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Create Linux Debian based small personal home Postfix Mail Server with RainLoop Webmail interface in less than 2 hours time

Saturday, October 5th, 2019

Why run an Own Home or Dedicated Own server nowadays is a must in the Digital Age ?

Having own home based email server should be the target (most basic step) of any person that respects his Email privacy as most of the Public accessible Email accounts such as Yahoo Mail! and Gmail are collecting personal flavour info and flavour data.

Thus to mitigate the possible Personal Security problems of using any of the multiple Public Email services it is rather easy nowdays to configure quickly a own based home Email server, Hire Cheap VPS for Own Email Service or even hire a Dedicated server – the cheapeast dedis nowadays are starting from 40 / 50 EUROs per server.

To protect your Email privacy to maximum and keep your email data owned by you hence in this small article, I'll explain how to setup a Postfix based Simple own hosted Email server in about 2 hours of time, but before proceeding with the actual install instructions, I'll say a bit more on the downsides of using public mail gmail.com / yahoo.com / yandex.ru etc.

– The Downsides of using Public free hosted email address such as Google / Yahoo / Yandex / Mail.com etc.

If you happen to have @gmail.com account then you're more or less surveilled by automated scripts software that prepares your virtual dossier – those of us who lived in the Communism of USSR, knew that each of us had a good personal record kept in policy no matter of his function in society, now the situation is no different besides the fact that your Corporate owned data is often sold to National Governments could leak out of its owner and a lot of very personal data could end up in the hands of some malicious blackmailers or spammers, that could have a very complete records of your interest, age, profession, marrital status, position in society, music preference, daily habits, something definitely most people want to avoid.

– Why using Android Phone with Gmail is terrible for your privacy / myaccount.google.com and what Google knows about you

To get further idea about the great expand of Surveillance, if you're an Android Mobile Phone User like me I recommend you login with your Android Email account to https://myaccount.google.com and find out what Google knows about you or better said what from what it knew is willing to show you.
Android OS phones collect a lot of data connected to your Mail use if you stay logged in in Browser (because you forgot to logout and left the new tab opened) as well as track you about the overall Google Search Engine made searches or Youtube watched and preferred genre videos – hence know about overall activity on the Net. And even worse perhaps there is much more details that are automatically shared to Google as you're continuously logged in to Android Google Play …

To illustrate what I mean in terms of How much we're surveilled nowadays, in one of my Gmail accounts I've been almost stunned seeing that, some Google Data Analytics scripts based on the Android Synchronized pictures has created a full featured nice funny Music video of "my life", showing me pictures of my marriage ceremonly, places, where I visit such as some Monasteries, close friends and a tons of very private data that in normal circumstances, they should never know about.

Earlier I've blogged how to Install and Configure a Postfix server with Dovecot and MySQL with a configuration setup that worked on Debian 7 and prior Debian servers which used to be among the only setups that can keep mail accounts inside the database that worked on the net and for more professional Email server to be serving a small / midsized company multiple email boxes perhaps it is still a good one to follow, however as above suggested initial config is a bit overcomplicated (and maybe outdated) for Linux novice users / sysadmins and for own small home servers with only few Mail accounts it might be not needed at all.
I've decided to write how to setup much more quickly and easily Working Internet Mail server with MailBoxes directly owned by each of the UNIX created local accounts.

1. Install prerequired packages for Email setup and set hostname

Update Debian Linux distribution to the latest:

apt-get –yes update && apt-get –yes upgrade

apt-get install curl net-tools bash-completion wget lsof nano mailutils bsdmailx

In this article I assume you already have your own Linux server.

To make the hosts file ber read before any local running DNS server in case if you're running bind or any other local caching DNS server add following lines to /etc/host.conf

vim /etc/host.conf
order hosts,bind
multi on

If you already haven't configured the machine hostname on Linux OS install time, next step is to set the machine hostname to the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) that will be used by mail server.

hostnamectl set-hostname mail.your-mail-domain.com

If you don't plan to regularly change the IP address of Mail server It is a good idea to add the IP -> Domain relation to /etc/hosts doing so should not waste DNS cycles to resolve the hostname but every time the hostname will be locally taken from /etc/hosts.

echo "86.78.10.1 your-mail-domain.com mail.your-mail-domain.com" >> /etc/hosts

getent ahosts mail.your-mail-domain.com
86.78.10.1    STREAM mail.your-mail-domain.com
86.78.10.1    DGRAM
86.78.10.1    RAW

Also check whether mail.your-mail-domain.com is pingable

ping mail.your-mail-domain.com

You should get a properly delivered ping packets with no losses.

2. Install Postfix Mail Server Debian package

Debian Postfix package provides a MTA (Message Transfer Agent). MTA is a pr

apt-get install –yes postfix

Next a ncurses interface will prompt you the usual Postfix type configuration where we have to choose Internet Site and type in the mail name your-mail-domain.com (note that here you have to type the domain without the mail. part) .

3. Setup Postfix Mail server configuration main.cf

Before starting make backup of main.cf

cp -rpf /etc/postfix/main.cf{,.backup}

vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

# See /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.dist for a commented, more complete version

smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP
biff = no
# appending .domain is the MUA's job.
append_dot_mydomain = no
readme_directory = no

# See http://www.postfix.org/COMPATIBILITY_README.html — default to 2 on
# fresh installs.
compatibility_level = 2

# TLS parameters
smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
smtpd_use_tls=yes
smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache
smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache

# See /usr/share/doc/postfix/TLS_README.gz in the postfix-doc package for
# information on enabling SSL in the smtp client.

smtpd_relay_restrictions = permit_mynetworks permit_sasl_authenticated defer_unauth_destination
myhostname = mail.your-mail-domain.com

mydomain = your-mail-domain.com

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases

#myorigin = /etc/mailname
myorigin = $mydomain

mydestination = $myhostname, $mydomain, localhost.$mydomain, localhost
relayhost =
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8, 192.168.1.0/24 86.78.10.0/24
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all
#inet_protocols = all
inet_protocols = ipv4

home_mailbox = Maildir/

# SMTP-Auth settings
smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtpd_sasl_local_domain = $myhostname
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,permit_auth_destination,permit_sasl_authenticated,reject

Replace the myhostname, mydomain and mynetworks variables to match your own configurations.

If for example your Mail Host IP is 86.78.10.1 then to add only this IP to mynetworks 86.78.10.1/32, if you have a range of IPs such as a 254 IP's range set the proper mask 86.78.10.1/24 etc.

Next you better test the configuration to make sure you haven't syntax errors with:

postconf -n

If no syntax errors found the command should dump main.cf postfix set variables.

Once config is fine to load it and test the status of postfix run:

systemctl restart postfix
systemctl status postfix

systemctl-postfix-status-on-debian-linux-screenshot

Then lets check the listener and try out telnet connect.

netstat -tulpan|grep -i 25
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 17715/master

telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.your-mail-domain.com ESMTP

4. Testing email sent is working on Postfix Mail Server

First lets test postfix is able to deliver to local email addresses by sending mail to mail root user mailbox

echo "This is a test mail body"| mail -s "Simple test mail" root

Everything should be fine and mail should be the last delivered to root MailBox to view it:

cat /root/Maildir/new/$(ls -1 /root/Maildir/new/|tail -1)
Return-Path: <root@localhost>
X-Original-To: root@localhost
Delivered-To: root@localhost
Received: by mx.adzone.pro (Postfix, from userid 0)
id 9C4FA7E1952; Thu, 3 Oct 2019 22:19:59 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Simple test mail
To: <root@localhost>
X-Mailer: mail (GNU Mailutils 3.5)
Message-Id: <20191003191959.9C4FA7E1952@mail.your-mail-domain.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 22:19:59 +0300 (EEST)
From: root <root@localhost>

This is a test mail body

by default mail command will try to read email content from /var/mail/root file which will be empty file, because Postfix main.cf home_mailbox = Maildir/ emails served by MTA will be delivered to /$USER/Maildir/ seperated in 3 directories (cur – current, mail ends here once red, new – new incoming mail, tmp – temporary directory used by postfix delivery programs /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/master and qmgr.

# ls -al /$USER/Maildir
total 20
drwx—— 5 root root 4096 Sep 30 20:26 .
drwx—— 9 root root 4096 Oct 3 22:37 ..
drwx—— 2 root root 4096 Sep 30 20:26 cur
drwx—— 2 root root 4096 Oct 3 22:19 new
drwx—— 2 root root 4096 Oct 3 22:19 tmp

Hence to set for mail command to read its mails from /$USER/Maildir you need to add:

export MAIL=$HOME/Maildir

to end of ~/.bashrc red for user after very user login.

echo 'export MAIL=$HOME/Maildir' >> /root/.bashrc

or if you want to make the mail command to read from /$USER/Maildir system wide (e.g. for all users).

You can add a simple script mailenv.sh to /etc/profile.d/

echo 'export MAIL=$HOME/Maildir' ' >> /etc/profile.d/mailenv.sh

If mail is send successfully you should also get an empty mail queue:

# mailq
Mail queue is empty

To get further info on how email got delivered its delivery status:

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

Once we're sure everything is fine with mail delivery, next step is to enable the Server to be accessed via IMAP2 protocol in plain text or crypted connected via Dovecot.

5. Install and configure Dovecot IMAP daemon

Dovecot is server binded daemon, responsible to deliver messages to local recipients mailboxes in IMAP protocol. IMAP protocol runs by default on port 143 and port 993 (SSL) – used for secure communication between the client side and the server. IMAP (Internet Message Acess Protocol) is used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection.
IMAP was designed with the goal of permitting complete management of an email box by multiple email clients, therefore clients generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them.

The IMAP protocol also uses synchronization in order to assure that a copy of each message is saved on the server and allows users to create multiple directories on the server and move mails to this directories in order to sort the e-mails.

POP3 proto (listening on port 110) which is older in time, differs from IMAP as protocol won’t allow users to create multiple directories on the server to sort your mail. You only have the inbox folder to manage mail.
But enought talk, lets kick in and install dovecot.

apt install –yes dovecot-core dovecot-imapd
…

Once installed to make dovecot listen on 143 and 993 on all network interfaces edit /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf find commented line #listen = *, :: and uncomment it

vim /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
#listen = *, ::
listen = *, ::
….

Next edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf to disable obligatory SSL / TSL authentication for connecting client programs

disable_plaintext_auth and auth_mechanisms vars should look like so

disable_plaintext_auth = no
auth_mechanisms = plain login

Then, change the default mail store format from Mbox to Maildir in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf comment mail_location set directive and change it to mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

vim /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
…

## mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

…

Finally edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

Search for smtp-auth block of code and change to look as following:

# Postfix smtp-auth
unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
mode = 0666
user = postfix
group = postfix
}

6. Restart dovecot and test if configuration works as expected

systemctl restart dovecot.service
systemctl status dovecot.service

netstat -tlpn

7. Create new local email user and test mail delivery and IMAP dovecot connectivity

Now as postfix and dovecot are running fine to have a functional email to test SMTP delivery, we need create a new working email address, that means a simple local UNIX account with adduser / useradd *nix commands as usual.

adduser support

telnet localhost 25

The commands sent after connection with Enters at the end of each line and delay of 1/2 secs are as so:

EHLO localhost

MAIL FROM: root

RCPT TO: support

DATA

Subject: Sample Subject

MAIL BODY

.

