Archive for the ‘*nix’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/02
Some notes (mainly links) on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier as at the time of writing it is the only provider with a “free forever” tier.
In the past for FOSS, there was [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost on Twitter: “@d_feldman Check out fosshost.org for an alternative to Oracle Cloud for ARM/AArch64. We are free, open source and you will never get bill shock. Open source projects must apply only.”, but at the end of 2022 they started to wind down their services as per [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services
Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services
At this time, Fosshost is deeply sorry to announce we are no longer able to continue offering our services.
Because of this, we strongly recommend all Fosshost tenants to backup their data immediately, and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.
Oh before you begin: if you need a reverse DNS record then be sure to request that as soon as your free tier starts: at that time you have USD 300 credits for running paid services which includes the support to request reverse DNS records.
Anyway, many links on the Oracle OCI Cloud Free Tier (especially the ARM deal is great: lots of RAM as compared to the x86 VMs):
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Posted in CentOS, openSuSE, OracleLinux, RedHat, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Windows, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/30
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Blue team, Bluetooth, Development, Encryption, ESP32, Hardware, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Home Audio/Video, HTTPS/TLS security, Infosec (Information Security), Network-and-equipment, Power User, Red team, Software Development, WiFi, Wireshark | Tagged: USBArmyKnife | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/25
Perl isn’t my strength, so I was glad to find the below links that inspired me to add this bash function to my profile decoding Quote-Printable email data (for instance used by sendmail and postfix to store SMTP message files):
# https://superuser.com/questions/1452249/fix-revert-wrong-encoding-of-file
function sendmail-decode-quoted-printable-from-stdin() {
perl -0777 -ne 'use MIME::QuotedPrint; print decode_qp($_)'
}
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Perl, Power User, Python, Scripting, sendmail, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/15
I wish I had found this overview eons ago: [Wayback/Archive] Managing the Mail Queue Files and Directories.
The most important bits on the various kinds of files that appear in your message queue:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User, sendmail | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/06
Sometimes I need [Wayback/Archive] Redirect Checker | Check your Statuscode 301 vs 302 on the command-line, so cURL to the rescue: [Wayback/Archive] linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow. The relevant portions of answers and comments further below.
TL;DR:
Since I prefer verbose command-line arguments (you can find them at the [Wayback/Archive] curl – How To Use on-line man page) especially in scripts this HTTP GET request is what works with Twitter:
% curl --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
https://x.com/anyuser/status/20
This failed (twitter dislikes HTTP HEAD requests):
% curl --head --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
Notes
Given so many of my scripts now run on zsh, I added the new-line because of command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow. You can strip that bit.
Note that these do not perform client side redirects, so they do not return the ultimate originating URL https://x.com/jack/status/20 (which was the first ever Tweet on what was back then called twttr) as Twitter on the client-side overwrites window.location.href with the final URL. Similar behaviour for getting the Twitter user handle of a Twitter user ID, more on Twitter tricks below.
Tweet by TweetID trick via [Wayback/Archive] Accessing a tweet using only its ID (and without the Twitter API) – Bram.us.
Further reading (thanks [Wayback/Archive] vise, [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Stenberg, [Wayback/Archive] Ivan, [Wayback/Archive] AndrewF, [Wayback/Archive] Roger Campanera, and [Wayback/Archive] Dave Baird):
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Batch-Files, Bookmarklet, Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, CSS, cURL, Development, Event, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, TCP, Twitter, Web Browsers, Web Development | Tagged: 76 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/04
Every now and then you make a typo when accessing remote systems through UltraVNC vncviewer.exe (I did the worst: thinking I had hit Enter to select the most recent connection, but typing a password instead).
I could not find settings in the registry, nor a vncviewer.ini file, so I used Process Monitor and filtered all events for the most recently started vncviewer.exe to figure out where it would store configuration files.
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User, VNC/Virtual_Network_Computing, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/31
I try to stay on the default shells of environments as much as possible, especially as that makes life easier when needing to work on an non-customised system.
Apple switched back from an ancient latest GPLv2 version 3.2 of bash (they regard newer GPLv3 as toxic to their revenue stream¹), introduced MIT-license based zsh and introduced a bash nag screen a few years ago forcing users to switch. Suppressing that message reliably is trickier than you might think².
After so many years of bash, I still stumble over things that zsh does differently: [Wayback/Archive] command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Travis and [Wayback/Archive] zaTricky) is a “feature” with a simple workaround for cURL:
This is a zsh feature that prints a percent-and-newline after a command completes if that command does not already include a newline at the end of its output. If zsh did not do this, you would either not ever notice the fact that the command didn’t print a newline – or you’d see zsh’s command prompt not start on the margin and think it was a bug in zsh.
…
$ curl http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7
Cisco Systems, Inc%
$ curl -w '\n' http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7
Cisco Systems, Inc
…
Since the above example now writes a redirect messages (good bye HTTP, welcome HTTPS), and I very much dislike short command-line parameters, here is version with the long form of the [Wayback/Archive] curl -w or --write-out parameter :
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, bash, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, zsh | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/11
Didn’t know nx had a scriptable RPN command-line calculator dc (for Desk Calculator) which does not seem to need white space characters in the input stream or input file.
It likely is a source for command-injection attacks given the question [Wayback/Archive] unix – How come is this command returning “GET A LIFE!”? – Stack Overflow, so I did a bit of digging and found this great platform:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 