I usually come across stuff on the web and just post it to my twitter account, but i was browsing the other day and came across a fantastic article by Ben Rockwood (@Benr) which he gave a title of “Devops: The Re-emergance of Systems Engineering as a Discipline”, Let’s quote some words of wisdom from this article:

The people that I met that seems to “get” the devops culture are devs. But not that kind… You see, they profess years in administration or ops, but they more excited by JSON and AMQP than they are by the next release of their favorite OS or chip architecture. These people no longer see computers as autonomous entities, rather they see the protocols to link them. They are more excited by NoSQL databases that can house metrics than they are in the commands and interfaces they can get them from. Spending time learning every little feature of an OS isn’t exciting, but optimizing inter-system communication is.

That’s interestingly true !, When NoSQL was trending, i saw it on the UNIX/Sysadmins blogs more than on the developers blogs, some of us just like to follow the new/alternative to the software models we have been using in operations because we already experienced the bottle necks of performance for the old systems and kept inventing workarounds to get those systems up and running in production efficiently.

What I’m driving at is that the most interesting artifact of the “devops” movement is that its bringing a new generation of Systems Engineers out of the closet. They are devs in an ops world. Not dev for dev sake… not ops for ops sake… but rather dev for the sake of ops.

Take a look at the new tools in our market:

• Configuration Management -> created by Sysadmins turned Developers for the sake of managing the configuration of a large amount of systems
• Servers Orchestration/ Command & Control -> Also created by Ops sick of SSHing into each server and doing the same thing over and over again, therefor they created frameworks for orchestrating their servers.
• Examples here are simply endless ! ….

But making a culture change like this in a job that most of it is based around routine processes (Monitoring, Provisioning, Deploying the same stuff over and over again) is not that easy, Especially for people who entered the Systems world seeking a “stable” job, those guys must think again about their jobs, one day they may be in an “Evolve or Die” situation:

As the good news of “devops” spreads it first enlightens, then brings excitement, then dread. If your one of those “specialists”, you can easily feel that your now out-dated. Consider that there is now pride within the devops elite that CIO’s are now talking about having a “devops strategy”. Some even suggest a (I’m paraphrasing) “evolve or die” scenario for operations teams. If your a sysadmin who uses Borne or Korn shell instead of Ruby, look out! I don’t think that’s fair, nor do I think its true for all. Instead, it all makes more sense when you see it as three camps instead of two, with a the culture over the three… that is, applications developers (traditional “dev”), system administrators (traditional “ops”), with a new role in the middle of Systems Engineers that helps glue the camps together. Some of your Systems Engineers will emerge from the dev side, some from the ops side, always having hidden their secret urges to do both. And, as with any emergent role, many will aspire to it but simply not be cut out for it.

And that’s all folks ! , I see this as a real enlightenment for the Systems Engineer, Our jobs are almost being redefined right now.

You can read the whole article that Ben wrote on his blog: Devops: The Re-emergance of Systems Engineering as a Discipline

What do you think will happen if you remove the executable flag from the chmod binary itself ?

Assalamu Alykom Everybody,

I know that this blog has almost been dead and you can only see my twitter updates laying around (seen this line before ?! well, it is the most famous line that bloggers write when they stop writing for some time, — Back to the topic chatty !! –)

So i have been working in the Egyptian market for quite some time now in the field of UNIX-like/Linux Systems administration, dealt with a lot of technologies like: web operations/scalability, Infrastructure management, web farms,VoIP, Security systems and whole bunch of stuff, which gave me some idea on how do sysadmins (or systems engineers whatever you like ) do and achieve their goals.

The point is, I DON’T LIKE IT, WE ARE BEING KILLED BY OUR JOBS, Systems are evolving and we are not ?! ..

Virtualization and Cloud Computing brought a whole lot of machines, and we still manage them using “almost” the same technologies ?! ..

If you are like me and have been searching for a solution for the past year or two, You will see around the internet that people are talking about “Agile Systems Administration”, “Infrastructure As Code” , “Command and Control”, “Configuration Management”, “Server Orchestration” and “DevOps”.

So I started asking people working on our industry, and there is almost NOBODY individually or an enterprise in Egypt that started working with those technologies, just some tiny trials and i just cannot stand the time/power we are wasting on managing our servers “Old School”. (If your Enterprise is using some of the technologies mentioned above, please tell us in the comments or mail me personally, I would love to have a chat about that.)

