All things Linux

[Noodles]

So seems like a good place to ask.

Is there a way to make SSH automatically start in a Screen container (or equivalent) so if I get disconnected, I can just resume it later by reconnecting.

 

[Essence Lumin]

nn for the win for usenet. It's been at least 20 years since I've used it though.

 

[Chalice Yao]

So seems like a good place to ask.

Is there a way to make SSH automatically start in a Screen container (or equivalent) so if I get disconnected, I can just resume it later by reconnecting.

Technically, yes. You could have the screen command(s) in your remote Server's /home/username/.bashrc.

This of course requires some bash scripting knowledge:
However, this will get run each time you open up a bash shell (i.e. also when making new screen windows, etc) so check if the SSH_CONNECTION variable is set.
If it is set, run either screen (if there is no screen session yet) or screen -Udx if (ps aux | fgrep screen |fgrep yourusername) returns any PS lines.

Personally I simply fall into the habit of typing screen -Udx after ssh login

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Edit: does Alpine function as a newsreader and accidentally out people by publically posting replies to private emails that include a Newsgroups header like Pine did?

Alpine has NNTP support, yes. If the asked problem is possible though I cannot tell, because I never used it as newsreader - could be, that they have some protection builtin against it, then again maybe not.

If I would still use Usenet, I would prefer other programs as newsreader over Alpine - either I would personally use Tin on the text console because this is a program dedicated to that task, or Knode under X11.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

So seems like a good place to ask.

Is there a way to make SSH automatically start in a Screen container (or equivalent) so if I get disconnected, I can just resume it later by reconnecting.

Use the -s option with a little support script. Something like this (probably requires tweaking):

#!/bin/sh

SSH=/bin/ssh; # Or whatever the path to ssh is.

# Note this will screw up quoting, you will probably need to add a little loop on "$@" if that's an issue.
exec screen -s "$SSH $*"

Note that this doesn't handle the ssh keychain issue.

Personally I run the screen on the destination system instead of locally.

That can also be handled by a little script but I haven't automated it yet because of the ssh keychain issue.

If I would still use Usenet, I would prefer other programs as newsreader over Alpine - either I would personally use Tin on the text console because this is a program dedicated to that task, or Knode under X11.

Yeh, I would use trn, but back in the day a lot of people used Pine and accidentally released private personal information about themselves or others because they were replying to an email someone had sent them from a newsreader. Crispin responded by flaming news readers for including the Newsgroups line in email responses to messages like they'd been doing for like a decade before Pine was released.

If he'd made that argument in 1981 instead of the early '90s it might have been a useful response.

I hope Alpine did better.

 

[Noodles]

Personally I simply fall into the habit of typing screen -Udx after ssh login

Yeah I have been trying to get into that habit with not a lot of luck. I also found a suggestion of setting up a second device to SSH into using a special SSH that's more forgiving (I forget the name) then doing SSH from there, but that feels like extra steps.

Maybe I just need a post it note reminder on the monitor until I built the habit. The problem isn't always even flakey connections, sometimes I get some process going and its taking longer than expected and I need to log out and go do something else.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Losin’, losin’, losin’,
Trolls we’re disapprovin',
Keep them trolls a-movin', killfile!
Don't try to understand 'em,
Extinguish fires, don’t fan them.
Soon you'll see quiet far and wide.
You’ll miss out on their baitin',
Their arguin’ and ravin',
They’re waitin' to be in your killfile!

That which makes the famous *plonk* sound.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

A lot of people at work are into tmux, which basically combines a secure connection and screen. I haven't dug into it yet because my ssh scripts are working for me. It runs over UDP sending screen updates, not simply sending characters byte by byte.

Edit/Warning: I noticed it because this one co-worker had a zillion "waiting" tmux sessions they had basically forgotten about. So it apparently requires a bit of personal discipline if you have a bunch of servers you're working on.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Lesser known text based mail clients/software
Here are just some lesser known text based mail clients/software, just to showcase that there is more to Linux than just Alpine and Mutt, though both are normally enough for most.

• Elm - the granddaddy of mail programs, last release 2005 - so basically dead.
• Cone - a Pine clone of the makers of the Courier IMAP/MTA, which rarely anybody uses at all.
• Emacs - being an extensible editor, Emacs features many different mail modes you can use like Mew or Wanderlust. Of course not everybody likes Emacs, but here you go. By the way the once popular GNUs has not had a new release since 11 years.
• Aerc - a new client, still in development and has reached version 0.4.0 by now.
• NMH - a suite of roughly 30 programs which follows the Unix philosophy for "one program for one task". Most therefore are using it with a frontend.

