My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

Posts Tagged / Scripts


  • May 28 / 2017
  • 11
Linux

Creating a BIOS/GPT and UEFI/GPT Grub-bootable Linux system

Good old Master Boot Record (MBR) unfortunately cannot address anything beyond 2TB, so partitioning large disks and making them bootable is impossible using MBR. The GUID Partition Table (GPT) solves this problem: It supports disks up to 16EB. However, installing grub does not work without a special BIOS boot partition. If you also want to support booting the same system via UEFI, another partition, the EFI System Partition (ESP), is necessary.

This should post shows you how to partition a disk with GPT and make a bootable Linux system via BIOS/Legacy and UEFI.

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  • Mar 24 / 2015
  • 2
Code Snippets, Linux, Scripting

Snippet 0x0B: Bash completion with sub-commands and dynamic options

Every system administrator, most programmers and countless of command line surfing Linux/Mac users use it every day without thinking twice. Hitting the tab key twice, [TAB][TAB], has become the most common thing in the world. Bash completion is the magic behind the tab key. It’s easy to use, but it’s a pain to write. This tiny post demonstrates how to write scripts for bash completion, with sub-commands and dynamic parameters. A working script is embedded in my open source file sync software Syncany.

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  • Oct 25 / 2014
  • Comments Off on Snippet 0x07: Restart Docky from a cronjob (when it crashed)
Code Snippets, Scripting

Snippet 0x07: Restart Docky from a cronjob (when it crashed)

I recently updated from Linux Mint 16 Petra to Linux Mint 17 Qiana. Everything went smoothly, except for my dock Docky. For some reason, Docky decides to crash every once in a while with some error message.

Instead of fixing this error or reporting it, I decided to find the easy way out and simple set up a cronjob to restart Docky every minute (if it has crashed).

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  • May 29 / 2014
  • 3
Programming

The magic of Gradle: create Windows installers, Debian packages, manage a PPA, and optional sub-projects

Gradle is great build tool. Compared to Ant or Maven, it’s so much easier to use and write proper code for it — it’s unbelievable at times. A little while ago, I switched from an ugly Ant/Maven installation to Gradle with my open source project Syncany. Ever since then, I am simply amazed about what Gradle can do. Granted, it’s not always easy to understand and the lack of proper documentation and IDE support makes things more like a trial-and-error-based packaging experience. However, the amount of time that it saves is worth it.

Since I really like Gradle and I myself often have a hard time finding proper answers for the questions I have, I’d like to demonstrate a few solutions that I have come up with. In particular, I’ll describe how to create a Windows installer using Inno Setup under Linux, create Debian packages and manage a PPA (debuild/dput) as well as how to add an optional Gradle sub-project.

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  • Jul 07 / 2013
  • 160
Mobile, Programming, Scripting

Send WhatsApp messages via PHP using WhatsAPI

I recently discovered that once you have acquired your WhatsApp account password, it’s relatively easy to send and receive WhatsApp messages via PHP. Using the PHP-based framework WhatsAPI, a simple WhatsApp notifier script only has a dozen lines of code.

This tiny tutorial shows how to use the two very basic functions of WhatsAPI, namely to send simple outgoing messages to any number and to listen for new incoming messages from your own WhatsApp account. This is the second part of a two-part tutorial. The first part demonstrated how to sniff the WhatsApp password from your Android phone or iPhone.

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  • Jun 28 / 2013
  • 14
Linux, Scripting, Synchronization

Script: Run rsnapshot backups only once and rollback failed backups using rsnapshot-once

I use rsnapshot to backup all of my data to my HTPC and home server (the home partition, office documents and the root file system). While rsnapshot is not as shiny as other backup tools, it is very flexible and effective: rsnapshot is based on rsync and makes hardlink-based backups (like cp -al), i.e. backups that point to the same inode on the disk if a file in consecutive backups is identical (much like SIS in deduplication).

However, rsnapshot is meant to be triggered by cronjobs and is built for always-on server machines rather than for lid-open-lid-close-type machines like laptops: That means that rsnapshot must be scheduled to run at a certain time (no retries!) and is not prone sudden system shutdowns. Furthermore, it does not detect failures and simply leaves unfinished backups as if they were complete. That in turn leads to more disk space being used for the backups, because the last complete backup is not really complete.

