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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for September, 2021

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Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/30

[WayBack] Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files:

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Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

One of the Let’s Encrypt’s Root Certificates expired today (and their corresponding intermediate yesterday); how is your infrastructure doing?

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/30

Last weekend I published 5 days before the Let’s Encrypt’s Root Certificate is expiring!

It basically was a post trying to amplify the [Wayback/Archive.is] Let’s Encrypt’s Root Certificate is expiring! message by [Wayback] Scott Helme .

Yesterday and today, he is maintaining a Twitter thread on things that have broken.

Quite a few things have, including some versions of curl, on which a lot of infrastructure relies (the certificate for it got fixed later on 20120930), see:

Two important starting points in his thread:

  1. [Archive.is] Scott Helme on Twitter: “🚨🚨🚨 5 minutes until the Let’s Encrypt R3 intermediate expires 🚨🚨🚨 29 September 2021 19:21:40 UTC”
  2. [Archive.is] Scott Helme on Twitter: “🚨🚨🚨 30 minute warning 🚨🚨🚨 IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 Expires: Sep 30 14:01:15 2021 UTC… “

If you want to check from one of your own clients, try [Archive.is] Scott Helme on Twitter: “I’ve created a test site to help identify issues with clients. If you can connect to https://t.co/bXHsnlRk8D then your client can handle being served the expired R3 Intermediate in the server chain!… “

[Wayback/Archive.is] https://expired-r3-test.scotthelme.co.uk/

Note that neither SSLabs, nor Cencys, nor CertCheckkerApp do show the expired certificate, only the new one:

Yes, I know the pluimers.com web server is rated B from a TLS perspective. Will be working on it, but I’m still recovering from rectum cancer treatments, and have an almost 1.5 year backlog to get through.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Uncategorized, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Ian Colwater: Here are some terms to mute on Twitter to clean your timeline up a bit. · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/30

[WayBack/Archive.is] Here are some terms to mute on Twitter to clean your timeline up a bit. · GitHub

Here are some terms to mute on Twitter to clean your timeline up a bit. – twittermute.txt

Via:

Related:

More details in [WayBack/Archive.is] List of Twitter mute words for your timeline | Hacker News curated comments:

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Posted in Development, LifeHacker, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

JetBrains Mono: A free and open source typeface for developers | JetBrains: Developer Tools for Professionals and Teams

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/30

Font I want to try out: [Archive.is] JetBrains Mono: A free and open source typeface for developers | JetBrains: Developer Tools for Professionals and Teams.

It has a large X-height and is sans serif, just like the lovely [WayBack] Lucida Console font, which I have been using for almost 3 decades.

So I wonder if JetBrains Mono can convince me to switch away from Lucida Console: no other monospaced font has convinced me yet (:

Via: [Archive.is] Matt Ellis on Twitter: “JetBrains Mono. A really nice, open source, ligature friendly, developer typeface. I’ve been using this for a while now, it’s my default font. And a really cool landing page! “

Edit 202109301T1300

JetBrains is discussing on how to update the Chocolaty support, see the twitter posts below:

Referred repositories in that thread:

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Font, JetBrains Mono, Lucida Console, Power User, Programmers Font, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows Sandbox: a feature I forgot about

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/29

The Windows Sandbox can be useful, but since it was never there in the first decades of my Windows usage, I forgot it was added.

I wonder how it is implemented, as it is really useful to test out new stuff, but I wonder what it protects against.

A few years back, I bumped into this because the [WayBack] Desktop Goose by samperson got viral (it can be downloaded from [WayBack/Archive.is] Desktop Goose v0.2.zip)

via [Archive.is] Samperson on Twitter: “I made a goose that destroys your computer Download it free here: samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose” / Twitter

So here are some links (you need at least build 1903 ([WayBack] Windows 10 May 2019 or 19H1) or Insider Preview Build 18305):

You can install it even if your Windows machine itself is a VM. For a physical machine, hardware virtualisation needs to be enabled (usually in the BIOS); for a VM, nested virtualisation enabled (check that in your virtualisation environment: Hyper-V, ESXi and others vary slightly on how to enable this).

