The ramblings of a computer geek
Netcat (nc) is a simple, but very useful tool to perform connection tests and scans on your network. Its helpful to quickly check if a port is open (and listening) on a remote machine and that firewall change you made is working as expected. Here i’ll provide some simple examples for you to try. Check … Read more
SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) is a useful command to copy files between systems, we’ll explore a few example scenarios that you’ll commonly use. I’m not going into great detail about all the various arguments and options you can use, these you can find in other articles elsewhere. Instead this is going to be a very … Read more
So you have a folder and within that folder you have a single subfolder (and no other files) at that level, but then some files inside the subfolder. VScode by default will compact path in the GUI. For example I have a folder structure like this: ~\projects\ansible-lab\~\projects\ansible-lab\hosts~\projects\ansible-lab\plays~\projects\ansible-lab\roles The projects folder only contains one folder “ansible-lab” … Read more
Let’s say you have your workstation with PuTTY installed, and you have accessed a remote machine via SSH. If you wanted to get to a service running on that remote machine you’d either need direct port access from your workstation to the remote machine on that port, or you can tunnel a port (or ports) … Read more
To SCP from a remote host, to a local directory, including all files and directories (recursively) you can use the following command: In the above we’re copying all files from the user’s home directory to the (current) local directory. So doing this as a real world example:
Let’s say you have three lines and you multi-select the beginning by holding ALT, then dragging down, so you end up with the cursor blinking across all three lines at once: You then add some something at the beginning of all three lines by typing across multiple lines at once: But now you want to … Read more
A useful visualisation on your Google Sheets is where you perhaps have a column for “Yes” or “No” or “Done” or “Not Started” and when this cell changes value, the whole row changes colour to make it obvious that action/item has been completed. You can do this as follows: Let’s say you have a spreadsheet … Read more
If like me you struggle to read dark blue comments on a black screen when using VIM, you can set a colour scheme in VIM by creating a file with these contents in your home directory. Add the following: There are a number of other colour schemes to suit your tastes.
The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) Protocol is a method used by clients to locate the URL of a configuration file that provides them with configuration needed to determine their browser’s (or system) web proxy configuration (if present or not). The file an be published via DHCP (scope option) or via DNS, in our case we use DNS. … Read more
You can setup Putty to just log everything by adding logging to your Default Settings, that way whenever you connect, you’ll always be logging what the outputs are to your chosen location, e.g. your local machine. Although be aware of any sensitive on-screen information that would also be logged to these files. Your path may … Read more