The last email in /home/support/Maildir/new/ should be the one we just sent.

cat /home/support/Maildir/new/$(ls -1 /home/support/Maildir/new/|tail -1)
Return-Path: <root@your-mail-domain.com>
X-Original-To: support
Delivered-To: support@your-mail-domain.com
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by mx.adzone.pro (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB5727E1117
for <support>; Fri, 4 Oct 2019 11:50:24 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Sample Subject
Message-Id: <20191004085038.CB5727E1117@mail.your-mail-domain.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 11:50:24 +0300 (EEST)
From: root@your-mail-domain.com

MAIL BODY
This is a test email

As you see mail delivered as expected, next step is to check we can properly login to IMAP server provided by dovecot.
Thunderbird / Outlook Express / Sylpheed and rest of IMAP protocol supporting clients could be emulated also with a simple netcat / telnet connection and few commands, below is how:

nc localhost 143
x1 LOGIN support user_password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

netcat-connect-and-talk-to-imap-protocol-howto-screenshot-debian-linux

8. Install and Configure RainLoop (PHP) WebMail

RainLoop is Simple, Modern and Fast Web-Based Email client, that supports IMAP over it can communicate to just tested Dovecot IMAP. The pros of RainLoop are the modest system requirements (no database backend required) and the mega simple installation and update.

RainLoop is written in PHP and uses Apache Webserver to serve content, as well has a dependency on few php modules, hence you have to install below .deb packs.

apt install –yes apache2 php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-curl php7.0-xml

Once above is installed and HTTP server is running on the backend the most simple way to install is to use the default Apache configured DocumentRoot directory which is /var/www/html to make the RainLoop a default opening Platform for the WebServer delete the default page /var/www/html/index.html, change directory to it and install via the PHP installer, e.g.

rm -f /var/www/html/index.html
cd /var/www/html
curl -sL https://repository.rainloop.net/installer.php | php

rainloop-installer-on-debian-linux-shot

Once RainLoop Webmail Installer is completed to login to Admin use the Host or IP address URL in browser, where it is installed for example:

http://192.168.0.102/?admin

However it is much better to set the webmail to be living on a seperate domain VirtualHost URL address , i. e. (depending on the serving backend Webserver Apache / Nginx etc.) – you can use mail.your-mail-domain.com

Default Rainloop user and pass to login is:

User: admin
Password: 12345

N.B. Please do not forget to change the default password to something more secure right after logging to prevent some malicious users to break in.

rainloop-php-easy-webmail-linux-user-login-screen

rainloop-php-webmail-client-linux-admin-panel-screenshot

rainloop-php-webmaill-linux-installable-packages-screenshot

Here is also how Rainloop normal email Send / Receive interface looks like (simplistic and intuitive)

rainmail-mailing-interface-gnu-linux-screenshot

If you want to redirect all Email for a certain user lets say support to another local existing mail address lets say to marketing

echo "support: marketing" >> /etc/aliases
newaliases

The default alias binding in /etc/aliases is for postmaster to deliver all received mails to root mailbox, once added the new alias the newaliases command is used initializes ealias database.

Here is how /etc/aliases looks after above new alias is added

cat /etc/aliases
# See man 5 aliases for format
postmaster: root
support: marketing

What is left is to configure properly is the Domain name DNS records if you will be using an external VirtualHost subdomain that is to be done from your domain registrer (Godaddy, Domain.Com, NameCheap etc.).

We're done with our setup and you can now happily use your Webmail or favourite IMAP client to send / receive mails to recipients. Note that because mail accounts email is to be kept locally on the server as a plain text files it is crucial to secure at max SSH access to the server or even better disable /bin/sh login with usermod command for all used Email addresses.

Here is how to disable interactive SSH / SFTP login to the support local existing UNIX account.

usermod -s /bin/false support

To check the change you can use finger command (assuming you have it installed on the system if not install it with apt install finger)

finger support
Login: support Name: Support
Directory: /home/support Shell: /bin/false
Never logged in.
No mail.
No Plan.

That's all folks, our goal to have an independent (self-owned) Email server from scratch to better Email account privacy is fulfilled.
Now you can be at peace that your email correspondence with friends / relatives / customers will be at your hands only and you and only you will have a sorted view of your Mail stored passwords and personal data over the years.

Enjoy ! 🙂

Tags: about, access, Account, addresses, Android Google Play, configured, Connected, connectivity, Create Linux Debian, email addresses, information, logout, Restart, running, scripts, small article, support, tmp, Update Debian Linux, version
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Postfix | No Comments »

Fix KDE Plasma fails to load: “All shell packages missing. This is an installation issue, please contact your distribution” in Kubuntu Linux

Friday, September 27th, 2019

Kubuntu_Linux-logo_and_wordmark-fix-plasma-graphical-environment

I've been called yesterday by a friend who has referred me to a friend of him Zvezdomir from Gabrovo who had installation of Kubuntu Desktop Linux by some other colleague but then suddenly the colleague decided to leave the country thus the Kubuntu become completely unmanaged.
In the spirit of Murphy's laws soon after it broke and as the HDD was filled with a lot of important pictures data I received the call with a beseech to help him fix his existing broken Kubuntu installation on the relatively old IBM thinkpad notebook.
No problem, I switched the role of a Linux Desktop user tech support as it is part of daily job of every system admini to be on the hotline for computer medication and never say no to incoming requests 🙂

It seems the guy had messed up his Graphical Environment when as a Linux novice user decided to experiment with changing environments, he used to be using GNOME and then due to some issues with some of the Image Viewer eog – Eye of Gnome / Shotwell / Gpaint whose borders was not showing properly or something he decided to Switch to KDE Plasma. This was successful but as he continued to try out things on the Linux he broke it up badly so after the machine booted he was getting the error after boot of Xorg Plasma was producing below error.

"All shell packages missing. This is an installation issue, please contact your distribution"

After spending about 30 minutes on the phone explaining him how to switch to Console as he had even no basic concepts about how to manage his Linux box, the problem was solved below are few steps taken to fix All shell packages missing issue

1. Press Ctrl + Alt + F2 Simultaneously

Usually historically switching to console on GNU / Linux was possible with CTRL + ALT + F1 but this was changed as often newer Linux distros do use TTY1 console to launch the X GUI environment.
Here we had some struggles to explain him where F1 as he thought he is supposed to press CTRL + ALT + S + 2 (perhaps misheard on the phone …) and was panicing how he is supposed to press 4 buttons simultaneously after a while it was cleared it is CTRL + ALT + F2 …
PS. In some of the other Ubuntus Lubuntu or older Ubuntus if CTRL + ALT + F2 doesn't work,
some of the other Virtual Text Consoles should be accessible with CTRL + ALT + F3 … CTRL + ALT + F4 etc.

2. Login with your user login name

Once the login: field appears I had to explain him about 10 times how he should type his non-privileged user as it is always the case with computer novice. I had to stress here he should press Enter after the username / login is typed …

3. Become root (superuser) after standard login with:

sudo su

3. If the machine is not connected to internet (this might be the case if errors are produced on below 4. 5. steps)

Assuming you're already superuser (root) and you have no internet because the Network Manager is unable to connect due to failure of KDE Plasma to start, in order to connect to lets say already configured WI-Fi home wireless router,
restart networking with

service NetworkManager restart

Since internet connectivity will be required in order to be able to install the missing packages and update the package repositories, next test whether internet is reachable.

ping google.com
PING google.com (172.217.169.110) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sof02s31-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.169.110): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=15.2 ms
64 bytes from sof02s31-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.169.110): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=11.5 ms
64 bytes from sof02s31-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.169.110): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=6.00 ms
^C
— google.com ping statistics —
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 5ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.003/10.892/15.220/3.783 ms

N.B.! We had stumble blocks here too, as the Wi-Fi router seemed to be far away from the room where the PC was, after he moved to the other room where Signal was fine and re-issuing the service NetworkManager restart ping worked.

4. Next to get the latest list with available installable packages on the Ubuntu run the usual

apt-get update
…

5. Do install / reinstall kubuntu-desktop meta package

Finally to Fix the broken desktop GUI (that is not appearing instead of the Plasma login

apt-get install –yes kubuntu-desktop
…

Finally reboot the Laptop with reboot cmd:

reboot

On next boot Kubuntu's usual login screen should be as it used to be until you have broken your package system with tampering with the packages.

And Hooray ! It works again 🙂

By the way as I googled a bit to investigate futher, the problem seems to be common and the solution with a lot of fuzzling is given also pointed as an bug in Ubuntu's launchpad here

Tags: fails, Load, Missing, packages, plasma, Shell
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Package Management | No Comments »

Getting Console and Graphical hardware system information on Linux with cpuinfo, neofetch, CPU-X (CPU-Z Unix alternative), I-nex and inxi

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

getting-console-information-and-graphical-hardware-system-information-Linux-cpuinfo-neofetch-cpu-x-i-nex-1

Earlier I've wrote extensive article on how to get hardware information on Linux using tools such as dmidecode, hardinfo, lshw, hwinfo, x86info and biosdecode but there are few other hardware reporting tools for Linux worthy to mention that has been there for historical reasons such as cpuinfo as we as some new shiny ones such as neofetch (a terminal / console hardware report tool as well the CPU-X and I-Nex which is Linux equivalent to the all known almost standard for Windows hardware detection CPU-Z worthy to say few words about.

1. cpuinfo

Perhaps the most basic tool to give you a brief information about your Processor type (model) number of Cores and Logical Processors is cpuinfo

I remember cpuinfo has been there since the very beginning on almost all Linux distributions's repository, nowadays its popularity of the days when the kings on the Linux OS server scenes were Slackware, Caldera OpenLinux and Redhat 6.0 Linux and Debian 3.0 declined but still for scripting purposes it is handy small proggie.

To install and run it in Debian / Ubuntu / Mint Linux etc.:

aptitude install -y cpuinfo
…
/usr/bin/cpu-info

2. neofetch

The next one worthy to install and check is neofetch (a cross-platform and easy-to-use system information
command line script that collects your Linux system information and display it on the terminal next to an image, it could be your distributions logo or any ascii art of your choice.)

The cool thing about neofetch is besides being able to identify the System server / desktop hardware parameters, it gives some basic info about number of packages installed on the system, memory free and in use, used kernel and exact type of System (be it Dell PowerEdge Model XX, IBM eSeries Model / HP Proliant Model etc.

neofetch info generated on my home used Lenovo Thikpad T420

neofetch-OS-hardware-information-Linux-ascii-system-info-pcfreak-home-server
neofetch info from www.pc-freak.net running current machine

neofetch even supports Mac OS X and Windows OS ! 🙂

To install neofetch on Mac OS X:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

or via Mac ported packages using brew

brew install neofetch

neofetch-screenshot-from-Mac-OS-X

neofetch is even installable on Windows OS that has the scoop command line installer tool installer manager with below PowerShell code in cmd.exe (Command line):

powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -scope CurrentUser
iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')
scoop install git
scoop install neofetch

neofetch-microsoft-windows-hardware-command-line-report-tool-screenshot

By the way Scoop was quite a finding for me and it is pretty handy to install plenty of useful command line Linux / UNIX tools, such as curl, wget, git etc. in the same easy straight forward way as a standard yum or apt-get on Windows (without explicitly installing things as GnuWin and CygWin).

3. CPU-X graphical user interface hardware report Linux GUI alternative to Windows CPU-Z

The packages for CPU-X are a bit outdated and even though there are rpm packages for Fedora, OpenSuSE and .deb package for Debian for Debian, Ubuntu and ArchLinux (pacman), there is no up to date version for Debian 10 and the package builds distributed for different Linux distros are a bit outdated.