Installation inside the Windows machine can be done via PowerShell (or the UI):

Note that starting the SandBox from an x86 process might require you to run a different WindowsSandBox.exe; see [WayBack] Launching Wsb (Windows Sandbox Config file) gives error – Total Commander:

you can use C:\WINDOWS\Sysnative\WindowsSandbox.exe in stead of C:\WINDOWS\System32\WindowsSandbox.exe in TC 32bit.

Also see:
[WayBack] On 64-bit Windows versions, some files and folders shown by Windows Explorer are not shown by Total Commander!

[WayBack] Windows x64: Explorer vs TC: Content of System32 different

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Moore’s law has almost ended: back to the future

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/29

[WayBack] We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers now | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

Ever-faster processors led to bloated software, but physical limits may force a return to the concise code of the past

So back to optimisation and maybe even assembly language.

Which brings back the days gone by.

–jeroen

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Posted in Algorithms, Assembly Language, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell error in a script but not on the console: The string is missing the terminator: “.

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/29

The below one will fail in a script, both both work from the PowerShell prompt:

Success

Get-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "File and Printer Sharing" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetFirewallAddressFilter -AssociatedNetFirewallRule $_ }

Failure

Get-NetFirewallRule –DisplayGroup "File and Printer Sharing" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetFirewallAddressFilter -AssociatedNetFirewallRule $_ }

The error you get this this:

At C:\bin\Show-File-and-Printer-Sharing-firewall-rules.ps1:5 char:52
+ ... -TCP-NoScope" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetF ...
+                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The string is missing the terminator: ".
    + CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : TerminatorExpectedAtEndOfString

Via [WayBack] script file ‘The string is missing the terminator: “.’ – Google Search, I quickly found these that stood out:

Cause and solution

Before DisplayGroup, the first line has a minus sign and the second an en-dash. You can see this via [WayBack] What Unicode character is this ?.

Apparently, when using Unicode on the console, it does not matter if you have a minus sign (-), en-dash (–), em-dash (—) or horizontal bar (―) as dash character. You can see this in [WayBack] tokenizer.cs at function [WayBack] NextToken and [WayBack] CharTraits.cs at function [WayBack] IsChar).

When saving to a non-Unicode file, it does matter, even though it does not display as garbage in the error message.

Similarly, PowerShell has support for these special characters:

    internal static class SpecialChars
    {
        // Uncommon whitespace
        internal const char NoBreakSpace = (char)0x00a0;
        internal const char NextLine = (char)0x0085;

        // Special dashes
        internal const char EnDash = (char)0x2013;
        internal const char EmDash = (char)0x2014;
        internal const char HorizontalBar = (char)0x2015;

        // Special quotes
        internal const char QuoteSingleLeft = (char)0x2018; // left single quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteSingleRight = (char)0x2019; // right single quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteSingleBase = (char)0x201a; // single low-9 quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteReversed = (char)0x201b; // single high-reversed-9 quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteDoubleLeft = (char)0x201c; // left double quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteDoubleRight = (char)0x201d; // right double quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteLowDoubleLeft = (char)0x201E; // low double left quote used in german.
    }

The easiest solution is to use minus signs everywhere.

Another solution is to save files as Unicode UTF-8 encoding (preferred) or UTF-16 encoding (which I dislike).

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

Google Cloud Shell: connecting to cloud storage buckets

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/28

One of the drawbacks of Google Cloud Shell is that it will delete the home directory after 120 days of not using it: [WayBack] Deletion notice for my Google Cloud Shell home directory – Stack Overflow

This is documented [WayBack] here:

If you do not access Cloud Shell for 120 days, we will delete your home disk. You will receive an email notification before we do so and simply starting a session will prevent its removal.

