Computing – Page 5 – More Zonkyness

Shell Alias May Be Dangerous

Jul 132022

Not all shell aliases of course, but some. I’ve just seen a youtube video that suggested creating a shell alias to run rmtrash when rm is invoked :-

alias rm='rmtrash'

Seems sensible enough doesn’t it? This is in fact the classic example of how dangerous shell aliases can be, although the classic example was to turn on “-i” :-

alias rm='rm -i'

The problem is that you get used to “rm” being safe – either it asks before it removes files (“-i”) or it safely preserves what is deleted in the Trash folder. But what happens when the alias doesn’t get created? Perhaps you have a broken .zshrc and Zsh stops interpreting before the alias is declared. Or you’ve logged on to a remote server that doesn’t have your .zshrc installed as yet?

All of a sudden you are running the unadulterated rm command – deleting files without being asked, or preserving them in the Trash folder. See the danger now?

It is better not to replace standard commands but create a new ‘command’ :-

alias del="rmtrash"

Perhaps you regard this as being excessively risk averse – fair enough. But just don’t say you weren’t warned – and I’ve encountered missing aliases every year over the last 30-odd years I’ve been using Linux and Unix.

When Is a Command-Line Application Not?

Computing, Linux No Responses »

Jun 022022

It sometimes seems that every time I dive into a Youtube video promising “${N} Awesome CLI Applications” (or equivalent), that most of the suggested applications are not command-line applications. They’re TUI-applications – text user interface as opposed to graphical user interface – or to align with my bad habit of referring to GUI applications as gooey applications, perhaps tooey applications.

Now there’s nothing wrong with tooey applications; I use them every day. Especially nmon (just because I got used to it before I discovered htop). Or btop

But none of these are really command-line applications; by which I mean they aren’t used at the command-line even if they are (optionally) invoked there. A command-line application allows you to use the shell including pipes to produce an aggregate result. For example :-

» grep mike /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $5}'
Mike Meredith

That uses two command-line “applications” to turn a username (“mike”) into a full name (“Mike Meredith”). Yes it can be optimised into a single command :-

» awk -F: '/^mike:/ {print $5}' /etc/passwd
Mike Meredith

… which even improves the search, but makes the point less well. And we can do slightly fancier things too :-

Screenshot of a random URL being picked and turned into a QR code.

(don’t assume that QR code takes you somewhere nice)

I’m not suggest Youtubers should stop making videos about terminal-based applications; I’m not even suggesting they should concentrate on “proper” command-line applications. Just don’t call terminal-based applications “command-line” because they really are not.

Initial Thoughts on Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro

Computing, Security No Responses »

Mar 302022

Just set up a UDM pro to replace a really old Cisco 881W and had some initial thoughts on it :-

The firewall configuration is more than a little clunky; the version I was using still seems to require the legacy interface to configure IPv6 firewall rules. Plus configuring a set of IPv4 rules and a seperate set of IPv6 rules added to the clunkiness – why not allow tcp any to ${addresses} eq ssh rather than repeat the same rule with different address types? Anything to keep firewall rule sets simple is good (but I deal with another firewall that has over 200 rules).
Whilst we’re on the subject of the firewall, it would be nice if the firewall supported the “apps” identified in the traffic management; not really an easy thing to do, but a firewall relying on port numbers is a bit 1990s to those of us used to next-generation firewalls.
Device identification is just a little bit rough; to be fair I’m using a separate DHCP server. But to identify a Linux container as a Windows PC is more than a little off! I had to check that my virtual Windows 10 machine wasn’t actually running when I first saw this.
The topology diagram is all very well but very boring if you’re not using all Ubiquiti gear. Not everyone is going to replace all their switches just to get this to work straight away – I have three switches not counting the ethernet-over-power devices that also count as switches. It would be handy if the UDM would at least go to some effort to identify third-party network devices.
Oh, and ssh access to the command-line is … confusing. The gooey implies that you set up a password and a username, but it seems that whatever the username you use it really only works with the user root. And the username you supply isn’t contained within /etc/passwd on the device.