Thus to install CPU-X on any Linux distribution it is perhaps best to use the portable version (static binary) of CPU-X.
It is currently available on https://github.com/X0rg/CPU-X/releases

To install latest portable version of CPU-X

wget https://github.com/X0rg/CPU-X/releases/download/v3.2.4/CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.tar.gz
…
mkdir CPU-X
cd CPU-X
tar -zxvvf CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.tar.gz
-rwxr-xr-x yohan/users 4563032 2019-01-13 22:15 CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.bsd64
-rwxr-xr-x yohan/users 5484968 2019-01-13 22:15 CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.linux64

cp -rpf CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.linux64 /usr/local/bin/
ln -sf /usr/local/bin/CPU-X_v3.2.4_portable.linux64 /usr/local/bin/cpu-x

Next run as superuser (root)

hipo@jeremiah:~$ su -c 'cpu-x'

As seen from below screenshots cpu-x reports a lot of concrete specific hardware data on:

Processor
Motherboard
Memory
System
Graphic card
Performance

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-CPU-info

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-caches-info

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-Motherboard-info

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-memory-info

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-system-info

cpu-x-cpu-cpu-z-alternative-linux-screenshot-graphics-info

CPU-X can be installed also on FreeBSD very easily by just installing from BSD port tree sysutils/cpu-x/
It is also said to work on other *BSDs, NetBSD, OpenBSD Unixes but I guess this will require a manual compilation based on FreeBSD's port Makefile.

4. I-Nex another GUI alternative to CPU-Z for UNIX / Linux

I-Nex is even more useful for general hardware reporting as it reports many hardware specifications not reported by CPU-X such as Battery type and Model Name (if the hardware report is on a laptop), info on USB devices slots or plugged USB devices brand and specifications, the available Network devices on the system (MAC Addresses) of each of it, Installed and used drivers on Hard Disk (ATA / SATA / SCSI / SSD), HW Sector size, Logical Block size, HDD Sectors count and other specific Hard Drive data as well as information on available Audio (Sound Blaster) devices (HDA-Intel), used Codecs, loaded kernel ALSA driver, Video card used and most importantly indicators on Processor reported CPU (temperature).

To install I-nex

Go to https://launchpad.net/i-nex or any of the mirror links where it resides and install the respective package, in my case, I was doing the installation on Debian Linux, so fetched current latest amd64 package which as of moment of writting this article is i-nex_7.6.0-0-bzr977-20161012-ubuntu16.10.1_amd64.deb , next installed it with dpkg

dpkg -i i-nex_7.6.0-0-bzr977-20161012-ubuntu16.10.1_amd64.deb

As the package was depending on some other .deb packages, which failed to install to install the missing ones I had to further run

apt –fix-broken install

i-nex-cpu-info-linux-hardware-info-program

hre

I-Nex thermal indicators about CPU temperature on a Linux Desktop notebook

There are other Hardware identification report tools such as CUDA-Z – that are useful to check if you have Nvidia Video Card hardware Installed on the PC to check the status of CUDA enabled GPUs, useful if working with nVidia Geforce, Quadro, Tesla cards and ION chipsets.

If you use it however be aware that CUDA-Z is not compatible with 3rd-party linux drivers for NVidia so make sure you have the current official Nvidia version.

5. Inxi full featured system information script

Inxi is a 10000 lines mega bash script that fetches hardware details from multiple different sources in /proc /sys and from commands on the system, and generates a beautiful looking console report that non technical users can read easily.

inxi-10-k-mega-bash-shell-script-reporting-on-installed-system-computer-hardware

inxi -Fx

inxi-report-on-installed-hardware-on-my-lenovo-thinkpad-home-laptop

Each of the pointed above tools has different method of collection of Hardware information from various resources e.g. – kernel loaded modules, dmesg, files like /proc/meminfo /proc/version /proc/scsi/scsi /proc/partitions.
Hence some of the tools are likely to report more info than otheres, so in case if some information you need regarding the system plugged in hardware is missing you can perhaps obtain it from another program. Most Linux distribution desktop provided GNOME package are including Hardinfo gui tool, but in many cases above mentioned tools are likely to add even more on info on what is inside your PC Box.
If you're aware of others tools that are useful not mentioned here please share it.

Tags: ArchLinux, basic, check, command, cpu-x, cpuinfo, deb packages, Debian Ubuntu Mint Linux, finding, Graphical, hardware, i-nex, installed, inxi, Lenovo Thikpad T420, line script, machine, netofetch, number, OpenBSD, packages, plenty, Processor Motherboard Memory System Graphic, report, system information, terminal, tool, user interface, usr bin, version, wget, Windows
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, System Administration | No Comments »

Scanning ports with netcat “nc” command on Linux and UNIX / Checking for firewall filtering between source and destination with nc

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Netcat ( nc ) is one of that tools, that is well known in the hacker (script kiddie) communities, but little underestimated in the sysadmin world, due to the fact nmap (network mapper) – the network exploratoin and security auditing tool has become like the standard penetration testing TCP / UDP port tool.

nc is feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool with tons of built-in capabilities for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.

Its Plethora of features includes port listening, port scanning & Transferring files due to which it is often used by Hackers and PenTesters as Backdoor. Netcat was written by a guy we know as the Hobbit <hobbit@avian.org>.

For a start-up and middle sized companies if nmap is missing on server usually it is okay to install it without risking to open a huge security hole, however in Corporate world, due to security policies often nmap is not found on the servers but netcat (nc) is present on the servers so you have to learn, if you haven't so to use netcat for the usual IP range port scans, if you're so used to nmap.

There are different implementations of Netcat, whether historically netcat was UNIX (BSD) program with a latest release of March 1996. The Linux version of NC is GNU Netcat (official source here) and is POSIX compatible. The other netcat in Free Software OS-es is OpenBSD's netcat whose ported version is also used in FreeBSD. Mac OS X also comes with default prebundled netcat on its Mac OS X from OS X version (10.13) onwards, on older OS X-es it is installable via MacPorts package repo, even FreeDOS has a port of it called NTOOL.

The (Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux) busybox includes a default leightweight version of netcat and Solaris has the OpenBSD netcat version bundled.

A cryptography enabled version fork exists that supports that supports integrated transport encryption capabilities called Cryptcat.

The Nmap suite also has included rewritten version of GNU Netcat named Ncat, featuring new possibilities such as "Connection Brokering", TCP/UDP Redirection, SOCKS4 client and server support, ability to "Chain" Ncat processes, HTTP CONNECT proxying (and proxy chaining), SSL connect/listen support and IP address/connection filtering. Just like Nmap, Ncat is cross-platform.

In this small article I'll very briefly explain on basic netcat – known as the TCP Army knife tool port scanning for an IP range of UDP / TCP ports.

1. Scanning for TCP opened / filtered ports remote Linux / Windows server

Everyone knows scanning of a port is possible with a simple telnet request towards the host, e.g.:

telnet SMTP.EMAIL-HOST.COM 25

The most basic netcat use that does the same is achiavable with:

$ nc SMTP.EMAIL-HOST.COM 25
220 jeremiah ESMTP Exim 4.92 Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:39:41 +0300

Beside scanning the remote port, using netcat interactively as pointing in above example, if connecting to HTTP Web services, you can request remote side to return a webpage by sending a false referer, source host and headers, this is also easy doable with curl / wget and lynx but doing it with netcat just like with telnet could be fun, here is for example how to request an INDEX page with spoofed HTTP headers.

nc Web-Host.COM 25
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: spoofedhost.com
Referrer: mypage.com
User-Agent: my-spoofed-browser

2. Performing a standard HTTP request with netcat

To do so just pype the content with a standard bash integrated printf function with the included end of line (the unix one is \n but to be OS independent it is better to use r\n – the end of line complition character for Windows.

printf "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www.pc-freak.net\r\n\r\n" | nc www.pc-freak.net 80

3. Scanning a range of opened / filtered UDP ports

To scan for lets say opened remote system services on the very common important ports opened from UDP port 25 till, 1195 – more specifically for:

UDP Bind Port 53
Time protocol Port (37)
TFTP (69)
Kerberos (88)
NTP 123
Netbios (137,138,139)
SNMP (161)
LDAP 389
Microsoft-DS (Samba 445)
Route BGP (52)
LDAPS (639)
openvpn (1194)

nc -vzu 192.168.0.1 25 1195

UDP tests will show opened, if no some kind of firewall blocking, the -z flag is given to scan only for remote listening daemons without sending any data to them.

4. Port Scanning TCP listening ports with Netcat

As prior said using netcat to scan for remote opened HTTP Web Server on port 80 an FTP on Port 23 or a Socks Proxy or MySQL Database on 3306 / PostgreSQL DB on TCP 5432 is very rare case scenario.

Below is example to scan a Local network situated IP for TCP open ports from port 1 till 7000.

# nc -v -n -z -w 5 192.168.1.2 1-7000

           nc: connect to host.example.com 80 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
           nc: connect to host.example.com 20 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
           Connection to host.example.com port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!
           nc: connect to host.example.com 23 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

Be informed that scanning with netcat is much more slower, than nmap, so specifying smaller range of ports is always a good idea to reduce annoying waiting …

The -w flag is used to set a timeout to remote connection, usually on a local network situated machines the timeout could be low -w 1 but for machines across different Data Centers (let say one in Berlin and one in Seattle), use as a minimum -w 5.

If you expect remote service to be responsive (as it should always be), it is a nice idea to use netcat with a low timeout (-w) value of 1 below is example:

netcat -v -z -n -w 1 scanned-hosts 1-1023

5. Port scanning range of IP addresses with netcat

If you have used Nmap you know scanning for a network range is as simple as running something like nmap -sP -P0 192.168.0.* (to scan from IP range 1-255 map -sP -P0 192.168.0.1-150 (to scan from local IPs ending in 1-150) or giving the network mask of the scanned network, e.g. nmap -sF 192.168.0.1/24 – for more examples please check my previous article Checking port security on Linux with nmap (examples).

But what if nmap is not there and want to check a bunch 10 Splunk servers (software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a Web-style interface.), with netcat to find, whether the default Splunk connection port 9997 is opened or not:

for i in `seq 1 10`; do nc -z -w 5 -vv splunk0$i.server-domain.com 9997; done

6. Checking whether UDP port traffic is allowed to destination server

Assuring you have access on Source traffic (service) Host A and Host B (remote destination server where a daemon will be set-upped to listen on UDP port and no firewall in the middle Network router or no traffic control and filtering software HUB is preventing the sent UDP proto traffic, lets say an ntpd will be running on its standard 123 port there is done so:

– On host B (the remote machine which will be running ntpd and should be listening on port 123), run netcat to listen for connections

# nc -l -u -p 123
Listening on [0.0.0.0] (family 2, port 123)

Make sure there is no ntpd service actively running on the server, if so stop it with /etc/init.d/ntpd stop
and run above command. The command should run as superuser as UDP port 123 is from the so called low ports from 1-1024 and binding services on such requires root privileges.

– On Host A (UDP traffic send host

nc -uv remote-server-host 123

If the remote port is not reachable due to some kind of network filtering, you will get "connection refused".
An important note to make is on some newer Linux distributions netcat might be silently trying to connect by default using IPV6, bringing false positives of filtered ports due to that. Thus it is generally a good idea, to make sure you're connecting to IPV6

$ nc -uv -4 remote-server-host 123

Another note to make here is netcat's UDP connection takes 2-3 seconds, so make sure you wait at least 4-8 seconds for a very distant located hosts that are accessed over a multitude of routers.

7. Checking whether TCP port traffic allowed to DST remote server

To listen for TCP connections on a specified location (external Internet IP or hostname), it is analogous to listening for UDP connections.

Here is for example how to bind and listen for TCP connections on all available Interface IPs (localhost, eth0, eth1, eth2 etc.)

nc -lv 0.0.0.0 12345

Then on client host test the connection with

nc -vv 192.168.0.103 12345
Connection to 192.168.0.103 12345 port [tcp/*] succeeded!