This only applies to the home directory of your Cloud Shell instance (you may want to store it on Cloud Storage anyway if you want to keep it). Any other Google services you use will be unaffected.

I hardly use the cloud shell, as it is a last resort to shell out from overly protected networks. Fewer and fewer environments restrict so much, so I’ve bumped into the home directory deletion a few times now.

I might use it more in the future, as I recently discovered there is a URL trick so you can start a cloud shell with parameters like an initial git repository: [WayBack] Open in Cloud Shell  |  Google Cloud

The Open in Cloud Shell feature allows you to publish a link that opens the Cloud Console and either automatically clones a Git repository into Cloud Shell or starts Cloud Shell with a custom image. It also allows for instructions to be printed to the terminal to help users interact with the content.

The Open in Cloud Shell feature helps developers experiment with code samples and APIs without having to worry about downloading Cloud SDK, installing required dependencies, or searching for relevant source files. This page explains how to add this feature to your Git repository.

Currently, only GitHub and Bitbucket repositories are whitelisted. If you would like to add a different repository, send feedback with the repository type you’d like to use with Open in Cloud Shell.

Setting up the home directory with my scripts can be a curse, so I have contemplated on these kinds of solutions:

  • store scripts in Google Drive, and mount part of Google Drive into the Cloud Shell
  • store scripts in Google Cloud Storage
  • script the setup of the home directory via a bash script in a gist

Some links that will hopefully help me with that:

  • [WayBack] Use the Google Cloud Shell to Upload files to Google Drive : DataHoarder
  • [WayBack] Open Your Repository In Google Cloud Shell – Daisuke Maki – Medium
  • [WayBack] gsutil – Google cloud storage – Download file from web – Stack Overflow

    mount the bucket in your Cloud Shell using gcsfuse:

    Create a directory in your Cloud Shell user home

     mkdir ~/mybucket

    Now mount your bucket in that directory using gcsfuse:

     gcsfuse bucket_name ~/mybucket

    Change the current directory to mount point directory:

     cd mybucket

    (if you want to have some fun run “df -h .” to see how much space you got in that mount point)

    …

    seems to work for all file sizes:

     curl http://speedtest.tele2.net/10GB.zip | gsutil cp - gs://YOUR_BUCKET_NAME/10GB.zip

    Basically curl “streams” the data directly to the bucket.

  • [WayBack] Limitations and restrictions  |  Cloud Shell  |  Google Cloud

    Usage limits

    Cloud Shell inactivity: If you do not access Cloud Shell for 120 days, your home disk will be deleted. You will receive an email notification before its deletion and simply starting a session will prevent its removal. Please consider a different solution on Google Cloud storage for sensitive data you wish to store long term.

    Non-interactive usage: Cloud Shell is intended for interactive use only. Non-interactive sessions will be ended automatically after a warning. Note that Cloud Shell sessions are capped at 12 hours, after which sessions are automatically terminated. You can use a new session immediately after.

    Weekly usage: Cloud Shell also has weekly usage limits. If you reach your usage limit, you’ll need to wait until the specified time (listed under Usage Quota, found under the three dots menu icon) before you can use Cloud Shell again.

    Restoring a session after a service limit violation: If your session is terminated or cannot be established because you exceeded a service limit, Cloud Shell will display an error with a link to a form that allows you to appeal the limit violation. Click the feedback link and submit the form with more information about the tasks you were performing before your session was terminated.

