Applications

Using aliases for SSH

 in Applications  tagged alias / ssh by

An extremely helpful feature of ssh is the ability to define aliases using its configuration files:

  • ~/.ssh/config
  • /etc/ssh/ssh_config

~/.ssh/config contains configuration that is only available to your user and any user can create one for themselves.
/etc/ssh/ssh_config contains configuration that applies to all users of the system and only administrators can modify it.

Note: ~/.ssh/config should only have read and write access rights by its owner only!
Be sure to execute the following after your create it:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config;

Example 1 – Creating an alias for a host name:

Assuming we are too bored to type the full domain of a server, we can define a shorter name as follows:

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net

by having this configuration lines in your ~/.ssh/config file, you can shorten the command ssh bytefreaks.net; to ssh bf;.

Example 2 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username:

In the next example, we create a new alias that not only will automatically set the host name but also the username

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george

by having this configuration lines in your ~/.ssh/config file, you shorten the command ssh [email protected]; to ssh bf;.

Example 3 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username and port:

In the next example, we create a new alias for a specific host name, username and ssh port number

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george
    Port 22300

The above will shorten ssh [email protected] -p 22300 to ssh bf;.

Example 4 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username and identity file:

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george
    IdentityFile /path/to/needed/private/key/id_rsa

The above will shorten ssh [email protected] -i /path/to/needed/private/key/id_rsa; to ssh bf;

For more information on the capabilities of the configuration files, please review the following documentation page as it has a whole lot more of useful information: http://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man5/ssh_config.5

Repeated note: ~/.ssh/config should only have read and write access rights by its owner only!
Be sure to execute the following after your create it:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config;

Send ALT+CTRL+Delete to QEMU virtual machine 1

 in GNU/Linux / Virtualization  tagged alt+ctrl+del / monitor / qemu / sendkey / terminal by

Recently we wanted to start a Windows virtual machine from a physical hard disk using a Fedora w/ GNOME 3 host machine to change the domain password of a user.
To do so, we used QEMU, QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

To perform the password change, we needed to sent the ALT+CTRL+Delete key combination to the virtual machine to access the system screen and then change the user password.
Pressing ALT+CTRL+Delete on the Fedora/GNOME 3 host machine, it popped up a prompt to shut down the host machine instead of sending the key combination to the active window of the VM. Apparently, we could not sent the key combination directly to the VM and had to find a way around it.

Solution:

We pressed ALT+CTRL+2 while the QEMU window was selected/active to switch to the QEMU terminal/monitor.
In the blank screen that appeared, we typed sendkey alt-ctrl-delete and pressed the Enter key.
This action sent to the virtual machine OS the key combination ALT+CTRL+Delete.
Finally, to switch back  to the guest screen we pressed ALT+CTRL+1.

Jenkins: Improve the format of the email 4

 in Applications  tagged jenkins by

Like many people, we use Jenkins to perform several tasks automatically.
Jenkins is an open source automation server, it provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.

One of the features of Jenkins is the option to send an email to the user under certain circumstances, e.g. after a build was complete.
The default layout of those emails is not so pretty, so we did some changes to it.
Note: below we present how to make the changes apply to the whole system, if you do not want to do that, you could apply these changes to individual projects only.

Using an administrative account, click on Manage Jenkins option on the left menu and in the new screen click on Configure System on the right column.
These actions will take you to the configuration page of your Jenkins installation (e.g. http://jenkins:8080/configure).

Scroll down to the category Extended E-mail Notification.

  1. From the drop down menu, change the value of Default Content Type to HTML (text/html).
  2. Update the value of Default Subject to [$BUILD_STATUS] - $PROJECT_NAME - Build # $BUILD_NUMBER ($BUILD_ID). We prefer to have the build status first (like a tag).
  3. In the box named Default Content enter the following block of data: 
    $PROJECT_NAME - Build # $BUILD_NUMBER - $BUILD_STATUS.<br/>
<br/>
Check console <a href="$BUILD_URL">output</a> to view full results.<br/>
If you cannot connect to the build server, check the attached logs.<br/>
<br/>
--<br/>
Following is the last 100 lines of the log.<br/>
<br/>
--LOG-BEGIN--<br/>
<pre style='line-height: 22px; display: block; color: #333; font-family: Monaco,Menlo,Consolas,"Courier New",monospace; padding: 10.5px; margin: 0 0 11px; font-size: 13px; word-break: break-all; word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: #f5f5f5; border: 1px solid #ccc; border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.15); -webkit-border-radius: 4px; -moz-border-radius: 4px; border-radius: 4px;'>
${BUILD_LOG, maxLines=100, escapeHtml=true}
</pre>
--LOG-END--

The email you will receive after a successful execution will be similar to the one below:

Subject: [Successful] - banana - Build # 77 (77)
 Body:

Press the Apply button to save the changes.

You will notice that in the email we mention the following: If you cannot connect to the build server, check the attached logs..
To enable the option to attach the logs, you need to configure your project itself.
Select your project from the main screen and then click on Configure on the left column.

Scroll down to Post-build Actions section.

From the Add post-built action drop down list select Editable Email Notification.

A new block will appear in the page.
Set the value of Attach Build Log drop down to Compress and Attach Build Log and then hit the Apply button.

Back Up Jenkins instance except for workspace and build logs

 in Applications  tagged depth / exclude / find / jenkins / mkdir / rsync by

Our Jenkins setup has a lot of cool features and configuration.
It has ‘project-based security’, it has parametrized projects, multiple source code management blocks per project and fairly extensive tests implemented with several build steps.
Of course, we do not want to lose them, so we make backups often.
The commands we use for the backup are the following.


jenkins_folder="/var/lib/jenkins/";
 backup_folder="$HOME/jenkins/`date +%F`";
 mkdir -p "$backup_folder";
 (cd "$jenkins_folder"/jobs/; find . -mindepth 3 -type d -regex '.*/[0-9]*$' -print) | sed 's|./|jobs/|' | sudo rsync --archive --exclude 'workspace/*' --exclude-from=- "$jenkins_folder" "$backup_folder";

Explanation of commands:

  • In backup_folder="$HOME/jenkins/`date +%F`"; we used the $HOME variable instead of the tilde ~ as this would create a folder in the current directory called ~ instead of creating a new folder called jenkins in the home directory.
  • mkdir -p "$backup_folder"; instructs mkdir to create all parent folders needed to create our destination folder.
  • (cd "$jenkins_folder"/jobs/; find . -mindepth 3 -type d -regex '.*/[0-9]*$' -print) navigates to the directory of jenkins before performing the search, this way the result file names will be relative to the installation location which we need later to pass to rsync.
    Then we search for all folders which their name is numeric and they at least on depth 3. We filter by depth as well to avoid matching folders directly in the jobs folder.
  • sed 's|./|jobs/|' replaces the prefix ./ with jobs/ to match the relative path from where rsync will work from
  • sudo rsync --archive --exclude 'workspace/*' --exclude-from=- "$jenkins_folder" "$backup_folder"; it will copy everything from $jenkins_folder to the folder $backup_folder while excluding the data in workspace and the folders matched from find (the job build folders).
    --exclude-from=- instructs rsync to read from stdin the list of files to exclude.