8. Proxying traffic with netcat

Another famous hackers use of Netcat is its proxying possibility, to proxy anything towards a third party application with UNIX so any content returned be printed out on the listening nc spawned daemon like process.
For example one application is traffic SMTP (Mail traffic) with netcat, below is example of how to proxy traffic from Host B -> Host C (in that case the yandex current mail server mx.yandex.ru)

linux-srv:~# nc -l 12543 | nc mx.yandex.ru 25

Now go to Host A or any host that has TCP/IP protocol access to port 12543 on proxy-host Host B (linux-srv) and connect to it on 12543 with another netcat or telnet.

to make netcat keep connecting to yandex.ru MX (Mail Exchange) server you can run it in a small never ending bash shell while loop, like so:

linux-srv:~# while :; do nc -l 12543 | nc mx.yandex.ru 25; done

Below are screenshots of a connection handshake between Host B (linux-srv) proxy host and Host A (the end client connecting) and Host C (mx.yandex.ru).

host-B-running-as-a-proxy-daemon-towards-Host-C-yandex-mail-exchange-server

Host B netcat as a (Proxy)

Host-A-Linux-client-connection-handshake-to-proxy-server-with-netcat
that is possible in combination of UNIX and named pipes (for more on Named pipes check my previous article simple linux logging with named pipes), here is how to run a single netcat version to proxy any traffic in a similar way as the good old tinyproxy.

On Proxy host create the pipe and pass the incoming traffic towards google.com and write back any output received back in the named pipe.

# mkfifo backpipe
# nc -l 8080 0<backpipe | nc www.google.com 80 1>backpipe

Other useful netcat proxy set-up is to simulate a network connectivity failures.

For instance, if server:port on TCP 1080 is the normal host application would connect to, you can to set up a forward proxy from port 2080 with

nc -L server:1080 2080

then set-up and run the application to connect to localhost:2080 (nc proxy port)

/path/to/application_bin –server=localhost –port=2080

Now application is connected to localhost:2080, which is forwarded to server:1080 through netcat. To simulate a network connectivity failure, just kill the netcat proxy and check the logs of application_bin.

Using netcat as a bind shell (make any local program / process listen and deliver via nc)

netcat can be used to make any local program that can receive input and send output to a server, this use is perhaps little known by the junior sysadmin, but a favourite use of l337 h4x0rs who use it to spawn shells on remote servers or to make connect back shell. The option to do so is -e

-e – option spawns the executable with its input and output redirected via network socket.

One of the most famous use of binding a local OS program to listen and receive / send content is by
making netcat as a bind server for local /bin/bash shell.

Here is how

nc -l -p 4321 -e /bin/sh

If necessery specify the bind hostname after -l. Then from any client connect to 4321 (and if it is opened) you will gain a shell with the user with which above netcat command was run. Note that many modern distribution versions such as Debian / Fedora / SuSE Linux's netcat binary is compiled without the -e option (this works only when compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE), removal in this distros is because option is potentially opening a security hole on the system.

If you're interested further on few of the methods how modern hackers bind new backdoor shell or connect back shell, check out Spawning real tty shells article.

For more complex things you might want to check also socat (SOcket CAT) – multipurpose relay for bidirectional data transfer under Linux.
socat is a great Linux Linux / UNIX TCP port forwarder tool similar holding the same spirit and functionality of netcat plus many, many more.

On some of the many other UNIX operating systems that are lacking netcat or nc / netcat commands can't be invoked a similar utilitiesthat should be checked for and used instead are:

ncat, pnetcat, socat, sock, socket, sbd

To use nmap's ncat to spawn a shell for example that allows up to 3 connections and listens for connects only from 192.168.0.0/24 network on port 8081:

ncat –exec "/bin/bash" –max-conns 3 –allow 192.168.0.0/24 -l 8081 –keep-open

9. Copying files over network with netcat

Another good hack often used by hackers to copy files between 2 servers Server1 and Server2 who doesn't have any kind of FTP / SCP / SFTP / SSH / SVN / GIT or any kind of Web copy support service – i.e. servers only used as a Database systems that are behind a paranoid sysadmin firewall is copying files between two servers with netcat.

On Server2 (the Machine on which you want to store the file)

nc -lp 2323 > files-archive-to-copy.tar.gz

On server1 (the Machine from where file is copied) run:

nc -w 5 server2.example.com 2323 < files-archive-to-copy.tar.gz

Note that the downside of such transfers with netcat is data transferred is unencrypted so any one with even a simple network sniffer or packet analyzier such as iptraf or tcpdump could capture the file, so make sure the file doesn't contain sensitive data such as passwords.

Copying partition images like that is perhaps best way to get disk images from a big server onto a NAS (when you can't plug the NAS into the server).

10. Copying piped archived directory files with netcat

On computer A:

export ARIBTRARY_PORT=3232
nc -l $ARBITRARY_PORT | tar vzxf –

On Computer B:

tar vzcf – files_or_directories | nc computer_a $ARBITRARY_PORT

11. Creating a one page webserver with netcat and ncat

As netcat could listen to port and print content of a file, it can be set-up with a bit of bash shell scripting to serve
as a one page webserver, or even combined with some perl scripting and bash to create a multi-serve page webserver if needed.

To make netact serve a page to any connected client run in a screen / tmux session following code:

while true; do nc -l -p 80 -q 1 < somepage.html; done

Another interesting fun example if you have installed ncat (is a small web server that connects current time on server on connect).

ncat -lkp 8080 –sh-exec 'echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\nThe date is "; date;'

12. Cloning Hard disk partitions with netcat

rsync is a common tool used to clone hard disk partitions over network. However if rsync is not installed on a server and netcat is there you can use it instead, lets say we want to clone /dev/sdb
from Server1 to Server2 assuming (Server1 has a configured working Local or Internet connection).

On Server2 run:

nc -l -p 4321 | dd of=/dev/sdb

Following on Server2 to start the Partition / HDD cloning process run

dd if=/dev/sdb | nc 192.168.0.88 4321

Where 192.168.0.88 is the IP address listen configured on Server2 (in case you don't know it, check the listening IP to access with /sbin/ifconfig).

Next you have to wait for some short or long time depending on the partiiton or Hard drive, number of files / directories and allocated disk / partition size.

To clone /dev/sda (a main partiiton) from Server1 to Server2 first requirement is that it is not mounted, thus to have it unmounted on a system assuming you have physical access to the host, you can boot some LiveCD Linux distribution such as Knoppix Live CD on Server1, manually set-up networking with ifconfig or grab an IP via DHCP from the central DHCP server and repeat above example.

Happy netcating 🙂

Tags: access, addresses, after, ALL, ALLOW, allowed, allows, checking, command, destination, due, firewall, linux windows, network, nmap, Scanning, script kiddie, security policies, tool, unix
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Networking | 1 Comment »

How to change default Text editor in Linux

Saturday, August 31st, 2019

This is a very trivial question but, as I thought someone that is starting with Linux basics Operating might be interested I will shortly explain in this small article how to change default text editor on Linux.

Changing default text editor is especially helpful if you have to administer a newly purchased dedicated servers, that comes with default Operating System preinstalled.

By default many Linux distributions versions such as Debian / Ubuntu comes with nano comes with a default text editor nano (ANOther enhanced free Pico editor clone) many people as me are irritated and prefer to use instead vim (Vi Improved), mcedit (the Midnight Commander), joe or emacs as a default.

1. Changing default console text editor on Debian based Linux

On Debian / Ubuntu / Mint and other deb based distributions the easiest way to change text editor is with update-alternatives cmd.

update-alternatives –config editor

changing-default-text-editor-in-linux

Using Debian update-alternatives is useful as it makes the change OS global wide and the default mc viewer program mcview will also understand the change in the default text editor, which makes it the preferrable way to do it on deb based OS family.

An alternative way to set the default programs for the OS system wide is to create the respective symbolic link in /etc/alternatives actually what update-alternatives wrapper script does is exactly this it creates the required symlink.

2. Changing default text editor on any Linux

To change the text editor for only a single system existing user in /etc/passwd you need to edit $HOME/.bashrc, e.g. ~/.bashrc on Debian based Linux or on Fedora / RHEL / CentOS by adding to ~/.bash_profile

vim ~/.bashrc

And add

alias editor=vim

export EDITOR='/path/to/text-editor/program'
export VISUAL='/path/to/text-editor/program'

To change to mcedit for example when opening in any program that triggers to run default text editor

export EDITOR='/usr/bin/mcedit'
export VISUAL='/usr/bin/mcedit'

To make the change system wide on any Linux distribution you have to add the export EDITOR / export VISUAL at the end of /etc/bash.bashrc

To load the newly included .bashrc* instructions use source command

source ~/.bashrc

3. Changing the default text editor for mcview if all else fails

Once mc is running, use following menu keys order (also visible from Midnight Commander) menus:

    F9 Activates the top menu.
    o Selects the Option menu.
    c Opens the configuration dialog.
    i Toggles the use internal edit option.
    s Saves your preferences.

That's all folks Enjoy !

Tags: change, default, editor, linux?, text
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

Howto Configure Linux shell Prompt / Setup custom Terminal show Prompt using default shell variables PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4

Tuesday, August 27th, 2019

System Console, Command Operation Console or Terminal is a Physical device for text (command) input from keyboard, getting the command output and monitoring the status of a shell or programs I/O operations generated traditionally with attached screen. With the development of Computers, physical consoles has become emulated and the input output is translated on the monitor usually via a data transfer protocol historically mostly over TCP/IP connection to remote IP with telnet or rsh, but due to security limitations Consoles are now accessed over data (encrypted) network protocols with SHA2 / MD5 cryptography algorithm enabled such as over SSH (Secure Shell) network protocol..
The ancestors of physical consoles which in the past were just a Terminal (Monitoring / Monitor device attached to a MainFrame system computer).

Mainframe-physical-terminal-monitor-Old-Computer

What is Physical Console
A classical TTY (TeleTYpewriter) device looked like so and served the purpose of being just a communication and display deivce, whether in reality the actual computing and storage tape devices were in a separate room and communicating to Terminal.

mainframe-super-computer-computing-tape-machine
TTYs are still present in modern UNIX like GNU / Linux distrubions OSes and the BSD berkley 4.4 code based FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD if you have installed the OS on a physical computer in FreeBSD and Solaris / SunOS there is also tty command. TTY utility in *nix writes the name of the terminal attached to standard input to standard output, in Linux there is a GNU remake of same program part called GNU tty of coreutils package (try man tty) for more.

The physical console is recognizable in Linux as it is indicated with other tree letters pts – (pseudo terminal device) standing for a terminal device which is emulated by an other program (example: xterm, screen, or ssh are such programs). A pts is the slave part of a pts is pseudo there is no separate binary program for it but it is dynamically allocated in memory.
PTS is also called Line consle in Cisco Switches / Router devices, VTY is the physical Serial Console connected on your Cisco device and the network connection emulation to network device is creates with a virtual console session VTL (Virtual Terminal Line). In freebsd the actual /dev/pts* /dev/tty* temporary devices on the OS are slightly different and have naming such as /dev/ttys001.
But the existence of tty and pts emulator is not enough for communicating interrupts to Kernel and UserLand binaries of the Linux / BSD OS, thus to send the commands on top of it is running a System Shell as CSH / TSH / TCSH or BASH which is usually the first program set to run after user logs in over ptty or pseudo tty virtual terminal.

linux-tty-terminal-explained-brief-intro-to-linux-device-drivers-20-638

Setting the Bash Prompt in Terminal / Console on GNU / Linux

Bash has system environments to control multiple of variables, which are usually visible with env command, one important variable to change in the past was for example USER / USERNAME which was red by IRC Chat clients such as BitchX / irssi and could be displayed publicly so if not changed to a separate value, one could have known your Linux login username by simple /whois query to the Nickname in question (if no inetd / xinetd service was running on the Linux box and usually inetd was not running).