–jeroen

Posted in bash, Development, Google, GoogleCloudShell, GoogleDrive, Internet, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, SpeedTest | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – proxykit/ProxyKit: A toolkit to create code-first HTTP reverse proxies on ASP.NET Core

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/28

Interesting: [Archive.is] GitHub – proxykit/ProxyKit: A toolkit to create code-first HTTP reverse proxies on ASP.NET Core:

Having built proxies many times before, I felt it is time to make a package. Forked from ASP.NET labs, it has been heavily modified with a different API, to facilitate a wider variety of proxying scenarios (i.e. routing based on a JWT claim) and interception of the proxy requests / responses for customization of headers and (optionally) request / response bodies. It also uses HttpClientFactory internally that will mitigate against DNS caching issues making it suitable for microservice / container environments.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, .NET Core, .NET Standard, ASP.NET, C#, Communications Development, Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Software Development, TCP | Leave a Comment »

Chocolatey: force install sysinternals after hash mismatch

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/28

Shortly after UltraVNC mismatching sha256 hash the chocolatey checksum check (Chocolatey: when upgrades or installs keep insisting the hash has changed, and over time the mismatch changes as well), I bumped into another occasion: now (because of a zero sized .nupkg file), I had to force reinstall sysinternals.

The problem however is that sysinternals chocolatey will always install the latest version as per [WayBack] Chocolatey Software | Sysinternals 2019.12.19

Notes

  • This package supports only latest version.
  • This package by default installs to tools directory which will create shims for all applications. When you install to different directory, shims are not created but directory is added to the PATH.
  • This package downloads the nano edition of sysinternals suite when installing it on a nano server.
  • To have GUI for the tools, install nirlauncher package and use /Sysinternals package parameter.

It means that when reinstalling an older version (in the process of fixing a broken chocolatey install), it is OK to ignore the error caused during forced reinstall:

C:\bin\bin>choco install --force --yes sysinternals
Chocolatey v0.10.15
Installing the following packages:
sysinternals
By installing you accept licenses for the packages.
sysinternals v2019.6.29 already installed. Forcing reinstall of version '2019.6.29'.
 Please use upgrade if you meant to upgrade to a new version.
Progress: Downloading sysinternals 2019.6.29... 100%

sysinternals v2019.6.29 (forced) [Approved]
sysinternals package files install completed. Performing other installation steps.
Sysinternals Suite is going to be installed in 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\sysinternals\tools'
Downloading sysinternals
  from 'https://download.sysinternals.com/files/SysinternalsSuite.zip'
Progress: 100% - Completed download of C:\Users\jeroenp\AppData\Local\Temp\chocolatey\sysinternals\2019.6.29\SysinternalsSuite.zip (29 MB).
Download of SysinternalsSuite.zip (29 MB) completed.
Error - hashes do not match. Actual value was 'AE0AB906A61234D1ECCB027D04F5A920D78A31494372193EE944DD419842625C'.
ERROR: Checksum for 'C:\Users\jeroenp\AppData\Local\Temp\chocolatey\sysinternals\2019.6.29\SysinternalsSuite.zip' did not meet 'db59efe1739a2262104874347277f9faa0805a1a7a0acd9cc29e9544fb8040c5' for checksum type 'sha256'. Consider passing the actual checksums through with --checksum --checksum64 once you validate the checksums are appropriate. A less secure option is to pass --ignore-checksums if necessary.
The install of sysinternals was NOT successful.
Error while running 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\sysinternals\tools\chocolateyInstall.ps1'.
 See log for details.

Chocolatey installed 0/1 packages. 1 packages failed.
 See the log for details (C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\chocolatey.log).

Failures
 - sysinternals (exited -1) - Error while running 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\sysinternals\tools\chocolateyInstall.ps1'.
 See log for details.

So in this case, as always the most recent Sysinternals file is used, it is OK to follow the bold guideline above (and quoted below) use the checksum for that file. You might even want to ignore it, as the file is downloaded over https so tampering is virtually impossible:

Consider passing the actual checksums through with --checksum --checksum64 once you validate the checksums are appropriate. A less secure option is to pass --ignore-checksums if necessary.

For this checksum, the forced reinstall becomes choco install --force --yes sysinternals --checksum AE0AB906A61234D1ECCB027D04F5A920D78A31494372193EE944DD419842625C

Alternatively (with a slight chance of yet another checksum) would be choco install --force --yes sysinternals --ignore-checksums

Related:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, SysInternals, Windows | Leave a Comment »

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