Cygwin Portable (Without admin rights)

Short version:

Solution: Start cygwin installation with “–no-admin”

Longer version:

Vagrant proxy through CNTLM on Windows using CYGWIN

Wow, talk about a crappy post title, but I just got this working on my corporate network and was quite happy about it.

Reason for this post; Every time I start a new assignment at a (rather big) corporation, I need to follow these steps to be able to access the internet from my vm’s.

(and I keep forgetting the steps, I’m getting old..)

What we’ll use to get this working:

• Cygwin : https://www.cygwin.com/
• Vagrant : https://www.vagrantup.com/
• Virtualbox : https://www.virtualbox.org/
• Cntlm : http://cntlm.sourceforge.net/

I’m running CentOS vm’s inside Vagrant with Virtualbox provisioning on Cygwin on Windows 7. I’m running Cntlm to create a local proxy for all stuff what I’m doing through cygwin, because I don’t like putting clear text passwords in bashrc or in Win / Bash variables.

Steps:

1. Get your corporate proxy URL (Via Google Chrome)
2. Configure Cntlm
3. Configure Cygwin
4. Configure Vagrant
5. Use teh interwebs from your VM, practicing ninja turtle coding skillz and be instantly awesome!!1!

Remove duplicate lines while comparing two files

I’ve been quite busy this whole day with a partially complete database dump and wanted to prepare for tomorrow with some ninja bash voodoo shizzle. I’m doing a braindump here because I know I’ll have forgotten this when I wake up tomorrow :-)

The command stated below was the first working example I’ve gotten together, please let me know if you know a neater / better solution!

The situation:

I’ve got two files. The first file contains lines which need to be deleted from the second line (if they exist there)

Python pip without internet

The title of this post is a bit misleading. I will not outline the use of pip without internet but I will suspect most people will search for this search string, thus coming here for an alternative.

I’ve been blessed with a very thorough security officer, who decided that CLI internet access is not permitted, even using CNTLM (1)is blocked.

The easiest way to install packages is via pip, but it’s also possible to install them via the commandline.

Using the example of Django, we will first download the tarball from the Django site;

https://www.djangoproject.com/download/

On the right side there’s a link to the latest release.

Unzip and untar the tarball and open a Prompt in that directory.

Then run the following command:

python setup.py install


Next, we’ll check if it is installed correctly:

Bash: Shortcuts to your favorite directories with CDPATH

This is a fairly handy trick.

I’m always logging in to different servers, which all have a different location for their logs. With this trick you can login and just type “cd logs” from anywhere.

First we will add our directory to the CDPATH variable:

joris@badattitude /data/share/my_domain
$ echo $CDPATH

joris@badattitude /data/share/my_domain
$ export CDPATH=/data/share/my_domain

joris@badattitude /data/share/my_domain
$ echo $CDPATH
/data/share/my_domain

Then we’ll check if it is working:

joris@badattitude ~
$ cd logs
/data/share/my_domain/logs

joris@badattitude /data/share/my_domain/logs
$

Awesome, we’ve arrived in our logs directory straight from our homedir!

SSH Remote Execute command, multiple command and with interaction

This article shows how to execute remote commands via ssh, but you’ll send the commands from your own shell.

ssh my_server 'ls -l /home/my_home_dir'

This will result in this output:

$ ssh ae2 'ls -lha ~'
total 36K
drwxr-xr-x  2 joris joris 4.0K Jan 23 11:42 .
drwxr-xr-x. 5 root  root  4.0K Jan 23 11:41 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris   54 Jan 23 11:41 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris  507 Jan 23 11:41 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris  213 Jan 23 11:41 .bashrc
-rw-------  1 joris joris   51 Jan 23 11:42 .history
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris  171 Jan 23 11:41 .kshrc
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris  375 Jan 23 11:41 .profile
-rw-r--r--  1 joris joris  153 Jan 23 11:41 .vimrc

What’s even better, is that you can run multiple commands separated with a semi colon, like this:

ssh my_server 'ls -l /home/my_home_dir;whoami'

And the best trick is this one, user input with an interactive command, sending input and output back and forth!

ssh -t my_server 'vi ~/.bash_profile'

CHere Bash Here without Admin Rights – CYGWIN

I wanted to add a “Bash Here” context entry when I right click on a directory:

This Bash Here would open that directory in Cygwin (mintty).

