The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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Chocolatey 1.0.0 got released last week (chocolatey/choco · GitHub)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/24

Last week finally there was the stable [Wayback/Archive] Release version 1.0.0 · chocolatey/choco · GitHub.

So I fixed the Wikipedia page

It was a few days after the 11th birthday “Celebration”: [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software Blog | This One Goes To 11! Celebrating 11 Years Of Chocolatey. Not a really festive post, though it does have a really nice overview of 11 years of Chocolatey history and clearly showing the momentum of it has been a few years behind us.

The thing is: hardly anybody noticed the celebration nor the 1.0.0 release. Being at various 0.* versions for like a decade makes people not follow sudden version bumps closely. I only noticed when updating a bunch of testing VMs of which one had a problem, so I inspected the logs and saw the 1.0.0 version.

So these recent tweets did not gain much attention:

Anyway: the release notes indicate a few things scheduled for 2.0.0. Given the sudden 0.12.0 -> 1.0.0 bump, I have no clue far (or near!) in the future that will be.

It is kind of both a saddening and relieved feeling: like for instance Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (both in the same age cohort as Chocolatey), Chocolatey is just there and mostly works.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Some of my wp-admin links, as WordPress.com is hiding access to classic-editor and wp-admin links more and more

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/18

For my link list as WordPress.com is actively hiding them:

Notes

You can see the old versus new infrastructure by comparing these branches:

WordPress.com does not have the “Classic Editor” plugin, but just gradually discourages use of the old infrastructure which is far more feature rich, thereby screwing old users.

Some of these features from the old infrastructure that are gone (despite the pretentious name of the Gutenberg editor):

  • Posts/Pages/Tags/Categories/Comments overviews are paginated, can be filtered and have bulk-actions
  • Classic-Editor has lots of useful keyboard shortcuts and allows for nested quotes

For reference, WordPress – Wikipedia: Gutenberg versus classic-editor:

WordPress 5.0 “Bebo”[edit]

The December 2018 release of WordPress 5.0, “Bebo”, is named in homage to the pioneering Cuban jazz musician Bebo Valdés.[90]

It included a new default editor “Gutenberg” – a block-based editor; it allows users to modify their displayed content in a much more user friendly way than prior iterations. Blocks are abstract units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a web page.[91] Past content that was created on WordPress pages is listed under what is referred to as a Classic Block.[92] Prior to Gutenberg, there were several block-based editors available as WordPress plugins, e.g. Elementor, and following the release of Gutenberg Elementor was compared to existing plugins.[93][94]

Classic Editor plugin[edit]

The Classic Editor Plugin was created as a result of User preferences and helped website developers maintain past plugins only compatible with WordPress 4.9.8, giving plugin developers time to get their plugins updated & compatible with the 5.0 release. Having the Classic Editor plugin installed restores the “classic” editing experience that WordPress has had up until the WordPress 5.0 release.[95] The Classic Editor Plugin will be supported at least until 2022.[96]

The Classic Editor plugin is active on over 5,000,000 installations of WordPress.[97]

–jeroen

Posted in Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on replacing parts of a text file with template text using sed on a Busybox system

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/17

Note before you think about putting stuff in /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh: that script will not be executed when UEFI booting.

In a very lightweight Busybox system, I wanted to modify some configuration files automatically using fragments stored in template files.

The system has diff, but no patch.

The basic idea is to use sed to insert the template files into certain spots of the configuration file when certain marker texts are not present. So I want the opposite of [Wayback] Hey Stephen Wood: Try patch instead of sed in shell scripts.

Basically the idea is a poor-man’s patch, described in Too bad: ESXi busybox has diff, but not patch « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.

Some links that might help me with this:

One alternative would have been to use ed (which is part of the normal Busybox), but ESXi Busybox omits ed like it omits patch.

Too bad that sed commands are too different from ed commands, as I could have used diff -e on another system based on ideas here:

I might give it one more go, as vi is sort of derived from ed via ex (see vi: Creation – Wikipedia), which means that vi “colon mode” (officially command mode: [Wayback] Vim documentation: cmdline) is very similar to ed.