Below is my custom set USER / USERNAME to separate

hipo@pcfreak:~$ env|grep USER
USERNAME=Attitude
USER=Attitude

There is plenty of variables to tune email such as MAIL store directory, terminal used TERM, EDITOR etc. but there are some
variables that are not visible with env query as they're not globally available for all users but just for the single user, to show this ones you need to use declare command instead, to get a full list of All Single and System Wide defined variables and functions type declare in the bash shell, for readability, below is last 10 returned results:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ declare | tail -10
{
    local quoted=${1//\'/\'\\\'\'};
    printf "'%s'" "$quoted"
}
quote_readline ()
{
    local quoted;
    _quote_readline_by_ref "$1" ret;
    printf %s "$ret"
}

PS1 is present there virtually on any modern Linux distribution and is installed through user home's directory $HOME/.bashrc , ~/.profile or .bash_profile or System Wide globally for all existing users in /etc/passwd (password database file) from /etc/bash.bashrc
In Debian / Ubuntu / Mint GNU / Linux this system variable is set in user home's .bashrc but in Fedora / RHEL Linux distro,
PS1 is configured from /home/username/.bash_profile to find out where PS1 is located for ur user:

cd ~
grep -Rli PS1 .bash*

Here is one more example:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ declare|grep -i PS1|head -1
PS1='\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

hipo@pcfreak:~$ grep PS1 /etc/bash.bashrc
[ -z “$PS1” ] && return
# but only if not SUDOing and have SUDO_PS1 set; then assume smart user.
if ! [ -n “${SUDO_USER}” -a -n “${SUDO_PS1}” ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

Getting current logged in user shell configured PS1 variable can be done with echo:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

So lets observe a little bit the meaning of this obscure line of (code) instructions code which are understood by BASH when being red from PS1 var to do so, I'll give a list of meaning of main understood commands, each of which is defined with \.

The ${debian_chroot} shell variable is defined from /etc/bash.bashrc

Easiest way to change PS1 is to export the string you like with the arguments like so:

root@linux:/home/hipo# export PS1='My-Custom_Server-Name# '
My-Custom_Server-Name# echo $PS1
My-Custom_Server-Name#

\a : an ASCII bell character (07)
\d : the date in “Weekday Month Date” format (e.g., “Tue May 26”)
\D{format} : the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
\e : an ASCII escape character (033)
\h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
\H : the hostname
\j : the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
\l : the basename of the shell's terminal device name
\n : newline
\r : carriage return
\s : the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
\t : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
\T : the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
\@ : the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
\A : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
\u : the username of the current user
\v : the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
\V : the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
\w : the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
\W : the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
\! : the history number of this command
\# : the command number of this command
\$ : if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
\nnn : the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
\\ : a backslash
\[ : begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
\] : end a sequence of non-printing characters

The default's PS1 set prompt on Debian Linux is:

echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

As you can see \u (print username) \h (print hostname) and \W (basename of current working dir) or \w (print $HOME/current working dir)
are the most essential, the rest are bell character, escape character etc.

A very good way to make your life easier and learn the abbreviations / generate exactly the PS1 PROMPT you want to have is with Easy Bash PS1 Generator Web Utility
with which you can just click over buttons that are capable to produce all of the PS1 codes.

1. How to show current hour:minute:seconds / print full date in Prompt Shell (PS)

Here is an example with setting the Bash Shell prompt to include also the current time in format hour:minute:seconds (very useful if you're executing commands on a critical servers and you run commands in some kind of virtual terminal like screen or tmux.

root@pcfreak:~# PS1="\n\t \u@\h:\w# "
14:03:51 root@pcfreak:/home#

PS1-how-to-setup-date-time-hour-minutes-and-seconds-in-bash-shell-prompt

export PS1='\u@\H \D{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M;%S%z}] \W ] \$ '

Make superuser appear in RED color (adding PS1 prompt custom color for a User)

root@pcfreak:~$ PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 1)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"

how-to-change-colors-in-bash-prompt-shell-on-linux-shell-environment

In above example the Shell Prompt Color changed is changed for administrator (root) to shebang symbol # in red, green, yellow and blue for the sake to show you how it is done, however this example can be adapted for any user on the system. Setting different coloring for users is very handy if you have to administer Mail Server service like Qmail or other Application that consists of multiple small ones of multiple daemons such as qmail + vpopmail + clamd + mysql etc. Under such circumstances, coloring each of the users in different color like in the example for debugging is very useful.

Coloring the PS1 system prompt on Linux to different color has been a standard practice in Linux Server environments running Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SuSE Enterprise Linux and some Desktop distributions such as Mint Linux.

To make The Root prompt Red colored only for system super user (root) on any Linux distribution
, add the following to /etc/bashrc, e.g.

vim /etc/bashrc

# If id command returns zero, you've root access.
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ];
then # you are root, set red colour prompt
PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 1)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"
else # normal
PS1="[\\u@\\h:\\w] $"
fi

2. How to make the prompt of a System user appear Green

Add to ~/.bashrc following line

PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 2)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"

3. Print New line, username@hostname, base PTY, shell level, history (number), newline and full working directory $PWD

export PS1='\n[\u@\h \l:$SHLVL:\!]\n$PWD\$ '

4. Showing the numbert of jobs the shell is currently managing.

This is useful if you run and switch with fg / bg (foreground / background) commands
to switch between jobs and forget some old job.

export PS1='\u@\H \D{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M;%S%z}] \W \$]'

Multi Lines Prompt / Make very colorful Shell prompt full of stats info

PS1="\n\[\033[35m\]\$(/bin/date)\n\[\033[32m\]\w\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u@\h: \[\033[1;34m\]\$(/usr/bin/tty | /bin/sed -e ‘s:/dev/::’): \[\033[1;36m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed ‘s: ::g’) files \[\033[1;33m\]\$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed ‘s/total //’)b\[\033[0m\] -> \[\033[0m\]"

prompt-show-how-many-files-and-virtual-pts-ps1-linux

5. Set color change on command failure

If you have a broken command or the command ended with non zero output with some kind of bad nasty message and you want to make, that more appearing making it red heighlighted, here is how:

PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="\[\033[0;33m\][\!]\`if [[ \$? = “0” ]]; then echo “\\[\\033[32m\\]”; else echo “\\[\\033[31m\\]”; fi\`[\u.\h: \`if [[ `pwd|wc -c|tr -d ” “` > 18 ]]; then echo “\\W”; else echo “\\w”; fi\`]\$\[\033[0m\] “; echo -ne “\033]0;`hostname -s`:`pwd`\007"'

6. Other beautiful PS1 Color Prompts with statistics

PS1="\n\[\e[32;1m\](\[\e[37;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]jobs:\j\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]\w\[\e[32;1m\])\n(\[\[\e[37;1m\]! \!\[\e[32;1m\])-> \[\e[0m\]"

another-very-beuatiful-bash-colorful-prompt

7. Add Muliple Colors to Same Shell prompt

function prompt { local BLUE="\[\033[0;34m\]” local DARK_BLUE=”\[\033[1;34m\]” local RED=”\[\033[0;31m\]” local DARK_RED=”\[\033[1;31m\]” local NO_COLOR=”\[\033[0m\]” case $TERM in xterm*|rxvt*) TITLEBAR=’\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]’ ;; *) TITLEBAR=”” ;; esac PS1=”\u@\h [\t]> ” PS1=”${TITLEBAR}\ $BLUE\u@\h $RED[\t]>$NO_COLOR " PS2='continue-> ' PS4='$0.$LINENO+ ' }

colorful-prompt-blue-and-red-linux-console-PS1

8. Setting / Change Shell background Color

export PS1="\[$(tput bold)$(tput setb 4)$(tput setaf 7)\]\u@\h:\w $ \[$(tput sgr0)\]"

tput Color Capabilities:

tput setab [1-7] – Set a background color using ANSI escape
tput setb [1-7] – Set a background color
tput setaf [1-7] – Set a foreground color using ANSI escape
tput setf [1-7] – Set a foreground color

tput Text Mode Capabilities:

tput bold – Set bold mode
tput dim – turn on half-bright mode
tput smul – begin underline mode
tput rmul – exit underline mode
tput rev – Turn on reverse mode
tput smso – Enter standout mode (bold on rxvt)
tput rmso – Exit standout mode
tput sgr0 – Turn off all attributes

Color Code for tput:

0 – Black
1 – Red
2 – Green
3 – Yellow
4 – Blue
5 – Magenta
6 – Cyan
7 – White

9. Howto Use bash shell function inside PS1 variable

If you administrate Apache or other HTTPD servers or any other server whose processes are forked and do raise drastically at times to keep an eye while actively working on the server.

function httpdcount { ps aux | grep apache2 | grep -v grep | wc -l } export PS1="\u@\h [`httpdcount`]> "

10. PS2, PS3, PS4 little known variables

I'll not get much into detail to PS2, PS3, PS4 but will mention them as perhaps many people are not even aware they exist.
They're rarely used in the daily system administrator's work but useful for Shell scripting purposes of Dev Ops and Shell Scripting Guru Programmers.

PS2 – Continuation interactive prompt

A very long unix command can be broken down to multiple line by giving \ at the end of the line. The default interactive prompt for a multi-line command is “> “. Let us change this default behavior to display “continue->” by using PS2 environment variable as shown below.

hipo@db-host :~$ myisamchk –silent –force –fast –update-state \
> –key_buffer_size=512M –sort_buffer_size=512M \
> –read_buffer_size=4M –write_buffer_size=4M \
> /var/lib/mysql/bugs/*.MYI
[Note: This uses the default “>” for continuation prompt]

PS3 – Prompt used by “select” inside shell script (usefulif you write scripts with user prompts)
PS4 – Used by “set -x” to prefix tracing output
The PS4 shell variable defines the prompt that gets displayed.

You can find example with script demonstrating PS2, PS3, PS4 use via small shell scripts in thegeekstuff's article Take control of PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4 read it here

Summary

In this article, I've shortly reviewed on what is a TTY, how it evolved into Pseudo TTY and how it relates to current shells which are the interface communicating with the modern UNIX like Operating systems's userland and kernel.
Also it was reviewed shortly how the current definitions of shell variables could be viewed with declare cmd. Also I went through on how to display the PS1 variable and on how to modify PS1 and make the prompt different statistics and monitoring parameters straight into the command shell. I've shown some common PS1 strings that report on current date hour, minute, seconds, modify the coloring of the bash prompt shell, show processes count, and some PS1 examples were given that combines beuatiful shell coloring as well as how the Prompt background color can be changed.
Finally was shown how a combination of commands can be executed by exporting to PS1 to update process counf of Apache on every shell prompt iteration.
Other shell goodies are mostly welcome

Tags: access, adding, administrate, administrator, after, algorithm, ALL, amp, bash shell, Below, command, current time, default shell, echo, email, home, How to, root linux, Virtual Terminal Line, VTL
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

Check weather forecast from console (terminal) on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD howto

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

how to get weather forecast prognosis from command line text terminal / console on Linux and FreeBSD

Doing everything in Linux console / terminal is a question perhaps every Linux / BSD hacker wants to do as Graphical user interface and using web search or using Graphical Environment plugins is an unneded complexity + googling or duckduckgoing for weather to check your next vacation destination city has been more and more of a terrible experience (for me) as I'm not a big fan of using the OS in a GUI.
In that manner of thoughts, as a Linux console geek and hard core ASCII art fan. I was recently happy to find that possible to check weather forecast in tty console or Linux terminal in a beautiful ascii art way easily through a Web wttr.in service – a web application weather forecast service that supports displaying the current and few days in future, weather forecast either in browser as a plain text or from the command line by simply accessing it with your favourite web access / transfer tool such as;
wget / curl or any of your favourite text browser elinks / lynx / w3m or if on *BSDs use fetch command.

