Latest Updates: os x

  • SSH Client: Saving Server Configuration (Alias, Port, Username)

    14:46 on August 2, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: , , os x,

    There may be occasions where you want to connect to a host with a long host name, for example ssh servername.example.com – now it’s not massive, but it’s not as quick as ssh servername

    If you’ve been following droptips.com, you’ll have noticed my other post about setting the port number in the SSH config file (~/.ssh/config for individual users) – you can also use this config file to connect to shortened hostnames (aliases).

    So, if you want to be able to ssh into servername.example.com but just doing ssh servername, you would add the following to the ~/.ssh/config file:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com

    Now that’s great if you login to your local machine with the same username as the remote server, but what if it isn’t?  You’d have to do ssh remoteusername@servername but we can also get around this by adding User username to the host section:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com
  User remoteusername

    You can also tie this into having the port number as per my other post like so:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com
  User remoteusername
  Port 1234

    Once you’ve done this, whatever you put on the Host line, will work by just doing the following with whatever options the configuration file says:

    ssh host

    Hopefully this will allow you to speed up connecting to servers you connect to a lot!

     

  • SSH Client: Automatically Connect to a Servers’ Non-Standard Port

    10:18 on August 2, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: , , os x,

    If you run an SSH server, or many SSH servers, then you may have set the SSH daemon to run on a non-standard port. SSH normally listens on port 22, but with the large amount of script/bot attacks now on this port, attempting random logins, changing it to something different is a quick way to stop the majority of these automated attacks.  I’ve detailed this in another post here.

    Once you’ve done this, though, you probably get bored with having to specify the port every time you connect by typing ssh -p 1234 hostname or scp -P 1234 hostname (where 1234 is the port SSH is running on hostname) – I know I do!

    You can get around this problem, by using the ~/.ssh/config file (config in the .ssh directory in your home directory).

    You can add multiple hosts to this file, along with their port, so you can simply ssh hostname and it’ll connect  using whatever port is set in that file.

    The entry you need to add is:

    Host host.example.org
  Port 1234

    Where host.example.org is the hostname you SSH too (if you SSH to an IP address, then this will need to be set here) and Port 1234 is the port number SSH is running on hostname.

    Once this is done, you’ll be able to:

    ssh host.example.org

    … and it’ll know that you need to connect on the port set in the file.

    You can add multiple hosts to this file, if you access multiple SSH servers:

    Host host.example.org
  Port 1234
    Host host2.example.com
  Port 4567

    Give it a try – it’s certainly saved me some time!

    You may also want to checkout another post on droptips.com with further options for the ~/.ssh/config file:  http://droptips.com/ssh-client-saving-server-configuration-alias-port-username

     

  • Access Your OS X Clipboard from the Command Line

    13:00 on July 29, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: os x,

    There may be times when you need to access whatever is on your clipboard in a Terminal; maybe a particularly long URL for example.  And, there may be times when you want to put things on to the clipboard from a Terminal.

    Reading the Clipboard

    As it’s going to be text on the clipboard (even if it’s an image, it’ll just be the file name if you use this command), you can access it using the command pbpaste:

    $ pbpaste

http://droptips.com/

    So in this case, I have the text “http://droptips.com” on my clipboard, but what if I want to access that from a string of commands?  (I’m using curl as an example from another post)

    $ curl -Is `pbpaste` | head -n1

    By placing ` ` around the pbpaste command, it will run, and whatever it returns will be used instead.  So, the above command in this instance will actually run:

    $ curl -Is http://droptips.com | head -n1

    Of course, you may want to just run a few stats on the contents of your clipboards, and you can also do this using the wc command I posted about.  You can run pbpaste and pipe it through the wc command as follows:

    pbpaste | wc -w

    This will return the amount of words currently on the clipboard.

    Writing to the Clipboard

    But what if you want to get content onto the clipboard?  We use the pbcopy command.

    So if I want to get the contents of a text file onto the clipboard, I could cat the file and pipe it through to pbcopy as follows:

    cat myfile.txt | pbcopy

    Anything which gets passed to pbcopy this way, will be on the clipboard.

    Likewise, if I want to put a single line of text onto the clipboard, I could use the echo command:

    echo "I want this on the clipboard" | pbcopy

    As this is the normal clipboard, this content is available using the normal paste commands and of course pbpaste.

    So if you ever find yourself needing to use the clipboard from a Terminal, then pbpaste and pbcopy are the commands to do it!

     

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