Oh! And requiring access to the cloud to generate the first admin (“owner”) account could well be problematic. Apart from the obvious problem of allowing the Cloud admin-level access to a firewall – something the more paranoid may regard as a killer misfeature, what happens if something goes wrong during the creation of a cloud-based account?

And having SNMP mentioned within the gooey but requiring command-line “bodges” (from here) to actually get it running is not acceptable. Strange that such a feature isn’t supported on a network device!

Linus’ Linux Travails

Computing, Linux No Responses »

Nov 112021

If you follow a certain Linux on Youtube, you may well be aware of an incident where Linus was trying to install Steam on a newly installed copy of Pop_OS! and managed to produce a bit of a mess without a desktop environment. What happened?

I think that when he encountered a problem installing Steam with the gooey, he then obtained a command-line “recipe” for installing Steam – potentially for a different distribution (it certainly mentioned removing lots of “stuff” including gnome-desktop).

Is this a problem with Linus being a bit of an idiot or Linux being a bit broken? A bit of both perhaps.

Linus’ idiocy is perhaps an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing – he mentioned being comfortable with using the command-line, but would admit that he doesn’t understand everything that goes on within it (to be fair, nobody understands everything even those who’ve been using the Linux command-line for over 20 years). And certainly when apt said “To install this package, I’m going to remove this long list of other packages”, the appropriately cautious should be saying “No” (and yes there is a prompt to allow you to do that).

The Linux command-line follows the principle that if the human wielding it wants to do something dumb, it may warn you but it will let you do whatever you want. That’s handy but scary and dangerous.

Now most users will likely veer away from the command-line – this is where Linus was a bit of an idiot – at least until they have a bit more experience. But perhaps those who make distributions should make the danger a bit more dangerous by adding a warning when opening the terminal (added to ~/.profile so we can remove an unnecessary warning) :-

WARNING !!!!

The command-line can be dangerous if you are not careful. Pasting in "recipes" found on the Internet for solutions to issues can result in serious damage to your Linux installation requiring re-installation.

In particular a recipe should be specific to your distribution and the version of the distribution you are running.

When looking for solutions on the Internet, always bear in mind that there are idiots out there who will publish “solutions” that are anything but. As mentioned in my hypothetical warning, recipes are very often (especially when dealing with software installation) specific to a particular distribution and version – use it inappropriately and you may well run into serious trouble.

On the subject of gooeys, it would be handy to include a “Solutions” link when an error occurs in a software package manager that takes you to a web page specific to the package you are trying to install. Encounter trouble installing “Steam 6.23”? The solutions link might take you to a page saying “This package is out of date; please run Update”. This would allow links to be specific to the distribution and version in use – a lot more helpful than simply expecting the user to search the Internet for a solution.

My Random Password Generator

Computing, Linux, Security No Responses »

Nov 062021

Someone asked me about this – a zsh function which I use to generate random passwords :-

✓ mike@pica» rpass noise
oOg6vsM+V0It4he6US4Xk6DuZPja9okyOpQyUCfW6NQ=
✓ mike@pica» rpass words
patternmaker+meio+tubicolous+misbelievingly

It’s too small and simple for me to classify as “open source” but there’s no harm in sharing the function :-

✓ mike@pica» which rpass
rpass () {
	case "$1" in
		("noise") dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=32 status=none | base64 -i ;;
		("words") punct=("," "." "<" ">" "/" ";" ":" "-" "+" "=") 
			onep=${punct[$(($RANDOM % ${#punct[@]} + 1 ))]} 
			w1=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w2=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w3=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w4=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			echo "${w1}${onep}${w2}${onep}${w3}${onep}${w4}" ;;
		("*") echo $1 not understood ;;
	esac
}

This is just a simple zsh function with all sorts of little “issues” – not least is that it could at least say “$1 not understood – try ‘words’ or ‘noise'”.

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