I wrote a little helper script to fix exactly this behavior: rsnapshot-once makes sure that (1) rsnapshot is only called if a backup is necessary (once every 24h for ‘daily’, once ever 7 days for ‘weekly’, …) even if rsnapshot-once is called multiple times, and (2) that crashed/interrupted backup runs are rolled-back before starting a new backup run.

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  • Dec 07 / 2012
  • 33
Multimedia, Scripting

Script: Refresh the Fritz!Mediaserver DLNA Index of the Fritz!Box 6360 Cable

Some of AVM’s Fritz!Box routers allow connecting a USB device and use this device as a network attached storage (NAS) via Samba/SMB in the local network. In combination with the fact that the NAS can also be accessed from the Internet via FTP, and the multimedia files can be streamed to a TV via the Fritz!Mediaserver (using DLNA), it makes a pretty basic home entertainment system. I use it to automatically copy videos (YouTube, etc.) to the NAS from my virtual server, and then watch these with my Samsung Smart TV. It’s not as great as XBMC, but it works for now.

Unfortunately, the Fritz!Mediaserver (DLNA server) does not automatically refresh the index when media files are added via Samba/SMB or FTP (only if they are added via their web interface Fritz!NAS). It can be refreshed manually via the interface on fritz.box/storage/settings.lua. But, since I like to automate things, I made a little helper to automatically refresh the index.

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  • Jun 15 / 2012
  • 9
Cloud Computing, Linux, Scripting

Script: Your US proxy server in one minute using Amazon EC2

Many of the well known websites determine your location based on your IP address and restrict their content or functionalities based on the country you’re in. Some examples are Gmail (Germans get only @googlemail.com-addresses, legal reasons), YouTube (content is restricted by the GEMA), and Pandora (limited to US citizens) to name only a few. To circumvent these restrictions, being able to quickly get an IP address outside of your own country is most helpful.

To do exactly that I wrote a little script that will start your very own US proxy server in one minute using Amazon EC2. In combination with browser plug-ins such as FoxyProxy, the script enables you to route all your web traffic through a proxy on an Amazon-owned machine — with an IP address in the US, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo or Sao Paulo (location of Amazon data centers).

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  • Jan 12 / 2011
  • 3
Linux, Multimedia, Scripting

Picasa for Linux: Export albums in sort order

As one of the best picture organizers out there, Picasa is (in my opinion) almost complete in terms of features and has a nice look and feel at the same time. Even though Google stopped developing the Linux version after 3.0, it still works perfectly using Wine and a couple of cp-statements.

However, as stated many times by Picasa users and bloggers [1,2,3,…], Picasa’s export function misses a tiny little feature that maintains the sort order of the album when exporting it to a folder. Instead of renaming the pictures to keep them sorted in normal file managers (by name), Picasa just copies the files of an album to one folder and thereby destroys the order. As if that wasn’t enough, Picasa also overwrites duplicates filenames from different source folders.

This missing feature has even led to small standalone projects that fix this issue, e.g. Picasa Independent Album Exporter (PIAE) and Picasa Order Preserver. While both applications do their job, both are a bit heavyweight, and PIAE only works for Windows (and not on Wine).

This post presents a tiny little Perl script that renames pictures of an exported album according to their Picasa sort order.

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  • Jan 29 / 2010
  • Comments Off on WP-UN: WordPress version update notification with cron
Administration, Linux, Scripting, Security

WP-UN: WordPress version update notification with cron

WordPress is a very popular open-source blog software and is used widely throughout the Internet. However, with great success comes great attack potential: like any other wide spread open-source software, WordPress is target for frequent hacking attacks and spam-bots. All the more important is it to always update the distribution to the latest release.

As Debian/Ubuntu user, I am spoiled when it comes to update management: apt-get updates most of my software, and apticron notifies me when updates are available. For WordPress however, the packaged versions of Debian/Ubuntu are really old and less adjustable which unfortunately makes a manual installation inevitable. While there are several automated WordPress update mechanisms out there, I couldn’t find a simple notify-on-update tool.

This post introduces the WordPress Update Notifier (WP-UN), a simple script that frequently compares the installed WordPress version with the latest available one. If a new version is available, it sends an e-mail to a given address.

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