My current PC is fairly regulated, so without admin rights and thus I can’t use the CHere option which I would normally use.

I just created the registry keys via regedit and that works fine.

You can use two options:

1. Import the registry file mentioned below
2. Create the keys yourself

1. Import the registry file

Create a file called cygwin_bash_here.reg with the following contents:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Directory]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Directory\shell]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Directory\shell\bashhere]
@="Bash Here"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Directory\shell\bashhere\command]
@="C:\\cygwin\\bin\\mintty.exe"

Save the file and double click on it to import it to the registry.

2. Create the keys yourself

1. Open the registry editor: Start – Run – “regedit”
2. Open the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes
3. Create key: “Directory”
4. Inside Directory, create key: “shell”
5. Inside shell, create key: “bashhere”
6. Inside bashhere double click on the standard key and insert text “Bash here” without quotes (This is the text which is displayed in the context menu.
7. Inside bashhere, create key: “command”
8. Inside command, double click on the standard key and insert text “C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe” without quotes. Important: This is the command which is run. Please change directory to your cygwin directory

Conclusion

Both options will create a context menu item which opens Cygwin at your current windows directory!

Cygwin – Your group is currently mkpasswd

This message occurs every time you start your freshly installed Cygwin when you’re logged in as a domain user.

Your group is currently "mkpasswd".  This indicates that your
gid is not in /etc/group and your uid is not in /etc/passwd.

The /etc/passwd (and possibly /etc/group) files should be rebuilt.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run

mkpasswd -l [-d] >> /etc/passwd
mkgroup  -l [-d] >> /etc/group

Note that the -d switch is necessary for domain users.

Important: You need to install Cygwin with the user you are logged in with.
Tip: Remove the word “setup” from the cygwin executable to be able to install it without administrator privileges. (e.g. setup-x64.exe should be renamed to cygwin-x64.exe)

• mkpasswd -l only shows my local users, and not the domain user I’m logged in with, so that does not solve this.
• mkpasswd -l -d get an enormous amount of users because it tries to replicate my whole organisation, which is not necessary.

We just need our current user ( mkpasswd -c ) to be sent to the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files, to do this, we use this command:

Solution:

mkpasswd -c >> /etc/passwd
mkgroup -c >> /etc/group

After that, our current account is added to both /etc/passwd and /etc/group and the annoying greeting message is gone!

SSH through a proxy to a remote server

I wanted to SSH into my home server from my workplace but I couldn’t reach it directly because of the way the network was set up.

As it turns out it is quite easy to do by using the corkscrew program.

Edit ~/.ssh/config and add the following lines:

Host home joris.his.homeserver.com
    Hostname joris.his.homeserver.com
    User joris
    ProxyCommand corkscrew proxyserveraddress proxyserverport %h %p

The most important part is the ProxyCommand, this lets your ssh client know that it should use corkscrew as a proxy to your host. %h means the host of your remote server, %p means the port of your remote server.

Authentication – Subversion on command line will not remember credentials

I ran into this issue today on my command line SVN client.

Every time I ran the SVN command against my repository, it asks for my password. It does remember the username but doesn’t store the password.

There are a couple of settings to check in two different files:

• .subversion/config
• .subversion/servers

.subversion/config

The config file contains a setting which sets the password store you will be using. We need to disable all password stores and use an empty list, which is done by uncommenting (or adding) the next line

password-stores =

.subversion/servers

The servers file contains settings which allow you to save your passwords in general and to save the passwords in plaintext (please be careful when choosing this option!)

This file is divided in sections which are set with the [] brackets. In the [global] group you should uncomment (or add) the following lines:

store-passwords = yes
store-plaintext-passwords = yes