Install Curl data transfer tool if it is not already

Wget is installed by default across most Linux distributions and fetch is present by default on BSDs, displaying it in text browser would perhaps be never used but if you decide to give it a try maybe try with elinks (to get colorful output), w3m and lynx will display a black and white results.

In case if you miss curl, install it:

On Debian distro

aptitude install -y curl

or Fedora

yum install -y curl
…

Of course to use wttr.in as it is Internet based Weather Forecast service the minimum you need to have is to have Internet connection to your Linux / BSD desktop computer.

Text based Weather Forecast Web App currently supports:

display the current weather as well as a 3-day weather forecast, split into morning, noon, evening and night

Temperature is displayed for morning, noon, evening and night (includes temperature range, wind speed and direction, viewing distance, precipitation amount and probability)
Provide results for Weather based on City / town / village location
Supports display of Moon Phases Forecast in calendar days
Supports multilingual names (Bulgarian Phonetic cyrillic / Russian and other exotic UTF-8 encodings such as Chineese and Japanese), 50+ languages are currently supported
Has ability for prognosis for hostname (domain) location based on an its IP GeoIP location on the Globe
Geographical locations / landmarks such as Lakes / Mountains etc. can be easily queried
Query results metrics could be configured, e.g. USCS units or EU and rest of world accepted ones (SI) metric
Displayed result could be either in ANSI (if from terminal / console / HTML if queried from browser or in PNG – if needed)

Where wttr.in could be useful ?

The best applications use, I can think of are for server (shell) / perl scripting automation purposes, it could be useful especially in TOO HOT, TOO, COLD, TOO WET location in Small and Middle sized Data Centers Green Energy (Sun Panel) Parks / Wind Energy situated Linux monitoring hosts to track possible problems of overheats or overcolding of servers due to abnormal excessive temperatures such as the ones we experienced this summer here All across in Europe or in too Cold DC locations such as heat locations Deserts in African Countries, Saudi Arabia or Chukotka or Siberia in Russia.
Other application is as a backup option to other normal Weather report services by PHP or Python scripts that fetch data, from multiple places.
Of course since this is a third party controlled service, the downtime is due to excessive connection requests, the service could get flooded and stopped working, but I guess for any Commercial use, wttr.in creator Igor Chubin would be happy to sell a specific crafted service for any end user candidates.

Here is few examples of the beautiful returned ASCII art formatted output of wttr.in.

1. Getting a three days Weather Forecast prognosis for city / town location

To get what is current weather in my current city of Living, Sofia Bulgaria just pass the city to the URL address

curl http://wttr.in/Sofia

text-console-wttr.in-Weather-forecast-Sofia-for-Linux

links http://wttr.in/Dobrich

curl-Linux-show--Dobrich-Weather-forecast-in-lynx-text-browser

Default links (Linux) www text browser produces ugly black and white

2. Displaying Weather forecast with wget

wget -O- -q http://wttr.in

getting-weather-forecast-on-linux-terminal-console-with-wget-command

If you're lazy you can even omit the http:// as wget will look for HyperText Transmission Protocol by itself

wget -O- -q wttr.in

3. Getting Forecast results for a Tourist Destination

Lets get the weather forecast for the popular tourist Bulgarian destination of the Seven Rila Lakes (near Rila Monastery), situated in the Rila Mountain BG.

curl http://wttr.in/Seven+Rila+Lakes

Console-terminal-Weather-forecast-Linux-Seven-Rila-Lakes

4. Display Forecast for a specific server IP

Displaying information on specific server IP address current situated in GeoIP database, of course could be not really true, as the IP could be just a Load Balancer a router that does NAT to some internal DMZ-ed location server, but anyways it is a cool feature.

Lets get information on what is the weather on Google Global's Public DNS server IP 8.8.8.8 so commonly used to guarantee a Windows and Linux Desktop client machines Internet connectivity.

curl wttr.in/@8.8.8.8

wttr.in-Linux-text--forecast-service-curl-screenshot Google Public DNS location weather forecast

5. Download PNG image picture from wttr.in service

Lets say you want to get a 3 days standard Weather forecast for the popular Black Sea Resort town in Bulgaria Pomorie (a beautiful sea city which has even a functioning 5 Monks Monastery Pomorie Monastery situated near sea coast)

curl http://wttr.in/Pomorie.png

–2019-08-22 20:15:51– http://wttr.in/Pomorie.png
Resolving wttr.in (wttr.in)… 5.9.243.187
Connecting to wttr.in (wttr.in)|5.9.243.187|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 42617 (42K) [image/png]
Saving to: ‘Pomorie.png’

Pomorie.png 100%[=======================================================================================================>] 41.62K –.-KB/s in 0.07s

2019-08-22 20:15:52 (586 KB/s) – ‘Pomorie.png’ saved [42617/42617]

Note: The generated .png is again the ASCII art produced by a direct text fetch bug in pic format

6. Displaying Current Moon Phase

If you want to enjoy a text based Moon phase picture through wttr.in 🙂

wget -O- -q wttr.in/Moon

You can also get a Moon Phase prognosis for a current future date or get a previous date phase

curl wttr.in/moon@2019-09-15

Full-Moon-Weather-forecast-text-console-reporting-via-wttr.in-on-Gnu_Linux

Full Moon Madness !! – Vampires are out beaware and Enjoy the ultra kewl ASCII Colorful Art 🙂

7. Getting help for wttr.in terminal Waether Forecast results

$ curl wttr.in/:help
Usage:

    $ curl wttr.in          # current location
    $ curl wttr.in/muc      # weather in the Munich airport

Supported location types:

    /paris                  # city name
    /~Eiffel+tower          # any location
    /Москва                 # Unicode name of any location in any language
    /muc                    # airport code (3 letters)
    /@stackoverflow.com     # domain name
    /94107                  # area codes
    /-78.46,106.79          # GPS coordinates

Special locations:

    /moon                   # Moon phase (add ,+US or ,+France for these cities)
    /moon@2016-10-25        # Moon phase for the date (@2016-10-25)

Units:

    m                       # metric (SI) (used by default everywhere except US)
    u                       # USCS (used by default in US)
    M                       # show wind speed in m/s

View options:

    0                       # only current weather
    1                       # current weather + 1 day
    2                       # current weather + 2 days
    A                       # ignore User-Agent and force ANSI output format (terminal)
    F                       # do not show the "Follow" line
    n                       # narrow version (only day and night)
    q                       # quiet version (no "Weather report" text)
    Q                       # superquiet version (no "Weather report", no city name)
    T                       # switch terminal sequences off (no colors)

PNG options:

    /paris.png              # generate a PNG file
    p                       # add frame around the output
    t                       # transparency 150
    transparency=…        # transparency from 0 to 255 (255 = not transparent)

Options can be combined:

    /Paris?0pq
    /Paris?0pq&lang=fr
    /Paris_0pq.png          # in PNG the file mode are specified after _
    /Rome_0pq_lang=it.png   # long options are separated with underscore

Localization:

    $ curl fr.wttr.in/Paris
    $ curl wttr.in/paris?lang=fr
    $ curl -H "Accept-Language: fr" wttr.in/paris

Supported languages:

    af da de el et fr fa hu id it nb nl pl pt-br ro ru tr uk vi (supported)
    az be bg bs ca cy cs eo es fi ga hi hr hy is ja jv ka kk ko ky lt lv mk ml nl fy nn pt pt-br sk sl sr sr-lat sv sw th te uz zh zu he (in progress)

Special URLs:

    /:help                  # show this page
    /:bash.function         # show recommended bash function wttr()
    /:translation           # show the information about the translators

8. Comparing two cities weather from command line

One useful use of wttr.in if you plan to travel from Location city A to Location city B is to compare the temperatures with a simple bash one liner script:

diff -Naur <(curl -s http://wttr.in/Sofia ) <(curl -s http://wttr.in/Beograd )

9. Using ansiweather command to get Weather Temperature / Wind / Humidity in one line beuatiful text

If you go and install answeather Linux package

apt-get install –yes ansiweather

You will get a shell script wrapper with ANSI colors and Unicode symbols support. Weather data comes from OpenWeatherMap, this is useful if wttr.in is not working due to some URL malfunction (due to service is DoS-ed) etc.

ansiweather -l Atina

ansiweather-Atina-weather-forecast-result-linux-text-console

Lets use ansiweather to print the weather prognosis for upcoming 5 days for near port of Burgas, BG

ansiweather -F -l Burgas

ansiweather-print-weather-forecast-prognosis-for-5-days-in-Linux-text-terminal

10. Get all Weather current forecast for each Capital in the world

You can download and use this simple plain text file list of All Country Capitals in the World (country-capitals-all-world.txt) with ansiweather and a bash loop to get displayed each and every current day Weather Forecast in the World, here is how:

while read line; do ansiweather -l $line; sleep 3; done < country-capitals-all-world.txt

ansiweather-all-countires-capitals-result

As you can see some of the very exotic third world capitals does not return data so 'ERROR: Cannot fetch weather data' is returned.

You can also substitute ansiweather with curl wttr.in/$line to do get the beautiful ASCII art 3 days weather forecast via wttr.in

while read line; do curl http://wttr.in/$line; sleep 3; done < country-capitals-all-world.txt

I'll be happy to know other nice ASCII Art supporting Web service to enjoy from text terminal on Linux (nomatter useful or) just funny joyful prank maniacal pranks such as Watching text ASCII version remake of Star Wars Classic Movie by simply telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl (if you haven't so just telnet and enjoy the streamed ASCIIs ! 🙂

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Talking about fun and ASCII, its worthy to mention hollywood Linux package

hipo@jeremiah:~/Desktop$ apt-cache show hollywood|grep -i desc -A 3
Description-en: fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble
This utility will split your console into a multiple panes of genuine
technobabble, perfectly suitable for any Hollywood geek melodrama.
It is particularly suitable on any number of computer consoles in the
—
Description-md5: 768f44c76220ea2b35f855ea34c8bc35
Homepage: http://launchpad.net/hollywood
Section: games
Priority: optional

Once installed on Debian with:

aptitude install -y hollywood
…

You can get in a rapid manner plenty of tmux (screen like – virtual console emulator) split screen statistics about your notebook / workstation / server CPU usage, mlocate.db status, info about plugged in machine voltage, Speedometer (statistics about Network bandwidth usage), System load avarage (CPU Count, Memory Utilization) and some other random info coming out of dmesg kernel log and more. The information displayed in splitted windows changes rapidly and (assuming you run it at home Desktop with a soundblaster) and not remotely, a james bond Agent 007 soundtrack is played on the back, that brings up one's adrenaline and makes it look even cooler.

hollywood-melodrama-technobubble-split-console-multiple-panes-for-genuine-technobubble

To give you an idea what to expect, here is shot of /usr/games/hollywood (the program start binary location) on Debian GNU / Linux running, Enjoy! 🙂

Tags: about, access, console, default, destination city, Displaying Current Moon Phase, domain location, ip, languages, linux?, look, png, Resolving, specific, terminal, tourist destination, Usage, web access, wget, Windows
Posted in Curious Facts, Educational, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

How to make Samba smbfs / cifs mount share location with user / pass credentials authenticate via file stored credentials

Friday, July 19th, 2019

That's pretty trivial and perhaps if you had to manage samba server or cifs on a Linux host you already know it but for beginners, that might be interesting.

