Category Archives: Sys Admin

Material related to systems administration.

Installing .NET on Debian 9

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After installing Visual Studio Code I followed the instructions from .NET Tutorial – Hello World in 10 minutes, basically:

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo mv microsoft.asc.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/9/prod.list
sudo mv prod.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list

Then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-2.1

Then for example to create a new console project:

dotnet new console -o myApp
cd myApp

I ended up reading MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS for the MICROSOFT .NET LIBRARY which included this doozy:

The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft.

Ah, Microsoft. You haven’t changed.

I found some notes about how to disable telemetry:

Telemetry
———
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to help us improve your experience. The data is anonymous and doesn’t include command-line arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community. You can opt-out of telemetry by setting the DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to ‘1’ or ‘true’ using your favorite shell.

Read more about .NET Core CLI Tools telemetry: https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry

I have added the opt-out environment variable via jj5-bin.

Create a desktop alias for an SMB mount on Mac OS X

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So to create an alias to an SMB share on your Mac desktop:

First use Finder -> Go -> Connect to Server…

Enter a location such as: smb://server/share

Then use Finder -> Preferences… -> Show: Connected servers

The SMB mount should now be visible on the desktop. Right-click the share on the desktop and choose ‘Make Alias’. Then take connected servers out of your Finder preferences and rename the desktop alias probably as the name of the share.

Debugging JINJA in Salt Stack

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So I was trying to figure out how to report the template source file within the template itself and I found myself wanting to know what was available in the JINJA globals for a Salt Stack JINJA template.

Turns out you use the show_full_context() function, like this:

Context is: {{ show_full_context() }}

You can parse the output to see what top-level items are available. In my case I found the ‘source’ setting for the JINJA template in use.

Hot tip: if you’re using Vim to inspect the show_full_context() output, try using ‘%’ or ‘]}’ to move between matching braces.

Bonus: while I was learning about reporting the JINJA context I discovered that you can call Salt functions from JINJA templates, like this:

# The following two function calls are equivalent.
{{ salt['cmd.run']('whoami') }}
{{ salt.cmd.run('whoami') }}

If Apache2 won’t serve your JavaScript file try…

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I had an issue with Apache2 improperly serving a JavaScript file which I seem to have fixed by making sure the file was terminated with a new-line character… this was really hard to diagnose and resolve! The behaviour in Firefox was that the file just didn’t finish to download, whereas the Apache2 logs indicated a 200 result… I think it may have had something to do with automatic compression, which is a dark art that I do not understand (mumbles something about mod deflate…).

rsync errors

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I was having an issue with my rsync command:

time rsync --progress --verbose --acls --xattrs --exclude="/lib/mysql/ibdata1" --exclude="*.tmp" --stats --human-readable --recursive --del --force --times --links --hard-links --executability --numeric-ids --owner --group --perms --sparse --compress-level=6 diligence-test:/usr/ /data/temp/2017-11-15-163925/usr/

getting stuck during “receiving incremental file list” then giving up with:

Timeout, server diligence-test not responding.
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (16384 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(235) [receiver=3.1.2]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (32569 bytes received so far) [generator]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(235) [generator=3.1.2]
Command exited with non-zero status 255

I could see the server-side process hang in select() with:

root@diligence-test:/home/jj5# ps aux | grep rsync
root      5421  0.0  0.1  15636  2660 ?        Ss   18:55   0:00 rsync --server --sender -vlHogtpAXrSe.iLsfxC --numeric-ids . /usr/

root@diligence-test:/home/jj5# strace -p 5421
strace: Process 5421 attached
select(1, [0], [], [0], {42, 979828})   = 0 (Timeout)

Anyway I figured out how to dodge the problem by nominating –delete-before instead of –del, e.g.:

time rsync --progress --verbose --acls --xattrs --exclude="/lib/mysql/ibdata1" --exclude="*.tmp" --stats --human-readable --recursive --delete-before --force --times --links --hard-links --executability --numeric-ids --owner --group --perms --sparse --compress-level=6 diligence-test:/usr/ /data/temp/2017-11-15-163925/usr/