Second Advent

Jesus, time flies. It’s almost Christmas. I’ve decided to attend FOSDEM20 in February even though I have no business being there. But I figure it will motivate me to keep working on my ideas. Kind of like signing up for a marathon when you can’t even run 500m without getting winded and joint pains. Yeah…

Today I worked in Þjóðarbókhlaðan in downtown Reykjavík. It’s a really nice, quiet and free place to get work done. It’s crowded in December and May due to the University of Iceland exam season, but one finds a spot eventually.

While working I listened to Lana Del Rey’s album, Ultraviolence and Wu Tang’s 36 chambers

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Linux basics

As it turns out I already set up ssh keys before. In order to follow the tutorial I found, on creating ssh keys, I decided just to back up my old ssh key and delete it. For that it’s useful to know some basic commands…

cp -a /source/. /dest/

“The -a option is an improved recursive option, that preserve all file attributes, and also preserve symlinks. The . at end of the source path is a specific cp syntax that allow to copy all files and folders, included hidden ones.”

– enzotib (askubuntu)

rm -r dirname

“To remove non-empty directories and all the files within them, use the rm command with the-r (recursive) option. If a directory or a file within the directory is write-protected, you will be prompted to confirm the deletion.”

–linuxize (https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-remove…)

NMAP

Also, I found a decent page on nmap commands. Good for people with a gold fish memory like myself that can’t keep track of their server’s internal network’s ip address.

The parameter -sL (List scan) is the less offensive one, it enumerates the IP addresses in the network and tries to resolve through reverse-DNS lookup (resolve from ip to host) to know the hosts are there. This command is useful to print a list of hosts, In the terminal type:

https://linuxhint.com/nmap_ping_sweep/

nmap  -sL  172.31.1.1-255

SSH keys

The tutorial I followed to setup an SSH key for accessing my server:

https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-set-up-ssh-keys-on-ubuntu-1804/

I’ve grappled with rsa keys for a while. It’s really hard for me to use tools if I fundamentally don’t understand the underlying technology. But after reading the above tutorial and another website I feel a little better about my understanding of rsa keys.

I managed to activate SSH key login on my server and decided to use the optional passphrase for extra security, as someone advised me to do. We’ll see if in the future that becomes a problem for automated things like Ansible

My next focus will probably be a command-line setup of KVM, and after that maybe docker. I would also like to figure out a good way to access my router setup page remotely. So many things to learn, so much procrastination