Steve Parker

@unixsteve@social.linux.pizza
81 Followers
74 Following
42 Posts

sudo scientist | devoops | cloud naive

Unix/Linux/Infrastructure geek, author of Shell Scripting Tutorial (http://shellscript.sh) & Book (http://amzn.to/2s1kGN2).

he/him

Personalhttps://steve-parker.org
Shell Tutorialhttps://shellscript.sh
joke_label_1sudo scientist
joke_label_2cloud naive

There is a principle[1] that talking to a "rubber duck" can help in debugging a problem. It is a theory that I subscribe to, and many other IT people do too. The idea is that you talk to the rubber duck and in explaining the problem, it helps you to understand the problem and come to a solution, even if no other expertise is available to you.

But even a rubber duck is no use if you keep putting off the problem, so I have decided I need to up the ante: My rubber duck has been upgraded with a label so that it reminds me that it does need me to address the problem itself!

In this case, it's a Nagios issue for a project called "p4lm" but I am sharing this expansion to the Rubber Duck methodology to the world, in the hope that we can extend Rubber Duck debugging into Rubber Duck Nagging!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Rubber duck debugging - Wikipedia

Renaming the package, and giving it different paths (need a valid "sshd" for valid users plus the honeypot version, and need both packages installed with sensible package names)
Linux distro packaging is interesting, but I now have a Fedora/AWS and Debian/Ubuntu package of openssh which can store the passwords and SSH key fingerprints provided by anybody attempting to connect to a server.
Basically just an update to build the 9-yr-old "longtail" project for modern distros. The packaging was what took the time, I've done plenty of RPM before but as a Debian user, packaging the Ubuntu DEB was the most challenging part. (Why jump through all those hoops to add a *.patch file to the patches directory?!)
Still got a bit of tidying up to do, but I'm happy that I've made a decent start ahead of my MSc CS research project later this year.

Kept the same username, moved to BlueSky, will still check in here as sporadically as I have before!

https://bsky.app/profile/unixsteve.bsky.social

Steve Parker (@unixsteve.bsky.social)

DevOps Engineer. Author of "Shell Scripting: Expert recipes for Linux, Bash and more" and www.shellscript.sh Currently studying MSc. Computer Science with Cyber Security with York Uni

Bluesky Social

I've just realised why Microsoft called their operating system "Windows"

- because it's such a pane!

This took me longer than I would care to admit...
Just an observation that amused me so I made it into a thing
It's not new, but I just saw it again for the first time in a while. #vi #vim
Upgraded my Fedora 39 box to 40 today. Did *not* realise that meant upgrading Postgres which basically meant restoring database from backups.
Fortunately I do have twice-daily backups for this almost-never-changing database. Because without that it could have been a hell of a lot worse!
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Just an observation that amused me so I made it into a thing