Restore a SSH public key
I recently had the problem that I had on a system the private part
of the SSH key but its public part got lost.
Generating a new key pair wasn't possible as the public part
was still installed on other systems for proper public key
authentication and I could not change this.
So, I needed to restore the public part of the SSH key. After a bit
of using my favourite search engine, I noticed that it is way easier
than I expected:
ssh-keygen -y -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
This command will print the public part of the key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa
to stdout.
Isn't it easy?
gpg-update-key
If you are using GnuPG, you may receive new signatures or do other changes to your
GPG key and want to upload it to keyservers and/or your webserver to make it easier
for other people to find it.
Since this is a tedious task, I wrote a little script "gpg-update-key"
which does the job for me:
#!/bin/sh
KEY="CC03633F700990F2"
REMOTE_DIR="myserver.org:/var/www"
# upload the key to some key servers
gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pgp.uni-mainz.de --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pgp.surfnet.nl --send-key ${KEY}
# export the key
gpg --armor --export ${KEY} > /tmp/pub.asc
gpg --export ${KEY} > /tmp/pub.key
scp /tmp/pub.asc /tmp/pub.key ${REMOTE_DIR}
Note that you should change the KEY and REMOTE_DIR variables
otherwise the script won't help you that much :).
Also, the list of key servers to upload are just my personal
favourites. Adjust them to your needs.
Building SVN version of Xfce4
This is a little build script for Xfce4 to fetch and compile the sources from SVN.
Short instructions: You should start with an empty directory, where you put this script.
Edit the script and modify the list of packages or modules, you want to install.
Then run the script with:
./xfce4-build.sh init
this fetches the sources from the subversion servers and:
./xfce4-build.sh build
configures, builds and installs the sources. For more information read the script(it's really simple).
The script can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/xfce4-build.sh.
About distribution bugtrackers, delays and rays of hope
We all know the fancy bugtrackers of the various distributions. I don't have a doubt
the idea behind was good and for distribution specific bugs they are great.
But when it comes to concrete application specific bugs, it often happens that
users report them to the distribution bugtrackers instead of to the specific
software project. At this point, it depends how deep is the relation between the
distribution packager of the relevant software package and the upstream authors.
Based on my personal experience, the conversation between down- and upstream is not
always as good and intensive as it should be. Unfortunately, this affects both,
the users and the upstream project. The users maybe won't get a response to their
bug report in time or even no response at all. Upstream authors maybe don't notice
about known problems with their software and so can't fix them.
After all, I think distribution bugtrackers for not distro-specific bugs just hinder
communication and development in general. Users should contact upstream in case of
software bugs in the first place instead using the indirection of distribution bugtrackers.
Let's see an example:
in the past in Launchpad (Ubuntu's bugtracker) there were reported some bugs in Geany.
As far as I know, most of them were not answered and they definetely were not forwarded
to upstream, i.e. me. I/we didn't even know that there were reported and unanswered bugs.
But sometimes things actually get better:
Jérôme Guelfucci, as one of the Ubuntu Geany package maintainers, stepped in and
took care of the existing bug reports. We met on IRC and then walked through the list of
reported bugs at Launchpad. Luckily, most of the reports were invalid just because they were
so old that these have been fixed in the meantime. Others had too few information to
effectively work on them and so they got marked as Incomplete waiting for feedback
from the reporter. So, now after some work which was really overdue, things are better now
and Jérôme will try to keep up with the Ubuntu Geany bugs and ping me whenever something
interesting happens.
Thanks Jérôme!
Yay. Why couldn't this happen in general? In case of Debian and Geany, things are even better
because I personally use Debian and follow Geany bugs reported on bugs.debian.org. But what about all the other distributions?
I'm not sure I want to really know...
Strange search results
While viewing the logs of geany.uvena.de, I noticed one of the logged search keyphrases
was "die moldau friedrich smetana".
As this classical music composer and his most popular symphonic poem "The Moldau" is
in no way related to Geany, it's quite surprising that a very popular search engine
lists geany.uvena.de as the first hit in the results list.
