Bash

Shell Script to Route Multiple Public/Private Interfaces

JS Morisset Bash, Linux

If you have a server with multiple interfaces – either public and/or private – your routing table might look something like this:

This example shows one private interface with IP 192.168.0.51, two public interfaces with IPs 17.10.20.51 and 105.104.72.23, and a default route to 17.10.20.1. This means that any traffic to/from an IP outside the interface’s subnets is sent to 17.10.20.1 — and this is where problems occur (and probably why you’re reading this article). ;-)

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Optimize Images to Save Bandwidth and Speed Page Load

JS Morisset Bash, Perl, UNIX (Generic), WordPress

A few weeks ago I mentioned the wesley.pl script from GitHub to optimize images, and how I had modified it to keep (or discard) the EXIF / XMP information. Making sure images are as small as possible is important to save bandwidth and improve page load times (and google rank), so I think it’s worth discussing my image optimization process in more detail.

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Autossh Startup Script for Multiple Tunnels

JS Morisset Bash, CentOS, SSH

When an encrypted VPN is not available, the next best solution is usually port-forwarding one or more port(s) through an SSH tunnel. The down-side of SSH is that by itself it cannot maintain a persistent connection — network issues may force the tunnel to stop responding, or even drop completely. Autossh is a small front-end for SSH that can monitor the connection, and restart the tunnel if it drops or stops responding. I found that the startup scripts available for autossh on the internet were a little too basic for my needs — I wanted autossh to start multiple connections, and to start/stop each one individually if I needed — so I wrote my own.

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WordPress OS Disk Cache Report, Prime and Flush

JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic), WordPress

I wrote a bash script this morning to report the size of WordPress cache folders, the number of files they contain, read each file to prime the OS disk cache, and optionally flush the OS disk cache as well. This might be a script you could execute to email a daily/weekly report of cache folder sizes, or perhaps execute during/after booting a server to prime the OS disk cache, or even on a regular schedule to make sure the OS cache is always primed. The script also has a “flush” argument to sync and drop the OS disk cache, which isn’t very useful (to me) except to see the difference in speed between a clean and primed cache (about 11s vs 0.4s for all websites on my server).

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Quick Freeze / Thaw of Reverse Zones

JS Morisset Bash, BIND, UNIX (Generic)

I had to update several reverse zone files today, so wrote a quick for-loop in bash to freeze and thaw all the zones. The script parsed the zone file names and reversed them into a proper d.c.b.a.in-addr.arpa format. Later I tweaked it with sed to make it more flexible (in order to pass it a full or partial IP address), but ended up using tac for the reversing part instead – that’s what it’s made for after all. And if you’re wondering what tac stand for, just read cat backwards. :-)

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Wget with Firefox Cookies

JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic)

I recently found myself needing to scrape information from a website that uses login credentials. The authentication and session information was available in several cookies, which Wget could use, if the cookies were stored in a plain text file. I used Firefox to login and set the cookies, but Firefox saves it’s cookies in an sqlite data file, which must be exported before Wget can use it. A quick Google search turned up a few possible methods using sqlite3, which I’ve adapted here to use with Wget. I’ve also added some additional (example) code to extract hrefs and print them out, along with the webpage url. The script is called with the target url as the only command line argument.

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Update a Dynamic DNS IP with BIND

JS Morisset Bash, BIND, UNIX (Generic)

I wrote the following nsupdate-ddns.sh script to update the dynamic DNS entry for my laptop when switching network locations. There are several ways to execute a script like this automatically (cronjob, startup script, launcher, etc.) — I chose to use Sidekick for Mac OS X, which allows me to execute it when switching locations (either network or physical). This script can also create the private authentication key needed by the DDNS BIND server, and will display some sample configuration values. If you’re setting up a new DDNS BIND server, you can use the examples to configure your dynamic zone file.

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Autocomplete SSH Hostnames

JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic)

There are plenty of SSH autocomplete (or command-line completion) scripts available on the web, but I found most don’t go far enough — they usually just parse the ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ignoring the ~/.ssh/config and /etc/hosts files. Some of these scripts also generate a static autocomplete list at login, and can’t include new hostnames added during the session. The following script uses a function call to autocomplete hostnames dynamically, and fetches hostnames from the ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ~/.ssh/config and system-wide /etc/hosts file.

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