Source Guru

I do love a bit of Geek Art – and I loved what one of our LUGgers (whose name escapes me!) bought with them tonight’s LUG Meeting

A great addition to any condiment cupboard!

With his announcement of the N-imal for Ubuntu 11.04 – I’m being driven slightly insane, as I now now have this song stuck in my head (and probably will do for weeks to come!)

I’ve recently gotten a lot of flack from a couple of people for an innocent comment I made about logging into a machine as root.
I’d like to think of myself as pretty savvy when it comes to security, and as far as I’m concerned, the reasons for not logging in as root are:-

• Password could theoretically be sniffed
• Unsecure connection could theoretically be hijacked
• You don’t get an audit trail like you would with su or sudo
• Password could be brute forced
• You could easily run a command unintentionally which causes damage to your system

Ok, so we have the reasons not to – and they’re good reasons. This is why, generally, I don’t login to my boxes as root. However, the box in concern mitigates the above in the following ways

• We only ever connect via SSH
• Access to root is only allowable through SSH keys
• Due to the nature of the server (local file storage) we don’t need an audit trail
• Password login is only ever allowed from a secure TTY (aka the box itself)
• The only reason we ever need to login to this machine is to perform maintenance which requires root access

Is there any good reason that I shouldn’t be logging in as root in the above circumstances?

A mini-meme that has been spreading round the IT team at my workplace is “IOGraph” – a small Java program that tracks and draws the status of your mouse over a period of time. Lines are movement, circles are places where the mouse has stopped… The bigger the circle, the longer it was there. I have 2 monitors, which explains the weird dimensions!

For those of you who don’t know, I occasionally write for Linux Format. As I’ve got an article coming out in the next issue (available on April 29th), I thought I’d have a check to see if the PDF’s are available in the subscribers area yet.

Unfortunately, they’re not, however, I did notice that my first article for Linux Format has now been released to the general public.

If you head on over to Issue 121, you’ll find my tutorial “Security: Protect your server” has a “Click here to read!” link underneath it.

One of my other articles for them, “Super Snooper”, has also found it’s way onto TuxRadar, and, while it doesn’t have the pretty artwork (or a mugshot, or any mention of me, it seems!) that the magazine does, it’s still well presented on the site!

Let me know in the comments if you’ve any feedback to either of them!

Along the same lines, I’m thinking that I want to write a book (mainly so that I’ll eventually come first in Google, rather than what used to be second and now for some reason seems 7th ). But what should I write about? I’ve a few thoughts, and the one that I feel like I want to write the most is about “becoming a Google Ninja” (using Analytics, Website Optimiser, etc etc to their full potential) – but – I don’t know – would people be interested in buying that?

If you can’t see the video above, click here

Transforming data is hard. When I joined my current company, there were stupendous amounts of Perl/PHP/Bash/<insert random programming language here> scripts that would run on a cron job and do magic things to our data. They’d create reports, they’d tell the purchasers when we were running out of stock, they’d synchronise data between our Frontend and backend databases, they’d collect, they’d collate, they’d do everything and anything.

Except, with all these scripts, in all these random languages, written by a multitude of previous developers (at different skill levels), they weren’t particularly maintainable (and sometimes, they weren’t particularly readable or understandable either – imagine a 6000 line perl script that pretty much ran different permutations of the same data over and over again)

Enter Pentaho, and specifically it’s “Kettle” project. (since renamed “Pentaho Data Integration”), a tool that lets you manipulate your data in pretty much any way you can imagine, in the simplest and easiest way imaginable.

That’s right, it’s a GUI for data manipulation.

I know a lot of you are probably sceptical right now.  The first time I ever saw this was when a previous boss of mine put it forward as a potential solution for one of our problems (getting our orders from the front end database down to the office/warehouse).  I saw it, and I thought “GUI? Nah, that’s not how real programmers do things!”, so after the development team put forward another proposal to solve this, and it got accepted, I thought I’d never see the thing again.

That was until my current boss started playing with it, trying to work out what it was doing so that he could get these evil GUI based scripts into something manageable, like nice, pretty code.  Thing s, when my boss plays with things that he doesn’t know about, he tends to read up, research, and, 9 times out of 10, change his mind.

We wiped the previous server (it was rather noisy! We’re glad it’s no longer switched on!) and set up a new server to house our “BI platform”.  Starting off with a few scripts, my boss learnt to love this tool, and then, as I’m his “2nd in command” (aka general lackey) – started making me learn how to use it.

Again, I was sceptical, I didn’t want to learn, and I put up resistance, but my boss was going away for nearly a month, and by this time, a few of our key business processes relied on Kettle, so, grudgingly, I sat down, and started to learn.

You may be wondering now, why I started off this story talking about all those magical and wonderful scripts that no one seemed to know the inner workings of.  These scripts, as I’ve already mentioned were unwieldy, and at times, god-damned awful.  The plan was to move them to the BI system (as my boss had been doing already).

I like to think of Kettle as a bridge between the process-flow diagram, and the code.  I started converting these scripts, and I was astonished by the fact that most of the conversions I was doing was converting a long perl script into 3 or 4 “Integration steps”

I’m totally besotted with this program now.  Any time I have to do data manipulation, I turn to it.  I can’t describe how (once you’ve got used to it’s quirks) easy it is to use, how simple it is, and how much it just makes sense. Best of all, most of those evil scripts are gone now, and replaced with “pretty” diagrams that do the work for you.

If you have to play with large data sets on a regular basis, I urge you to try it out.  You can buy me a beer for reccommending it next time you see me at $conference.

Ok, so recently, Richard Johnson and Michael Lustfield blogged about tab completion for SSH hosts.

I’m an avid user of zsh, and have my own way of doing this (liberally stolen from Daniel Silverstone).

Now, this requires a little setup to start with, as some Linux Distributions have a habit of creating “hashed” known_hosts files.  So, what I’ve done, is before I ever SSH into a host, I add the following line to my ~/.ssh/config

HashKnownHosts no

From here, I can then add the following line to my ~/.zshrc

zstyle -e ':completion::*:*:*:hosts' hosts 'reply=(${=${${(f)"$(cat {/etc/ssh_,~/.ssh/known_}hosts(|2)(N) /dev/null)"}%%[# ]*}//,/ })'

Now, when I try and ssh into a host, I can use tab completion to complete any host I’ve previously ssh’d into and any new hosts I ssh into get automatically added to the list

Today, an episode of “The Gadget Show” aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their “wall of fame”.

I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown.

Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac – Yes, you mention windows

But both PC’s and Mac’s have the ability to run a little thing called “Linux”

Linux is the base of an operating system that’s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to.

It’s an Operating system that’s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use – for FREE!!!!

A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it’s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer.  You don’t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it.

Compare the above to a Mac.  With a mac, you’re limited to the hardware you can use, you’re limited in the functionality, etc etc.  Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price.  Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money.

Ok, Linux does have it’s flaws.  Some hardware isn’t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you’ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won’t work with it.  But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software.

Enter the package Manager.  Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications,  and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot)

Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it’s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it’s not a target for Viruses.  Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
“are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin?”), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find.

Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there.  While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it’s perfectly placed.  This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)

–
Regards,
Martin Meredith

Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer – http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer – http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. – http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

• Christmas Songs on the Radio
• 64-bit Flash Support (edit: or lack thereof)
• Blog posts discouraging people from contributing to Debian