…

[james@computer tmp]$ ./rec.pp 
warning: Implicit invocation of 'puppet apply' by passing files (or flags) directly
to 'puppet' is deprecated, and will be removed in the 2.8 series.  Please
invoke 'puppet apply' directly in the future.

notice: count-4
notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Notify[count-4]/message: defined 'message' as 'count-4'
notice: count-2
notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Recursion[count-3]/Recursion[count-2]/Notify[count-2]/message: defined 'message' as 'count-2'
notice: count-3
notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Recursion[count-3]/Notify[count-3]/message: defined 'message' as 'count-3'
notice: count-1
notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Recursion[count-3]/Recursion[count-2]/Recursion[count-1]/Notify[count-1]/message: defined 'message' as 'count-1'
notice: done counting!
notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Recursion[count-3]/Recursion[count-2]/Recursion[count-1]/Notify[done counting!]/message: defined 'message' as 'done counting!'
notice: Finished catalog run in 0.16 seconds
[james@computer tmp]$

…and amazingly this seems to work! Hopefully this will be useful for some upcoming trickery I have planned, and if not, it was a fun hack.

I decided to see if it could handle larger values, and for my simple tests, it seemed to do okay:

notice: /Stage[main]//Recursion[start]/Recursion[count-99]/Recursion[count-98]/Recursion[count-97]/Recursion[count-96]/Recursion[count-95]/Recursion[count-94]/Recursion[count-93]/Recursion[count-92]/Recursion[count-91]/Recursion[count-90]/Recursion[count-89]/Recursion[count-88]/Recursion[count-87]/Recursion[count-86]/Recursion[count-85]/Recursion[count-84]/Recursion[count-83]/Recursion[count-82]/Recursion[count-81]/Recursion[count-80]/Recursion[count-79]/Recursion[count-78]/Recursion[count-77]/Recursion[count-76]/Recursion[count-75]/Recursion[count-74]/Recursion[count-73]/Recursion[count-72]/Recursion[count-71]/Recursion[count-70]/Recursion[count-69]/Recursion[count-68]/Recursion[count-67]/Recursion[count-66]/Recursion[count-65]/Recursion[count-64]/Recursion[count-63]/Recursion[count-62]/Recursion[count-61]/Recursion[count-60]/Recursion[count-59]/Recursion[count-58]/Recursion[count-57]/Recursion[count-56]/Recursion[count-55]/Recursion[count-54]/Recursion[count-53]/Recursion[count-52]/Recursion[count-51]/Recursion[count-50]/Recursion[count-49]/Recursion[count-48]/Recursion[count-47]/Recursion[count-46]/Recursion[count-45]/Recursion[count-44]/Recursion[count-43]/Recursion[count-42]/Recursion[count-41]/Recursion[count-40]/Recursion[count-39]/Recursion[count-38]/Recursion[count-37]/Recursion[count-36]/Recursion[count-35]/Recursion[count-34]/Recursion[count-33]/Recursion[count-32]/Recursion[count-31]/Recursion[count-30]/Recursion[count-29]/Recursion[count-28]/Recursion[count-27]/Recursion[count-26]/Recursion[count-25]/Recursion[count-24]/Recursion[count-23]/Recursion[count-22]/Recursion[count-21]/Recursion[count-20]/Recursion[count-19]/Recursion[count-18]/Recursion[count-17]/Recursion[count-16]/Recursion[count-15]/Recursion[count-14]/Recursion[count-13]/Recursion[count-12]/Recursion[count-11]/Recursion[count-10]/Recursion[count-9]/Recursion[count-8]/Recursion[count-7]/Recursion[count-6]/Recursion[count-5]/Recursion[count-4]/Recursion[count-3]/Recursion[count-2]/Recursion[count-1]/Notify[done counting!]/message: defined 'message' as 'done counting!'
notice: Finished catalog run in 1.16 seconds

Running this with a count value of 1000 took 132.19 sec according to puppet, but much longer for the process to actually clean up and finish. This made my fan speed up, but at least it didn’t segfault.

Hopefully I’ll have something more useful to show you next time, but until then, keep on imagining and,

Happy hacking!

James

EDIT: A follow up is now available.