So in this short article I will explain how to make configure smbfs / cifs authentication from Linux host A client to Linux host B server running smbd and nmbd samba server (which is the smfs / cifs share server) by using external authentication file for either mount command or if /etc/fstab used to automatically authenticate using a preconfigured mount saba share via /etc/fstab.

Before you start to do anything with samba on Linux host A client machine, you will need as a minimum to have installed cifs-utils or smbfs (assuming you're on Debian Linux like you can check with dpkg -l and if missing install it via:

apt-get install cifs-utils

Or on older systems or for smbfs support

apt-get install smbfs

The general mount smbfs share command without specified external credentials file would look like so:

mount //mynetworksharename/ /shares/data -o username=myusername, password=mypassword

So how to use external auth file to prevent samba shares users and passwords to not be stored in root user history all the time?

To do so it is pretty straight forward all you need to do is to create a single user / pass credentials variable defined lets say to file called .smbcredentials or .cifs under some directory lets /root/.smbcredentials.

One note here is (many people prefer to store the password under /root) for security reasons as root directory is usually readable only by administrator and would prevent a non-privileged user to read the user / pass which are stored in plain text.

.smbcredentials is described in mount.cifs man page, here is what it says about credentials variable understood by mount / mount.cifs command file syntax:

credentials=filename
specifies a file that contains a username and/or password. The format of the file is:

username=value
password=value

For a CIFS (Common Internet File System) which is a new implementation of old Windows Share (SMB protocol) avaiable in newer Windows XP / 7 / 10 machines, to do the cifs mount manually:

mount -v -t cifs //WINSHARESERVER/topsecretfiles /mnt/network/ -o credentials=/mnt/creds-file

or use

mount.cifs //WINSSHARE/topsecretfiles /mnt/network/ -o credentials=/root/.creds-file

For old smbfs protocol for backward compatibility so older Win 2000 or Winblows server XP PCs configured to also access the Linux samba mount.

mount -t smbfs //WINHARESERVER/topsecretfiles /mnt/network/ -o credentials=/mnt/.smbcredentials

Once you have the defined .smbcredentials file name, be sure to also protect it with properly set permissions like 0600 (rw) readable only for root user.

chmod 0600 /root/.smbcredentials

Note that in that example .smbcredentials is set to be a hidden file on purpose as this is a hidden file it will make it slightly less seenable if introduder breaks on the server (an example of security through obscurity)

Next lets see how to mount the Windows Samba Share permanently with predefined user / pass server login

For many non secured Windows shares one can use /etc/fstab line definition as simple as:

//server-share-name/sharename /mnt/shares/sharename cifs guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8 0

For password protected Win Share mounts however, the simplest way to do is via /etc/fstab line add like so:

//servername/sharename /mnt/shares/sharename cifs username=msusername,password=mspassword,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0

Note that the sec=ntlm is optional and remote samba server or Windows Share server version has to support this kind of authentication and in some cases you could safely reove sec=ntlm, just use it, when you know what you're doing. iocharset is good to have as for Russian / Bulgarian e.g. Cyrillic, Chineese, Indian and other exotic languages and other strange language encoding to be supported and properly shown on the mounted share it should be properly defined …,

A good permissions would be:

chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentials

To use the external /root/.smbcredentials password it shold be like so:

# cat /root/.smbcredentials

username=msusername
password=mssecretpassword56#

Finally /root/.smbcredentials record should be as so:

//share-server-name/sharename /mnt/shares/windowsshare cifs credentials=/home/ubuntuusername/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0

Note You should already have

/mnt/shares/windowshare created on server B (the ount client) with:

mkdir -p /mnt/shares/windowshare

To mount /etc/fstab defined filesystem to mount on next server boot then do

mount /mnt/shares/windowshare

or completely mount / remount all present /etc/fstab filesystems with the common

mount -a

(but here be careful as this might cause you troubles already other NFS or whatever FS is mounted and being read by clients) :

And you the remote Samba Share (mount location) – should be reachable with ping command and traceroute and remote server ports 139, 445 etc. should be up running opened and connectable from server B share-server-name/sharename

If you face some issues when trying to mount remote share with mount -t smbfs / mount.cifs then you can use smbclient with debug option to find out some more on the connectivity / authentication issue by using the smb share server IP address instead of hostnae and lets say a debug level of 3 like so:

smbclient -d3 -L //10.5.8.118/Files -A /root/.smbcredentials

[0] smbclient -d3 -L //10.2.3.111/Files -A /home/acteam/.smbcredentials lp_load_ex: refreshing parameters
Initialising global parameters
rlimit_max: increasing rlimit_max (1024) to minimum Windows limit (16384)
Processing section "[global]"
WARNING: The "syslog" option is deprecated
added interface eth0 ip=10.2.3.127 bcast=10.2.3.255 netmask=255.255.255.0
Client started (version 4.3.11-Ubuntu).
Connecting to 10.2.3.111 at port 445
Doing spnego session setup (blob length=120)
got OID=1.3.6.1.4.1.311.2.2.30
got OID=1.2.840.48018.1.2.2
got OID=1.2.840.113554.1.2.2
got OID=1.2.840.113554.1.2.2.3
got OID=1.3.6.1.4.1.311.2.2.10
got principal=not_defined_in_RFC4178@please_ignore
GENSEC backend 'gssapi_spnego' registered
GENSEC backend 'gssapi_krb5' registered
GENSEC backend 'gssapi_krb5_sasl' registered
GENSEC backend 'spnego' registered
GENSEC backend 'schannel' registered
GENSEC backend 'naclrpc_as_system' registered
GENSEC backend 'sasl-EXTERNAL' registered
GENSEC backend 'ntlmssp' registered
GENSEC backend 'ntlmssp_resume_ccache' registered
GENSEC backend 'http_basic' registered
GENSEC backend 'http_ntlm' registered
GENSEC backend 'krb5' registered
GENSEC backend 'fake_gssapi_krb5' registered
Got challenge flags:
Got NTLMSSP neg_flags=0x62898215
NTLMSSP: Set final flags:
Got NTLMSSP neg_flags=0x62088215
NTLMSSP Sign/Seal – Initialising with flags:
Got NTLMSSP neg_flags=0x62088215
NTLMSSP Sign/Seal – Initialising with flags:
Got NTLMSSP neg_flags=0x62088215
Domain=[TMGRID] OS=[Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 9600] Server=[Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 6.3]

Sharename Type Comment
——— —- ——-
ADMIN$ Disk Remote Admin
C$ Disk Default share
Files Disk
IPC$ IPC Remote IPC
MappedDrive Disk
Connecting to 10.2.3.111 at port 139
Connecting to 10.2.3.111 at port 139
Connection to 10.2.3.111 failed (Error NT_STATUS_RESOURCE_NAME_NOT_FOUND)
NetBIOS over TCP disabled — no workgroup available

Sum it up

Lets Summarize a bit, here I described how to mount smbfs and cifs mount shares with mount command, how to define the auto mount on server boot via /etc/fstab, how to mount manually /etc/fstab defined mount and what should be the syntax of .smbcredentials user / pass file and also pointed how to debug problems on samba / windows server location share mounts with smbclient command.

Tags: cifs, make, mount, samba, share, smbfs
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Samba, Various | 3 Comments »

How to remove ‘active contents’ from PDF file on Linux / Strip Active Contents from PDF

Thursday, July 18th, 2019

how-to-remove-active-content-from-pdf-with-ghoscript-on-gnu-linux.svg

I'm updating my Autiobography (CV) with my latest job eployeers, technology expertise and certifications and usually use the EuroPassCV standard web service to update already generated PDF files.The service as web based application service allows easy edit from the web as most web services which is quite handy and then allows Export to DOCX or PDF file format. So far so good but today I faced a really weird problem after, I've used successfully EuroPassCV service and downloaded the PDF to my computer and tried to submit my Curriculum Vitae application to SAP's Successfactor newly created account for the purpose I faced a weird I error saying

"The system does not allow files with Active contents. Please …"

Of course if this error message was received on a Start-up application on Application upload that would be fine, but come on this is SAP's Successfactors, it cannot accept a standard generated PDF from EuroPass which nowadays is a standard for CV here in Europe and hosted on of official European Union website europa.eu …

To me this is a clear signal SAP needs an experienced ICT specialists and Quality Assurance testers like me to fix their mess and I will be willing to help them if they contact me until its too late for them, but let me go back to the topic of this article which was how to remove active contents from a PDF file 🙂

So first lets make clear what is Active content in a file ?

Active contents is content that includes programs like Internet polls, JavaScript applications, stock tickers, animated images, ActiveX applications, action items, streaming video and audio, weather maps, embedded objects, and much more. Active content contains programs that trigger automatic actions on a Web page without the user's knowledge or consent.
Active contents (Macros) could exist in many file formats that are used daily in most companies / organizations daily, active content can be contained in documents such as MS Excel, Word, PDF, PowerPoint and so on.

So why does some applications disable document support for Active contents?

Well just for the reason of security, Active contents could often be some kind of malware or crapware and they can mess up with the web application (in case of bugs) or even mess up with server software if it is a complex warm like behavior exploiting some kind of vulnerability.
One thing to say about active contents removal on file upload by applications is that this practice could only be tolerated if the organization had already adapted a security through obscurity which most likely is the case with SAP's Successfactors and many other applications out there.

So next question is how to Panicea (Resolution) Active Contents existing in a PDF file

Assuming you have a GNU / Linux Desktop or server with ghostscript package installed (which is the case by default with virtually any modern Linux distribution), removing Active Contents from PDF to make possible file to be submitted to the picky Security Conscious application with a single command:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=CV-Georgi_Dimitrov_Georgiev-Europass-20190718-EN-noact-content.pdf -dBATCH CV-Georgi_Dimitrov_Georgiev-Europass-20190718-EN.pdf

After that the stripped active contents PDF file would succeed in uploading to web app.

Tags: contents', file, from, linux?, remove, strip
Posted in Everyday Life, File Convert Tools, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

Howto create Linux Music Audio CD from MP3 files / Create playable WAV format Audio CD Albums from MP3s

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

Recently my Mother asked me to prepare a Music Audio CD for her from a popular musician accordionist Stefan Georgiev from Dobrudja who has a unique folklore Bulgarian music.

As some of older people who still remember the age of the CD and who had most likely been into the CD burning Copy / Piracy business so popular in the countries of the ex-USSR so popular in the years 1995-2000 audio , Old CD Player Devices were not able to play the MP3 file format due to missing codecs (as MP3 was a proprietary compression that can't be installed on every device without paying the patent to the MP3 compression rights holder.

The revolutionary MP3 compression used to be booming standard for transferring Music data due to its high compression which made an ordinary MP3 of 5 minutes of 5MB (10+ times more compression than an ordinary classic WAV Audio the CPU intensiveness of MP3 files that puts on the reading device, requiring the CD Player to have a more powerful CPU.

Hence due to high licensing cost and requirement for more powerful CPU enabled Audio Player many procuders of Audio Players never introduced MP3 to their devices and MP3 Neve become a standard for the Audio CD that was the standard for music listening inside almost every car out there.

Nowdays it is very rare need to create a Audio CD as audio CDs seems to be almost dead (As I heard from a Richard Stallman lecture In USA nowadays there is only 1 shop in the country where you can still buy CD or DVD drives) and only in third world as Africa Audio CDs perhaps are still in circulation.

Nomatter that as we have an old Stereo CD player on my village and perhaps many others, still have some old retired CD reading devices being able to burn out a CD is a useful thing.

