Why in the heck does Apple's High Sierra version of OS X lack a telnet client? It smells like they removed it for "security" reasons but without it, how am I supposed to poke at an SMTP server to manually test mail server things in my life as an email geek?
Showing posts with label unix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unix. Show all posts
Linux: Redirecting or Silencing Script Output
I've been writing shell scripts on *nix systems for more than twenty years. You'd think that by now I'd have this memorized, but I don't. Since I'm tired of looking it up every time, I'll post this here so that it can help jog my memory next time around.
Linux: Scraping web output with wget
This is probably a tip that smarter folks than me know already, but I just ran into this today and decided I'd write it down for future reference.
Ubuntu on the Eee: Way Cool!
I had actually tried loading Ubuntu 7.10 on my 12” Toshiba laptop, but there is some bug preventing audio from working, and I got fed up with fighting with it. I thought to myself, if this is the kind of trouble I’m going to have with Ubuntu, historically considered the “easy” Linux, then I’m in for a world of hurt.
But, I did a bit of reading, and found that a bunch of other folks are running Ubuntu on the Eee just fine, and there’s a website chock-full of info on how to get it installed and running.
The installation process was pretty easy. I have an external CD-ROM drive, so I downloaded the normal ISO disk image of Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) and installed it via their normal installer. Afterward, I copied the Ubuntu Eee script to an SDHC card, and ran it, to tweak everything that requires tweaking. (As the instructions suggested, I had to re-run it after loading a bunch of updates…and I did have do those mod probe commands before everything completely behaved.)
After all that, I’m up and running, and very happy.
I can tell that Ubuntu (or Gnome) is putting a bit more load on the Eee than Xandros/KDE was. I may try loading Xubuntu instead and seeing if that makes it slightly more responsive. But even accounting for that, I’m very happy with the results. I have a fully working system, don’t have to worry about filling up the drive space as quickly (by, say, upgrading OpenOffice without the old one taking up space on the default UnionFS partition), and lots more unixy-stuff “just works” without having to tweak it or work around Xandros/Eee customization issues.
I’ve been using the computer with Ubuntu on it since Thursday or Friday (today is Monday), and have even been using it for work today. I work for an internet company, so we’re all about web applications and Outlook. I’m using Thunderbird instead of Outlook, and that’s working just fine (though I have to login to the webmail interface to get at my calendar). Firefox is just Firefox, like on every other platform, and I’m having no issues there. Same with OpenOffice…all working excellently.
Slingplayer on Linux: Blah
So, I've gotten Slingplayer to run on Debian Linux, thanks to various how-to guides.
Previously, I got it to run on my Asus Eee laptop using the same guides. The audio and video quality were crap, though. At the time, I figured, oh well, the Eee just doesn't have enough horsepower to run Slingplayer under Wine.
But, my Debian desktop is much faster, and it still sucks:
As far as my tries at it, no matter what I run it on and how I configure it, it just blows.
Sling Media, I'm bummed. Where's the Linux client that Slingplayer should've had from day one?
Previously, I got it to run on my Asus Eee laptop using the same guides. The audio and video quality were crap, though. At the time, I figured, oh well, the Eee just doesn't have enough horsepower to run Slingplayer under Wine.
But, my Debian desktop is much faster, and it still sucks:
- Video: The video quality is awful, though potentially tolerable considering this is all a hack.
- Audio: Fail, fail, fail. The audio skips constantly, gets stuck if you resize a window, and randomly will spew static for many seconds at a time.
As far as my tries at it, no matter what I run it on and how I configure it, it just blows.
Sling Media, I'm bummed. Where's the Linux client that Slingplayer should've had from day one?
ProcCGI for shell script postform handling
Note to self: If you're going to build shell script CGIs, you need ProcCGI. I've been using this thing for years, and it's invaluable. It's a simple C program that will convert postform information into variables that you can access from your shell script. It really is a shell scripter's best friend.
I'm dropping this note here, because every couple years, I start over on a new webhost, or new platform, and forget the name of ProcCGI. As it's invaluable, that's unacceptable! So, hopefully this will help jog my memory, next time.
(And maybe I'll even remember to do " apt-get install build-essential " on Ubuntu first.)
