RedirectToken for Laravel
Posted: 2019-01-17 17:01:47 by Alasdair Keyes
A while back I wrote a library to easily allow creation of redirect URLs on the fly called redirecttoken https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/redirecttoken/.
It was a cleaner implementation of a setup I used on this site to see what links visotors are clicking.
After I migrated my site from Slim to Laravel about 2 months ago, I created a Laravel Service Provider to easily port this functionality into my new site. This has also just been released at https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/redirecttoken-laravel/.
A basic config is configurable through the .env file so no need for any additional coding to add it to your Laravel install.
Both packages are on Packagist and can be installed using composer.
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Gitlab Private vs. Public Heatmaps
Posted: 2019-01-10 15:51:18 by Alasdair Keyes
My Gitlab public vs private heatmaps. It looks rather pitiful but I promise, I have been coding!
** Private Heatmap **
** Public Heatmap **
I've got a few more OS projects in the pipeline so this should look a bit healthier
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Fun Linux Videos
Posted: 2018-11-25 23:31:45 by Alasdair Keyes
I'm not quite sure how (I think it was probably via Hacker News) but I came across the Youtube channel of Bryan Lunduke. https://www.youtube.com/user/BryanLunduke/
I don't really have any idea who he is, but he apparently gives a lot of talks at Linux North West conferences in the US. They're mainly a lighthearted and humourous look at Linux/Operating Systems and software in general. This includes what appears to be a decade long series of talks entitled "Linux Sucks".
As this weekend was fairly slow I got through a few of his videos, some of which I've listed below. Well worth checking out.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVHcdgrqbHE - Linux Sucks Forever
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjDQtNYxtbU - The complete history of Linux (abridged)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e6BKJPnb5o - programmers_are_evil()
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk - They're watching you
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPbAXKMCDkY - Linux is freaking weird
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The Future Is Bright
Posted: 2018-10-22 15:57:09 by Alasdair Keyes
Just what every right-minded developer has wanted. Perl in the browser!
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Advertising and Malware block list
Posted: 2018-09-28 08:59:15 by Alasdair Keyes
Via a Hacker News article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159 I came across a link to this git repo https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts .
It's a curated list of known advertising and malware hostnames that can be added to your system hosts file to protect your system from shady sites accessed by your browser as part of included javascript/tracking pixels etc. As long as your browser still uses your system resolver instead of being set to DNS over HTTPS it should provide a good degree of security for your browsing.
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Mojolicious v8 release
Posted: 2018-09-19 11:14:22 by Alasdair Keyes
Perl 5 is often seen as a dated, if not dead language, consigned to being hacked together by a sysad to keep some legacy platform from the 90s ticking over.
Sadly that part is true, but there is still life in the old dog yet, helped by the recent release of version 8 of the Mojolicious framework.
If you've not played with Perl but you have an interest, Mojolicious is a good entry point and I'd recommend it for any new projects. It's built in support for web-sockets makes it very suitable for modern back-end platforms.
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Github and Gitlab user public keys
Posted: 2018-09-02 11:18:15 by Alasdair Keyes
During installation of Ubuntu Server 18.04 today I noticed that the user creation section had an option for configuring SSH public keys from Github, this is a very useful feature but I was intrigued as to how these were exposed. It turns out that you can use the following URLs to get the keys for a given user for Github and Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/<username>.keys and https://github.com/<username>.keys
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Nagios NRPE wireguard check
Posted: 2018-08-30 16:41:36 by Alasdair Keyes
After playing around with Wireguard today (of which I'll no doubt do a more fully featured post). I wrote a quite Nagios NRPE check. There's not much to check with Wireguard, but it queries the wg show output for the number of interfaces and peers. Full arguments are in the README. Let me know if you have any suggestions for future behaviour.
https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/nagios-plugin-check_wireguard
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akeyes.co.uk - Now on HTTP/2
Posted: 2018-08-29 14:48:04 by Alasdair Keyes
Since HTTP/2 was implemented in NGINX, I've wanted to use it on my sites. Unfortunately due to one of my VPS providers not providing a Debian 9 image, I was stuck on Debian 8 with an NGINX version that didn't support it.
Now that I've upgraded all my machines to Debian 9 I have finally updated my sites to make use of HTTP2. Combined with the upgrade to PHP7.x at the same time it should allow some performance increase for my sites.
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LXC config error after update
Posted: 2018-07-19 21:46:48 by Alasdair Keyes
At some point in the recent past Linux Mint 18.3/Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial had updated lxc containers to a more recent version and when running lxc-ls I was greeted with the following error for all of my containers.
# lxc-ls
Failed to load config for mydevcontainer1
Failed to load config for mydevcontainer2
Failed to load config for mydevcontainer3
Failed to load config for mydevcontainer4
It appears support for an older container config version has been discontinued and it was unable to read the old versions, a bit of Googling found the answer was to use lxc-update-config helper utility.
# lxc-update-config -c /var/lib/lxc/mydevcontainer/config
# lxc-start -n mydevcontainer
#
For those with a lot of containers, the following one liner will resolve them all for you in one fell swoop
lxc-ls 2>&1 | grep "Failed to load config for" | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -i lxc-update-config -c /var/lib/lxc/'{}'/config
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