I’ve updated my old notes on managing a certificate authority and turned my current usage into a GitLab project. If you are looking at using TLS certificates on a private network, this is a good starting point to learn more about the process and best practices.
Category Archives: Unix
Fonts
I uploaded a small package of my preferred monospaced console fonts here.
Using ssh-agent on WSL: Take Two
I’ve updated my instructions for using ssh-agent with Windows Subsystem for Linux, as originally described in this post. From here on, I’ll be maintaining this on GitLab and any changes or improvements can be found there.
Disable terminal bell in WSL
Windows Subsystem for Linux is pretty nifty, but Windows has a very rudimentary terminal interface compared to most modern Unix implementations; though I do have high hopes for the new Windows Terminal project. One particularly annoying issue is that there is no way to directly disable sound, this can be a particularly annoying issue when using tab completion or backspace.
The easiest solution to this lack of functionality is to disable the bell in the Linux shell by modifying the readline(3) configuration in /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc.
# do not bell on tab-completion set bell-style none
Go by Example
I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.
Password Best Practices
I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.
This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.
Using ssh-agent with Windows Subsystem for Linux
Update: I’ve since revised these instructions in this post.
This is fairly basic, but you never know what might be useful to somebody!
Due to the fact that WSL doesn’t bootstrap itself with a normal init/systemd process it can be a bit frustrating to work with SSH keys.
Thankfully the ssh-agent command is designed to set up an environment for key management without much hassle. The trivial method of doing this is to insert the following command into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile script:
# start ssh-agent eval `ssh-agent`
This will initialize a socket to manage your keys and you can then use the ssh-add command as you would on a normal Linux system.
For completeness, stick the following in your ~/.bash_logout script:
# unset ssh-agent ssh-agent -k
This will remove the socket and unset the environment so that your keys don’t remain loaded after you close your WSL session using exit or CTRL-D.
Linux
Using Certbot with Route 53 in Manual Mode
I’ve just written a quick and dirty guide on how to use Certbot on Debian 9 with Route 53. This is useful if you are trying to manage wildcard certificates and don’t want to, or can’t, screw around with managing the current state of the Route 53 plugin on Debian 9.
Without further ado: quay:wiki – Let’s Encrypt Usage Notes
Unix is Beautiful
Yes it is.