I'm dropping this note here, because every couple years, I start over on a new webhost, or new platform, and forget the name of ProcCGI. As it's invaluable, that's unacceptable! So, hopefully this will help jog my memory, next time.
(And maybe I'll even remember to do " apt-get install build-essential " on Ubuntu first.)
Cygwin and fetchmail
I've been a frequent user of both Cywgin and fetchmail for rather a long time.
For a project I'm working on, I found that it would be very useful to be able to download messages from Gmail to shell scripts running under Windows. So, that means getting fetchmail to work under Cygwin.
This article gives you a pretty quick and easy overview of how to get fetchmail running under Cywgin. Problem is, it doesn't work. Not on fetchmail on my laptop, anyway.
I kept getting an error: "nodename nor servname provided, or not known" whenever running fetchmail with fetchmail -v (the -v meaning verbose -- I recommend always calling fetchmail with -v)
After a bit of Googling, here's what I found: You need to add the following to the /etc/services file on Cygwin:
pop3s 995/tcp
The error message is apparently specific to sites that require SSL to connect. The wording apparently indicates that fetchmail and Cygwin don't know how to establish a POP3 SSL connection, because it's not specified in the services list with a port entry. After I did that, it worked like a charm.
Here's another tip. Check out my .fetchmailrc file:
poll pop.gmail.com proto pop3 and options no dns
user 'randomusername@gmail.com' password 'pwgoeshere' options keep ssl
fetchlimit 1
mda "/usr/bin/tee incoming.txt > /dev/null"
Note some of the things I've changed around here. I set "fetchlimit 1" which downloads only one message at a time, and I set an "mda" setting. This stands for "mail delivery agent." It's made for forwarding inbound mail to some other script or process, like procmail. Here I'm tricking it by using the "tee" command (which simply takes stdin and outputs it to both stdout and the file specified) to take the inbound piece of mail and put it in the file incoming.txt. I added the "> /dev/null" to not bother with the stdout output.
Remove the word "keep" if you don't want it to leave the mail on the server. (I'm using the "keep" option just for testing. I'll have to remove it as I move forward.)
There's probably a fancier way to take a single email via pop3 and put it into a text file for further processing; but this quick and dirty method is serving me well.
If you find any of this information useful, please let me know!
For a project I'm working on, I found that it would be very useful to be able to download messages from Gmail to shell scripts running under Windows. So, that means getting fetchmail to work under Cygwin.
This article gives you a pretty quick and easy overview of how to get fetchmail running under Cywgin. Problem is, it doesn't work. Not on fetchmail on my laptop, anyway.
I kept getting an error: "nodename nor servname provided, or not known" whenever running fetchmail with fetchmail -v (the -v meaning verbose -- I recommend always calling fetchmail with -v)
After a bit of Googling, here's what I found: You need to add the following to the /etc/services file on Cygwin:
pop3s 995/tcp
The error message is apparently specific to sites that require SSL to connect. The wording apparently indicates that fetchmail and Cygwin don't know how to establish a POP3 SSL connection, because it's not specified in the services list with a port entry. After I did that, it worked like a charm.
Here's another tip. Check out my .fetchmailrc file:
poll pop.gmail.com proto pop3 and options no dns
user 'randomusername@gmail.com' password 'pwgoeshere' options keep ssl
fetchlimit 1
mda "/usr/bin/tee incoming.txt > /dev/null"
Note some of the things I've changed around here. I set "fetchlimit 1" which downloads only one message at a time, and I set an "mda" setting. This stands for "mail delivery agent." It's made for forwarding inbound mail to some other script or process, like procmail. Here I'm tricking it by using the "tee" command (which simply takes stdin and outputs it to both stdout and the file specified) to take the inbound piece of mail and put it in the file incoming.txt. I added the "> /dev/null" to not bother with the stdout output.
Remove the word "keep" if you don't want it to leave the mail on the server. (I'm using the "keep" option just for testing. I'll have to remove it as I move forward.)
There's probably a fancier way to take a single email via pop3 and put it into a text file for further processing; but this quick and dirty method is serving me well.
If you find any of this information useful, please let me know!
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