So within the next days isA, i will start doing some steps to get us out of the misery , may be creating some collaboration channels, contacting key professionals on that topic, who knows may be even making and event/sessions about it ..

But first I need your trusty comments, What do you think of the technologies mentioned ? Do you see it applicable at your employer ? Did you start using it ?

So i had this situation where i have 2 Asterisk boxes, the 1st one of them had a PRI card and the 2nd one is just attached to the network through an ethernet card

Goal: redirect all of the incoming calls on the PRI to the 2nd Asterisk box through a SIP Trunk (The 2nd box holds the IVR and all of those stuff, all of the IP phones are connecting to this one), There was no decent documentation about this out there so i am documenting this and may be someone will find it useful.

Here is what you should do (I am assuming you are using an Asterisk installation that uses FreePBX):

• Create the Zap Trunk as you normally do from the FreePBX interface: Trunks -> Add Zap Trunk
• Create a SIP trunk that points to the 2nd Asterisk box, we will use this Trunk later in the configuration: Trunks -> Add SIP Trunk, scroll down to outgoing settings and add the following
  • Trunk name: to-2ndAsterisk
  • Peer details:

type=peer

host=<IP Address of 2nd Asterisk Box>

• Connect to the 1st Asterisk box using SSH and edit the file /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf, you will find some configuration like

group=0,11

context=from-pstn

switchtype = euroisdn

signalling = pri_cpe

channel => 1-15,17-31

context = default

group = 63

• So as you can see all of the incoming calls are directed to the from-pstn context, we will now edit this line to direct the calls to the from-pstn-custom context and do the rest of the magic in this context so the file should be as follows

group=0,11

context=from-pstn-custom

switchtype = euroisdn

signalling = pri_cpe

channel => 1-15,17-31

context = default

group = 63

• Now edit the file /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf and add the following at the end of the file

[from-pstn-custom]
exten => _.,1,Dial(SIP/to-2ndAsterisk/${EXTEN:2},20,rt)

So what this does is that it matches all of the calls (_.) then redirect them through the SIP trunk to the 2nd Asterisk box

• And the last step is to allow calls coming from the 1st Box to the 2nd Box, you should do IP-based authentication on the 2nd box by editing /etc/asterisk/sip_custom.conf and add the following

[1stAsterisk]
type=peer
canreinvite=no
host=<IP Address of 1st Asterisk Box>
context=from-pstn
nat=no
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
insecure=port
qualify=yes

Of course you can now create any inbound routes on the 2nd Asterisk Box to match your needs.

I hope this works for you, and if you need any assistance please don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments

Thanks for listening

After having some problems trying to install Adobe Air under my Fedora 12 installation, here is the what you should do to get it up and running:

• Install the following packages usign YUM

yum install gtk2-devel rpm-devel xterm

• Solve the certificates issue using the command

for c in /etc/opt/Adobe/certificates/crypt/*.0; do aucm -n $(basename $c) -t true; done

• Now you can navigate to where you download the binary and then do the following

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

BTW, this was under a 32-bit installation.

Hope this solves the problem.

الحمد لله و كفى وصلاة و سلاماً على عباده الذين اصطفى ثم أما بعد..

فبينما أقوم بتجربة لغة البرمجة Ruby كلغة بديلة لل Bash Scripting للقيام ببعض أعمال اداره نظم التشغيل (System Administration) (والتى تبين لى انها قوية جداً فى هذا المجال و يبدو أنى سأستخدمها من الان فصاعداً), اذ تعرضت لل Interactive Ruby او ما يسمى أختصاراً  Irb و هو عبارة عن نوع من ال Shells و لكنه للتعامل مع لغة Ruby نفسها لتجربة بعض الطرق البرمجية قبل استخدامها فعلياً فى برامجك..

المشكلة التى قابلتنى هى انى وجدت Irb لا يقوم بعملية الاكمال التلقائى (Auto completion) لل Class & Methods و هذا شىء صعب للغاية على مدمن Shells مثلى !