Thus to make mother happy and as a learning excercise, I decided to prepare the CD for her on my Linux notebook.
Here I'll shortly describe the takes I took to make it happen which hopefully will be useful for other people that need to Convert and burn Audio CD from MP3 Album.

1. First I downloaded the Album in Mp3 format from Torrent tracker

My homeland Bulgaria and specific birth place place the city of Dobrich has been famous its folklore: Galina Durmushlijska and Stefan Georgiev are just 2 of the many names along with Оркестър Кристал (Orchestra Crystal) and the multitude of gifted singers. My mother has a santiment for Stefan Georgiev, as she listened to this gifted accordinist on her Uncle's marriage.

Thus In my case this was (Стефан Георгиев Хора и ръченици от Добруджа) the album full song list here If you're interested to listen the Album and Enjoy unique Folklore from Dobrudja (Dobrich) my home city, Stefan Georgiev's album Hora and Rachenica Dances is available here

Stefan_Georgiev-old-audio-Music-CD-Hora-i-Rychenici-ot-Dobrudja-Horos-and-Ruchenitsas-from-Dobrudja-CD_Cover
I've downloaded them from Bulgarian famous torrent tracker zamunda.net in MP3 format.
Of course you need to have a CD / DVD readed and write device on the PC which nowdays is not present on most modern notebooks and PCs but as a last resort you can buy some cheap External Optical CD / DVD drive for 25 to 30$ from Amazon / Ebay etc.

2. You will need to install a couple of programs on Linux host (if you don't have it already)

To be able to convert from command line from MP3 to WAV you will need as minimum ffmpeg and normalize-audio packages as well as some kind of command line burning tool like cdrskin wodim which is
the fork of old good known cdrecord, so in case if you you're wondering what happened with it just
use instead wodim.

Below is a good list of tools (assuming you have enough HDD space) to install:

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-get install –yes dvd+rw-tools cdw cdrdao audiotools growisofs cdlabelgen dvd+rw-tools k3b brasero wodim ffmpeg lame normalize-audio libavcodec58

Note that some of above packages I've installed just for other Write / Read operations for DVD drives and you might not need that but it is good to have it as some day in future you will perhaps need to write out a DVD or something.
Also the k3b here is specific to KDE and if you're a GNOME user you could use Native GNOME Desktop app such brasero or if you're in a more minimalistic Linux desktop due to hardware contrains use XFCE's native xfburn program.

If you're a console / terminal geek like me you will definitely enjoy to use cdw

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-cache show cdw|grep -i description -A 1
Description-en: Tool for burning CD's – console version
Ncurses-based frontend for wodim and genisoimage. It can handle audio and
—
Description-md5: 77dacb1e6c00dada63762b78b9a605d5
Homepage: http://cdw.sourceforge.net/

3. Selecting preferred CD / DVD / BD program to use to write out the CD from Linux console

cdw uses wodim (which is a successor of good old known console cdrecord command most of use used on Linux in the past to burn out new Redhat / Debian / different Linux OS distro versions for upgrade purposes on Desktop and Server machines.

To check whether your CD / DVD drive is detected and ready to burn on your old PC issue:

root@jeremiah:/# wodim -checkdrive
Device was not specified. Trying to find an appropriate drive…
Detected CD-R drive: /dev/cdrw
Using /dev/cdrom of unknown capabilities
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 5
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'HL-DT-ST'
Identification : 'DVDRAM GT50N    '
Revision       : 'LT20'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc   CD-R/CD-RW driver (mmc_cdr).
Driver flags   : MMC-3 SWABAUDIO BURNFREE
Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO SAO/R96P SAO/R96R RAW/R16 RAW/R96P RAW/R96R

You can also use xorriso (whose added value compared to other console burn cd tools is is not using external program for ISO9660 formatting neither it use an external or an external burn program for CD, DVD or BD (Blue Ray) drive but it has its own libraries incorporated from libburnia-project.org libs.

Below output is from my Thinkpad T420 notebook. If the old computer CD drive is there and still functional in most cases you should not get issues to detect it.

cdw ncurses text based CD burner tool's interface is super intuitive as you can see from below screenshot:

cdw-burn-cds-from-console-terminal-on-GNU-Linux-and-FreeBSD-old-PC-computer

CDW has many advanced abilities such as “blanking” a disk or ripping an audio CD on a selected folder. To overcome the possible problem of CDW not automatically detecting the disk you have inserted you can go to the “Configuration” menu, press F5 to enter the Hardware options and then on the first entry press enter and choose your device (by pressing enter again). Save the setting with F9.

4. Convert MP3 / MP4 Files or whatever format to .WAV to be ready to burn to CD

Collect all the files you want to have collected from the CD album in .MP3 a certain directory and use a small one liner loop to convert files to WAV with ffmpeg:

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

for i in $( ls *.mp3); do ffmpeg -i $i $i.wav; done

If you don't have ffmpeg installed and have mpg123 you can also do the Mp3 to WAV conversion with mpg123 cmd like so:

for i in $( ls ); do mpg123 -w $i.wav $i.mp3; done

Another alternative for conversion is to use good old lame (used to create Mp3 audio files but abling to also) decode
mp3 to wav.

lame –decode somefile.mp3 somefile.wav

In the past there was a burn command tool that was able to easily convert MP3s to WAV but in up2date Linux modern releases it is no longer available most likely due to licensing issues, for those on older Debian Linux 7 / 8 / 9 / Ubuntu 8 to 12.XX / old Fedoras etc. if you have the command you can install burn and use it (and not bother with shell loops):

apt-get install burn

yum install burn
…

Once you have it to convert

$ burn -A -a *.mp3

5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are
unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.

for f in *; do mv "$f" `echo $f | tr ' ' '_'`; done

6. Normalize audio produced .WAV files (set the music volume to a certain level)

In case if wondering why normalize audio is needed here is short extract from normalize-audio man page command description to shed some light.

"normalize-audio is used to adjust the volume of WAV or MP3 audio files to a standard volume level. This is useful for things like creating mp3 mixes, where different recording levels on different albums can cause the volume to vary greatly from song to song."

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

normalize-audio -m *.wav

7. Burn the produced normalized Audio WAV files to the the CD

wodim -v -fix -eject dev='/dev/sr0' -audio -pad *.wav

Alternatively you can conver all your MP3 files to .WAV with anything be it audacity
or another program or even use
GNOME's CDBurn tool brasero (if gnome user) or KDE's CDBurn which in my opinion is
the best CD / DVD burning application for Linux K3B.

Burning Audio CD with K3b is up to few clicks and super easy and even k3b is going to handle the MP3 to WAV file Conversion itself. To burn audio with K3B just run it and click over 'New Audio CD Project'.

k3b-on-debian-gnu-linux-burn-audio-cd-screenshot

For those who want to learn a bit more on CD / DVD / Blue-Ray burning on GNU / Linux good readings are:
Linux CD Burning Mini Howto, is Linux's CD Writing Howto on ibiblio (though a bit obsolete) or Debian's official documentation on BurnCD.

8. What we learned here

Though the accent of this tutorial was how to Create Audio Music CD from MP3 on GNU / Linux, the same commands are available in most FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD ports tree so you can use the same method to build prepare Audio Music CD on *BSDs.

In this article, we went through few basic ways on how to prepare WAV files from MP3 normalize the new created WAV files on Linux, to prepare files for creation of Audio Music CD for the old mom or grandma's player or even just for fun to rewind some memories. For GUI users this is easily done with k3b, brasero or xfburn.

I've pointed you to cdw a super useful text ncurses tool that makes CD Burninng from plain text console (on servers) without a Xorg / WayLand GUI installed super easy. It was shortly reviewed what has changed over the last few years and why and why cdrecord was substituted for wodim. A few examples were given on how to handle conversion through bash shell loops and you were pointed to some extra reading resources to learn a bit more on the topic.
There are plenty of custom scripts around for doing the same CD Burn / Covnersion tasks, so pointing me to any external / Shell / Perl scripts is mostly welcome.

Hope this learned you something new, Enjoy ! 🙂

Tags: application, apt-get, audacity, Below, case, command, command tool, console, debian linux, Device, Driver, due, DVD, folklore, gnome user, good, home, line, make, need, program, screenshot, standard, WAV
Posted in File Convert Tools, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various | No Comments »

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Archive for the ‘Linux and FreeBSD Desktop’ Category

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Archive for the ‘Linux and FreeBSD Desktop’ Category

Why run an Own Home or Dedicated Own server nowadays is a must in the Digital Age ?

– The Downsides of using Public free hosted email address such as Google / Yahoo / Yandex / Mail.com etc.

– Why using Android Phone with Gmail is terrible for your privacy / myaccount.google.com and what Google knows about you

1. Install prerequired packages for Email setup and set hostname

2. Install Postfix Mail Server Debian package

3. Setup Postfix Mail server configuration main.cf

4. Testing email sent is working on Postfix Mail Server

5. Install and configure Dovecot IMAP daemon

6. Restart dovecot and test if configuration works as expected

7. Create new local email user and test mail delivery and IMAP dovecot connectivity

8. Install and Configure RainLoop (PHP) WebMail

1. cpuinfo

2. neofetch

3. CPU-X graphical user interface hardware report Linux GUI alternative to Windows CPU-Z

5. Inxi full featured system information script

1. Scanning for TCP opened / filtered ports remote Linux / Windows server

2. Performing a standard HTTP request with netcat

3. Scanning a range of opened / filtered UDP ports

4. Port Scanning TCP listening ports with Netcat

5. Port scanning range of IP addresses with netcat

6. Checking whether UDP port traffic is allowed to destination server

7. Checking whether TCP port traffic allowed to DST remote server

8. Proxying traffic with netcat

Using netcat as a bind shell (make any local program / process listen and deliver via nc)

9. Copying files over network with netcat

10. Copying piped archived directory files with netcat

11. Creating a one page webserver with netcat and ncat

12. Cloning Hard disk partitions with netcat

1. Changing default console text editor on Debian based Linux

2. Changing default text editor on any Linux

3. Changing the default text editor for mcview if all else fails

Setting the Bash Prompt in Terminal / Console on GNU / Linux

1. How to show current hour:minute:seconds / print full date in Prompt Shell (PS)

2. How to make the prompt of a System user appear Green

3. Print New line, username@hostname, base PTY, shell level, history (number), newline and full working directory $PWD

4. Showing the numbert of jobs the shell is currently managing.

5. Set color change on command failure

6. Other beautiful PS1 Color Prompts with statistics

7. Add Muliple Colors to Same Shell prompt

8. Setting / Change Shell background Color

9. Howto Use bash shell function inside PS1 variable

10. PS2, PS3, PS4 little known variables

Summary

Install Curl data transfer tool if it is not already

Where wttr.in could be useful ?

1. Getting a three days Weather Forecast prognosis for city / town location

3. Getting Forecast results for a Tourist Destination

4. Display Forecast for a specific server IP

5. Download PNG image picture from wttr.in service

6. Displaying Current Moon Phase

7. Getting help for wttr.in terminal Waether Forecast results

8. Comparing two cities weather from command line

9. Using ansiweather command to get Weather Temperature / Wind / Humidity in one line beuatiful text

10. Get all Weather current forecast for each Capital in the world

1. First I downloaded the Album in Mp3 format from Torrent tracker

2. You will need to install a couple of programs on Linux host (if you don't have it already)

3. Selecting preferred CD / DVD / BD program to use to write out the CD from Linux console

4. Convert MP3 / MP4 Files or whatever format to .WAV to be ready to burn to CD

5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.

6. Normalize audio produced .WAV files (set the music volume to a certain level)

7. Burn the produced normalized Audio WAV files to the the CD

8. What we learned here

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5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are
unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.