Categories
Programming Systems Administration

A Userscript to click the “Recover Permissions” button for every space in Atlassian Confluence Cloud

When administering a Confluence Cloud instance, we encountered the issue where I needed to use the API to check every space’s permissions. However, in Confluence’s REST API, you need to have “Read” permissions on a space to be able to read the permissions. To get this access, you can (as an admin) go to the […]

Categories
Linux Systems Administration

A tool to take Cisco Umbrella logs and output them to Syslog messages

I wrote a tool recently that allows taking log files from the Cisco-managed S3 bucket, and outputs each log line as a Syslog message, with the content of the log line as a JSON-formatted message. Details of the Cisco-managed S3 bucket are here: https://docs.umbrella.com/deployment-umbrella/docs/cisco-managed-s3-bucket Once logged onto disk, the output of this tool looks like: […]

Categories
Linux Programming Systems Administration

“How I got a Feature Before I Even Asked for It” or “Open Source is Awesome”

To backup my server I uses a tool called restic (https://restic.net/) – It’s great. I’ve recently been testing out using MEGA (https://mega.io/) as the backend storage for my backups, and to integrate that with restic, you use rclone (https://rclone.org/) as a storage driver. Sounds complicated, but it’s really not:restic –talks-to–> rclone –talks-to–> mega However, during […]

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Linux Systems Administration

My Personal Nextcloud Setup

I run nextcloud on my home server. The primary purpose is for file sync, which I also use to back up my photos from my Android phone, and also I use the Notes app synchronised with my phone. Here’s a bottom-up description of the server setup. The Server Hardware The server is an old desktop […]

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Linux Networking Systems Administration

Importing a LetsEncrypt Certificate Generated by acme.sh into a Fortigate Firewall Using CLI

These are some tips I’ve put together on how to create a certificate using acme.sh then import it into a FortiGate firewall for use on the SSL-VPN or similar. Getting the Certificate and Key file I won’t go into too much detail on this – just use the acme.sh documentation to get a key+certificate: https://acme.sh […]

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Linux Networking Programming Systems Administration

A Logwatcher Tool to Trigger Integrations After Changes in phpIPAM

We use phpIPAM to manage all our IP Addresses, and we have recently built integrations between phpIPAM and our Kea DHCP server for reservations, and also into our BIND DNS server. These have been running on a schedule, which has worked well, but doing it that way means that it can take a while after […]

Categories
Systems Administration

Learn Your Tools

Just read a post by Drew DeVault: https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/06/Utility-vs-usability.html I very much agree. So many people treat working with computers as “I don’t like it but I have to do it.” Often these people learn only the minimum required to get something done. I think that, as professionals, we need to treat computers as tools to […]

Categories
Linux Programming Systems Administration

Tips for doing “shell” scripting in Python

I’ve been moving a bunch of my shell scripts to python recently, because of how much better it handles the concept of “a process didn’t run successfully”. Consider the bash script: What happens here if Command 2 fails? Note that we still get the success message at the end – bash silently ignored our error-ing […]

Categories
General Tech Linux Systems Administration

New Project – coconut-deadmanswitch – A tool to monitor Cron Jobs and Scheduled Tasks

I’ve started a new project! I recently talked about my experiments with coconut-lang here: https://jaytuckey.name/2020/10/25/thoughts-on-coconut-the-compile-to-python-functional-language-extension/ I’ve now started a project using coconut! It’s what I’m calling a “Dead Man’s Switch” (DMS) monitoring tool. The idea is this: Every cron job / scheduled task sends an update to the DMS monitor The monitor records the updates […]

Categories
Linux Networking Systems Administration

A script to bring Cisco Switch VLAN data into phpIPAM

We have recently set up an IPAM at my workplace, the excellent phpIPAM – https://phpipam.net/ I went through our install and added all our subnets into the IPAM, but to make the data much more useful we wanted to have the VLAN information also: However, I didn’t want to go through by hand, adding each […]