I'm wondering and happy ;-).
Geany
This is my most interesting and most actively developed project. Geany
is a small and lightweight integrated development environment. It
was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few
dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent
as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME. So
it is using only the GTK2 toolkit and therefore you need only the
GTK2 runtime libraries to run Geany.
Basic features of Geany:
- syntax highlighting
- code folding
- code completion
- snippet completion of often used constructs like if, for and while
- auto completion of XML and HTML tags
- call tips
- many supported filetypes like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal, Assembler
- symbol lists
- build support
- plugin interface
- ...
Further information, screenshots and downloads can be found on
Geany's Website http://www.geany.org.
Gigolo
Gigolo is a frontend to easily manage connections to remote filesystems using
GIO/GVfs. It allows you to quickly connect/mount a remote filesystem and manage
bookmarks of such.
It is part of the Xfce Goodies project and also hosted on the Xfce servers though
it doesn't have any hard Xfce dependencies and can be used on other desktop
environments as well. The only hard dependency is GTK2 (2.12 or newer).
More information and the source code for download can be found at
http://www.uvena.de/gigolo/.
PyWsdlGen
PyWsdlGen is a little tool to generate a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file
from Python source files. It parses a given Python source file and reads all public methods
defined in this file to generate a WSDL file to be used for example for SOAP services
implemented in Python.
For more information please, check out the GIT repository, available at
http://repo.or.cz/w/pywsdlgen.git.
Vomak
Vomak is a very simple IRC bot with a few basic features.
It connects to an IRC server and joins a channel. Then it waits for commands
like ?? keyword. This is a built-in help system. Additionally,
the bot creates a socket (Unix Domain Socket) where it accepts directly
IRC messages and a few special commands, see Socket Communication.
More information and the source code for download can be found at
http://www.uvena.de/vomak/.
Note
Vomak is dead. Please don't use it anymore or drop me a mail if you want to continue developing it.
VzUbcMon
A simple monitor to regularly check for UBC failcount changes in OpenVZ/Virtuozzo containers.
It's designed to run as a cronjob to mail the report to the admin if there are any changes.
The source code for download can be found at
http://repo.or.cz/w/vzubcmon.git.
Xfce4 Dict - The Xfce4 Dictionary
This program allows you to search different kinds of dictionary services
for words or phrases and shows you the result.
Currently you can query a "Dict" server(RFC 2229), any online dictionary
service by opening a web browser or search for words using a spell check
program like aspell, ispell or enchant.
xfce4-dict contains a stand-alone application called "xfce4-dict" and a
panel plugin for the Xfce panel.
For more information, please see the project's website
http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-dict.
Show or hide the mouse cursor
hide_cursor.c is a small tool, to hide or show the mouse cursor
on an X display. The source code is based on a tool from Nevrax
(www.nevrax.com). To compile it, just type something like:
gcc -lXft hide_cursor.c -o hide_cursor
Run it with "hide" to hide the cursor:
./hide_cursor hide
Run it with "show" to show the cursor again:
./hide_cursor show
The source code can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/misc/hide_cursor.c.
About Me
This is some sort of homepage/blog/dump/whatever of Enrico Tröger.
There is no private data here. If you want to know any private details
about me, you should ask me, ideally while meeting me instead of
grabbing a website.
My computer is driven by Linux, to be more exactly by
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/).
On my desktop a very nice and small desktop environment is running called
Xfce (http://www.xfce.org). If you do not know it already, you should really test it.
Contact: enrico( dot )troeger( at )uvena( dot )de
About Uvena
Uvena is the prime of the Uvena system, located in the Outer Rims
of the Star Wars universe. It is the homeworld of the Shistavanen,
also often called wolfmen. They are good hunters and can hide
very well. The Empire employs them as scouts because of their very
well developed senses.
About this server
These pages are generated by PyBlosxom (http://pyblosxom.bluesock.org/)
and served by Lighttpd (http://www.lighttpd.net) 1.4.x running on
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny).
