Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

sr.ht (“sir hat”) – open source software suite for managing your software development projects

sr.ht – pronounced “sir hat” – is a new competitor in the world of GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab.  Much like all of these, you can either self-hosted it or use a managed service.  It might not yet be as fancy, polished, and cool (I think they need a better name and the domain) as its competitors, but there are a couple of reasons that might make a difference when making a choice:

  1. Open Source.  From a quick look, sr.ht is distributed under the GNU Afero GPL.
  2. Modular.  The suite consists of the following components:
    1. git – git repository hosting service
    2. build – continuous integration service
    3. lists – mailing lists service
    4. todo – ticketing system / bug tracker
    5. dispatch – task dispatcher and integration service
    6. man – markdown and git-based wiki service
    7. meta – account management service

 

CurlMail – easy way to send emails with cUrl

I am a big fan of small and simple yet practically interesting ideas, like this one.  CurlMail is a super easy API service that allows one to send emails from the command line, using nothing but curl, or a similar HTTP client.

It’d be extra cool if it there was a GitHub link to it too.  But even if it’s not openly available, one could use the service for emails which are not sensitive and implement something similar from scratch in a few minutes for private use.

Archiving web sites

LWN runs an interesting article, covering different ways of archiving a website.  It sounds trivial, but it’s not.  Even the simplest of ways – wget – will probably take you a few dozen attempts to figure out the following:

$ wget --mirror --execute robots=off --no-verbose --convert-links \
       --backup-converted --page-requisites --adjust-extension \
       --base=./ --directory-prefix=./ --span-hosts \
       --domains=www.example.com,example.com http://www.example.com/

There a few other interesting tools (like pywb) mentioned.

Using aws-cli –query Option To Simplify Output

Eric Hammond shares a super-handy tip for those of us who work with Amazon AWS via the command line:

I just learned about a recent addition to aws-cli: The --query option lets you specify what parts of the response data structure you want output.

Instead of wading through pages of JSON output, you can select a few specific values and output them as JSON, table, or simple text. The new --query option is far easier to use than jq, grep+cut, or Perl, my other fallback tools for parsing the output.

Read the rest of his blog post for a few examples of how to use it.