Another alternative would be awk, but I have done so little work with it awk, that I’m hesitating to use a new tool. Some links:

And finally, ash could be used:

The kind of modifications I am after

Below are a few links with examples of the kind of modifications I want to make. Most patch just /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh, but some others introduce other changes as well.

Note that especially with networking settings, local.sh commands might not have any effect (for instance when having slow DHCP or other network issues), see for instance [Wayback/Archive.is] I’m running ESXi 5.5 and my persistent route in local.sh is not taking effect after boot. : vmware.

There is a very convoluted way around using local.sh by using the VIB authoring tool as described in [Wayback] How to create persistent firewall rules on ESXi. It requires lowering the software acceptance level to Community Supported (esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported), which gives you a hard time installing ESXi updates.

I got that VIB idea from [Wayback] Solved: Re: Persistent firewall rule – VMware Technology Network VMTN, as:

The local.sh file gets overwritten often with upgrades so it would mean another step during the process.

From the same thread comes [Wayback] Solved: Re: Persistent firewall rule – VMware Technology Network VMTN

set the sticky bit on your separate xml-file – then it will be backed up and persist through reboot: chmod +t

run backup manually before the first reboot: /sbin/auto-backup.sh  because backup runs only once per hour

Within vSphere, one could use [Wayback] Configure ESXi Hosts with Host Profiles, but a standalone ESXi box is not part of vSphere, so that won’t work.

ESXi 7 and up

ESXi 7 makes the above harder as for instance user root cannot change file rights any more, so eventually I might revert to a VM that auto-boots when ESXi comes up, then patches the right files in place over PowerCLI (read-only) or SSH.

Need to give this some thought later:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, ash/dash development, Awk, BusyBox, Development, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, PowerCLI, Scripting, sed, sed script, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Last year, a classic Mojibake was introduced when Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht redesigned their IT systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16

Last year, Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht sent me a paper letter notifying the yearly water bill was going to be late as they were redesigning their IT systems.

Their letter introduced a classic Mojibake that had not been present in all their older paper letter communication.

  • Street name on a letter via the old IT systems is "Pyreneeën":

    Pyreneeën goed geprint.

  • Street name on a letter via the new IT systems is "Pyreneeën":

    Pyreneeën geprint met Mojibake vervormingen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Encoding, ftfy, Mojibake, Python, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

Jilles posted a small script to show offline/online status based on ping

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16

Jilles posted a small script to show offline/online status based on ping in [Archive.is] Jilles on Twitter: “#!/bin/bash HOST={1ST HOP HERE} while true;do p=$(ping -c1 $HOST) if [ $? -ne 0 ];then s=offline else s=online\ fi echo $(date +%F\ %T) $s – $(echo $p | sed -e ‘s/^PING.*— 1/1/g’) sleep 10 done”

#!/bin/bash
HOST={1ST HOP HERE}
while true;do
  p=$(ping -c1 $HOST)
  if [ $? -ne 0 ];then
    s=offline
  else
    s=online\ 
  fi
  echo $(date +%F\ %T) $s - $(echo $p | sed -e 's/^PING.*--- 1/1/g')
  sleep 10
done

The reason was that his ISP had connection problems for the block of homes where Jilles lives.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, grep, Power User, Scripting, sed, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Cryptosense Discovery

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/15

This is cool: [Wayback] Cryptosense Discovery:

Free tool that discovers security configuration errors in SSH and TLS servers and explains how to fix them. Supports STARTTLS and can also scan HTTPS, POP3, IMAP and SMTP servers.

It gives you a list of servers a target domain uses (for purposes like web, email, etc) that can have external encryption enabled, then allows you to test these.

The list by default has only servers within that target domain enabled, but you can optionally include other servers (for instance if a domain uses a third party for their SMTP handling).

Basically it is the web-counterpart of a tool like testssl.sh (which I have written about before).

Found while checking out how to test the MX security of a domain using [Wayback] testssl.sh as I forgot the syntax, which in retrospect is dead easy as per [Wayback] tls – How to use testssl.sh on an SMTP server? – Information Security Stack Exchange (thanks [Wayback] Z.T.!):

…

testssl.sh --mx <domain name>

works fine.