That's it for the moment and it is pretty sure still somewhat incomplete, the next category is still quite a new breed of mail software, where some started development around 2010+ - local mail indexers. There is a bunch of such indexers now around like Linux, which can tag your emails like Gmail does based on filter rules automatically.

Most of these indexers don't care about receiving and sending the emails at all, so they use instead other programs to handle that stuff like offlineimap and msmtp. The most well known indexers are Sup, Notmuch and Mu; for handling the emails they do normally rely on third party frontends.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Also /bin/mail, and Mail/mailx. While you're being completist. Also "less /var/spool/mail/yourname".

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Of course that's possible (less), others would maybe use find for that task. But my focus are programs especially written for that task, not general purpose commands which might just display some.

Aside that NMH was missing though. Sighs.

 

[Noodles]

I have discovered SSHFS and it may be the best thing ever.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

In Reference to the imgur posted by Free in the std:string str thread:

std::string str ("Nobody cares about development...");

The code was obtuse. Deliberately I found out later ... Sometimes when really bored at work, I write my own programs that are really, really obfuscated. I do this intentionally so it's not obvious that they are childish dick and sex jokes to entertain me while bored, lol. ...been doing a...

www.virtualverse.one

I did my own fake hacking video. While I am a Linux user, I can't program my way out of a paper bag. Opening up a bunch of xterms with nerdy looking things in them, using the OpenGL analzyer with XMMS, running cmatrix and so forth, with a simple little bash script to look like fake hacking "The Gibson" from the film "Hackers" with techy-sounding nonsense. I had to google to find out how to do a progress bar in bash.


The script is:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Contacting the Gibson"
sleep 2;
echo "Probing the Gibson"
sleep 2;
echo "Analyzing the IPsec Firewall Django"
sleep 2;
echo "Synergizing the Paradigmic Crypto Parameters"
sleep 2;
echo "Crosstalk achieved! Handshaking the Kernel!"
sleep 2;
echo "☠Hacking the Gibson☠"

for x in {1..50} ; do
    sleep .1    # do some work here
    printf .
done | pv -pt -i0.2 -s50 -w 80 > /dev/null
echo -e "GIBSON HACKED!\nMESS WITH THE BEST, DIE LIKE THE REST" | toilet -f smblock --filter border:metal -w 70

 

[Essence Lumin]

Hmm -
toilet not found

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Hmm -
toilet not found

Yeah toilet (and perhaps pv) you'll have to install from your distro's repos. It's like figlet
Summary : Display large colorful characters in text mode
Description : The TOIlet project attempts to create a free replacement for the
: FIGlet utility. TOIlet stands for "The Other Implementation’s
: letters", coined after FIGlet's "Frank, Ian and Glen’s letters".

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Had to laugh at neofetch and cmatrix. I read a fair amt of linux subreddits (has its own category) and almost every single screen shot includes neofetch, I suppose for its info, but people also just seem to like how it looks.

When I watch videos related to linux, they almost always have multiple monitors, for obvious reasons of recording, but they too almost always have at least one of them displaying cmatrix.

 

[Free]

Chrono, the only thing your script is missing is something like:

>> Exploiting backdoor access to hidden FTP server

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

This is the only good scene in the Matrix sequels, because they're actually using real tools... nmap to find the port to attack, and sshnuke to break in. Yes the little "access granted" window is a bit twee, but I give it 4.5 stars.

 

[Lance Corrimal]

Is Kmail still a thing or has that faded into oblivion?

On the left: Kontact. It's a kind of a container around kmail, kaddressbook, korganizer, akkregator, knotes, and more, to bring them all into one PIM application.

On the left; kontact with the kmail part open.
On the right: me hanging out with coffee at Lapis' Belliseria house, running the developer version of Firestorm (nothing new since the latest release yet, just updated dullahan/cef and fmod), and also me, in the latest cool viewer 1.28.0.0, hanging out at my osgrid region, which runs ... in a docker container on linux.

The desktop OS is openSUSE 15.2 which was released on july 2, the desktop itself is KDE/Plasma5 Version 5.19.2.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yeah, Kmail is still there and getting love. For me a little bit strange is that they are using an embedded MySQL server for mail storage as default, and that this technology layer for it called Akonadi is always a little bit shaky.

Evolution also gets still development while looking quite dated, but so far it does work. Was has been a major show stopper for many users is that Evolution did not support setting a default font for mail composition, which is something you must have in a corporate environment. The developers just didn't care, because they were avid fans of the "we do know best what you need and what not" design principile.

But oddly enough after not caring about this for over just measly 11 years, it has been added to the development version 3.37.2 in April this year.

Bug 568311 – Configurable composer fonts

bugzilla.gnome.org