Tea-Driven Development

A while ago I wrote a tip that showed you how to copy your public SSH key to a remote server to allow you to login without entering a password every time. I’ve since put this into a script that I use, and today I got sick enough of copying that script onto yet another machine that I packaged it up as a gem, so now we can all use it.

It works just like the plain old ’ssh’ command, but this time you’ll never have to enter your password again:

ssh-forever username@yourserver.com

Your key will be generated (if necessary), copied to your server, and you’ll be logged in as normal.

Installation

gem sources --add http://gemcutter.org
gem install ssh-forever

Example:

[matt@bowie ssh-forever (master)]$ ssh-forever mattwynne@mattwynne.net
You do not appear to have a public key. I expected to find one at /Users/matt/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Would you like me to generate one? [Y/n]y
Copying your public key to the remote server. Prepare to enter your password for the last time.
mattwynne@mattwynne.net's password:
Success. From now on you can just use plain old 'ssh'. Logging you in...
Linux broncos 2.6.29-xeon-aufs2.29-ipv6-qos-grsec #1 SMP Thu Jul 9 16:42:58 PDT 2009 x86_64
  _
 | |__ _ _ ___ _ _  __ ___ ___
 | '_ \ '_/ _ \ ' \/ _/ _ (_-<
 |_.__/_| \___/_||_\__\___/__/
 
 Welcome to broncos.dreamhost.com
 
Any malicious and/or unauthorized activity is strictly forbidden.
All activity may be logged by DreamHost Web Hosting.
 
Last login: Sat Aug 15 17:24:17 2009
[broncos]$

Why?

Because I can never remember how to do it by hand. Now I don’t have to, and nor do you.

Like so many posts in this category, this is surely child’s play to you linux aficionados. For those of us mere morals though, this is a very useful little trick, and it shows how you can easily move data from your local workstation to a remote server using SSH.

If you don’t already have a public / private key pair on your local workstation do this:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, try looking for this:

ls ~/.ssh

Did you see anything? You’re looking for a file called id_rsa.pub, I would guess.

Now that you have generated your key, to copy the public key part up to the remote server, do this:

ssh remote-user@remote-server.com “echo ‘cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub‘ >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”

You should now be able to dance around the inner bits of the internet to your heart’s content.

Thanks to Dan Lucraft for the technology behind this post.

On finishing a long contract and project at the BBC a few months ago, I was incredibly touched to be given a brand new Asus EEE PC as a leaving gift by my colleagues.

Although I loved the tiny form factor and take it with me practically everywhere, I was never quite satisfied with the default Xandros Linux and have fidgeted around ever since trying out different options, spending way too much time on the on the excellent eeeuser.com community site, zapping the flash drive with different distros.

Finally this evening I think I found the answer: http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/

Slick, easy to install, great looking, and of course a proper operating system under the hood. Props to the team who put this together, it’s terrific. If you have one of these little beauties yourself, I highly recommend checking it out.

So I just spent a fun morning trying to work out why so many of our unit tests were breaking on my machine with the message:

undefined method `[]' for #<Enumerable:

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Okay, this is another one of those linux newbie posts where I tried to figure out how to do something that’s probably really obvious to all you seasoned hackers out there.

Anyway here I go clogging up the internet with a post that somebody, somewhere will hopefully find useful.

Are you that person? Well… have you ever used the shell command curl to fetch a web page? It’s cool, isn’t it, but you do end up with a splurge of ugly HTML tags in your terminal shell:

Eugh!

So… how about we parse that HTML into something human-readable?

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So the wife has been writing her mandatory university course diary as a wordpress blog, but now she needs to hand it in.

> Can you put it on a CD for me? She asks.

Unix to the rescue!

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If you’ve ever tried to copy the source files from a Visual Studio 2005 ASP.NET solution, especially if you’re using TFS and Resharper, you’ll have probably noticed all great steaming heaps of fluff and nonsense these tools leave all over your hard drive. Not to mention all the built assemblies lurking in your bin/Debug folders.

If you have a unix/linux/apple machine handy, or have at least had the sense to instal cygwin or coLinux on your quaint old PC, then give this a rumble.

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