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:25

and

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:587

also work fine.

Note that not specifying the port assumes port 443, despite specifying protocol smtp. That doesn’t work.

…

Also, you might try discovery.cryptosense.com which does the same thing only better

That website is made by the cool people at [Wayback] Cryptosense.

Both are a lot easier than the alternatives described in [Wayback] Blog · How to test SMTP servers using the command-line · Halon MTA: using nslookup and dig for determining the affected hosts, using nc or telnet for testing basic connectivity, using [Wayback/Archive.is] openssl s_client to test TLS, and [Wayback/Archive.is] smtpping for measuring throughput.

In addition to the above tools mentioned in the blog, I’ve also used sendEmail (note case sensitivity), ehlo-size, and swaks.

This is what I tested:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Awk, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Encryption, grep, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Scripting, Security, SMTP, Software Development, SSH, ssh/sshd, TCP, testssl.sh, TLS | Leave a Comment »

The things I didn’t notice during cancer survival: ftfy 6.0 and more versions got released during my recovery (including the poem “Ode to a Shipping Label”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/10

When writing this, [Wayback/Archive.is] ftfy · PyPI:history indicates ftfy was already at 6.0.3.

It is still my goto tool for figuring out the cause of Mojibake. I remember writing about it the first time in 2016 (see the ftfy category) when it was already at version 3.0, discovering it after a few Mojibake posts.

By now it even understands right-to-left Mojibake garbage: [Archive.is] Elia Robyn Speer on Twitter: “ftfy 5.8 is out! … A user reported that Hebrew text wasn’t being fixed, and this made me think about how to expand some of the trickier cases to non-Latin alphabets.”

Mojibake mishaps still happen a lot, so by now I hope I will have done a Mojibake themed Delphi talk at one or more conferences.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in !!con (bangbangcon), About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Cancer, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, ftfy, Mojibake, Personal, Python, Rectum cancer, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell debugging in Visual Studio Code: “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” configuration template is missing

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

Not sure why, but most of my Visual Studio configurations have the “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” debug configuration template. So here is the JSON you need to add in your launch.json configuration file.

        {
            "type": "PowerShell",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt",
            "script": "${file}",
            "args": [
                "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}"
            ],
            "cwd": "${file}"
        }

The trick is the bold part that prompts Visual Studio for the arguments.

Note: in order to have such a file, you need to have opened a folder in Visual Studio Code first, then open a PowerShell script file from that directory second.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

I needed this for my blog post tomorrow:

import os
os.system('sh') # or bash, tcsh, zsh, whatever. :-P

[Wayback] How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow

Thanks [Wayback] Chris Jester-Young!

This trick works at the Python shell.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08

The [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki has been mostly down since March 3rd, 2022 (not the main page, but almost all other pages are).

I modified [Wayback/Archive] Docwiki https – EmbarcaderoMonitoring to show the actual status of a deeper page as the (mostly static) top page is up, so monitoring that is useless as the deeper pages are down.

The deeper pages are dynamic and require a functioning MySQL database connection. That connection is mostly down (the error message is not clear, so this could be a network or a database server problem, or maybe even a loadbalancer gradually entering bit heaven).

Since it had been down for like 6 days in February*, I’d expect Idera to keep an eye on it and prepare for more downtime. Apparently that’s either not a 24×7 thing for them or  they missed the “pre” in preparation as it is dead-silent on .

It also runs on an unsupported version of Mediawiki 1.31** which by itself does not explain the outage, but does indicate that their idea of handling their internal lifetime management is different than what they advocate to clients in their software subscription model, see [Wayback/Archive] Delphi – Embarcadero store, [Wayback/Archive] Update Subscription – Embarcadero and [Wayback/Archive] Special Offers on RAD Studio, Delphi & C++Builder – Embarcadero:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Bookmarklet, Delphi, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lightweight markup language, MediaWiki, Monitoring, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, Uptimerobot, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

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