و بعد البحث عن الموضوع مع العملاق جوجل وجدت انه يجب عليك ان تقوم بضبط بعض الخواص فى ملف ال Configuration الخاص ب Irb و الذى يوجد فى مجلد ال Home بأسم irbrc. حتى يكون الملف كالاتى

IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] = []  unless IRB.conf.key?(:LOAD_MODULES)
unless IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES].include?('irb/completion')
  IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] << 'irb/completion'
end

و هكذا ترى النتيجة بعد الانتهاء من هذا التعديل البسيط 

سبحانك الله و بحمدك..أشهد ان لا اله إلا أنت..أستغفرك و أتوب إليك

الحمد لله و كفى و صلاة و سلاماً على عباده الذين اصطفى

EDIT: Added the solution at the end of the post

So i have been navigating through my home directory and i found a hidden directory (which starts with a dot .) and i found a directory called .purple..Hmm, i don’t remember installing an application called purple..

So after some searching i found that the .purple directory contains some files related to pidgin The universal Instant messaging client..okay this sounds reasonable now..the pidgin color is purple

okay..before you read any further in this topic please open a terminal in your Linux distro and execute the following command:

cat ~/.purple/acc* | grep “ord>”

YES, the output you have seen from this command is REAL !! ..It is your IM passwords

I used some bash tricks to hide what the command really do..but here is what it will really do

cat ~/.purple/accounts.xml | grep password

and if you are using window$, you will find it in C:Documents and Settings%USERNAME%Application Data.purpleaccounts.xml

What are we having here ? , well pidgin is not saving the passwords in encrypted format, it is saving them in clear text !

So beware.. don’t save your password on pidgin when using a shared machine with someone else

Solution

First of all, lets see why did the pidgin team decided not to encrypt the passwords, actually they talked about lots of issue, but to summarize, Here is a quote from their wiki:

Instant messaging is not very secure, and it’s kind of pointless to spend a lot of time adding protections onto the fairly strong file protections of UNIX (our native platform) when the protocols themselves aren’t all that secure

Edit: Kamasheto added the following quote in the comments, thanks kama

“But other programs don’t store my password in plain text!”

That’s true. But few of them store it in a way that’s any safer. A Google search for im passwords shows a bunch of hits for getting the passwords out of other IM clients just as easily as Pidgin.

so they advice you to use key rings that comes with your desktop environment (GNOME and KDE have key rings), there is a project discussing this issue here

Another solution is use a master password mechanism, like that one implemented in firefox, you can use this feature in pidgin by install the Password Encryption plugin

Hope this tips will solve the problem isA

سبحانك اللهم و بحمدك..أشهد ان لا إله إلا أنت..أستغفرك و أتوب إليك

So i have been working with a small personal coding project the last days, and i noticed that i will be distributing the code among several directories and files and i also need to go forward and backward in the code revisions, so i decided to get started with Subversion - The version control system.

I had some problems at first, then things started to get really good after some searching for information here and there, so here is a simple tutorial that will get you up with subversion in no time isA

First of all, What is Version control ?

Revision control (also known as version control (system) (VCS), source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information

Changes to these documents are usually identified by incrementing an associated number or letter code, termed the “revision number”, “revision level”, or simply “revision” and associated historically with the person making the change

So how does this apply to coding and source code, well, when you are working with lots of code some times you need to know how did the code look like at a specific time or specific “version”.

also when there is more than one person collabarating to the same project, you need to know who changed that specific piece of code, when he did he changed it and if he commented on the change so you can know about his work

Here is a nice video on youtube than explains the issue in a very simple scenario

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYiabh2hpM

Cool, What is Subversion ?

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. It is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).

SVN is an Open source software and it is currently replacing the CVS

What are the ingredients that i need to start working with SubVersion ?

The Server

First, you need a SVN Server (SVN works on server/client architecture), which basically contains some kind of a database that holds information about the different “revisions” of your code

we will skip setting up the server part as we will be using a hosted service on a remote server (note that you can actually build one on your local machine).

I have searched for a lot of online services and i think the best one that fitted my needs is XP-Dev.com

Go register an account there, and after logging in create a SubVersion repo from the “subversion” tab

after you create the repo, you will get the following URLs

https://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/repo_name/ (SSL)
http://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/repo_name/ (No SSL)

So these are the URLs that you can use to access the files in the repo and also use with SVN client

The Client

The client is used to connect to the SVN server, at our case we will be using the svn command under UNIX/Linux based systems, if you want a GUI you can use RapidSVN under Linux and TorsieSVN under windows

We will be discussing the Client in the next Post isA

Please share your comments on the materials presented here , may be we will put it in the Hackers Wiki if it is good enough

سبحانك اللهم و بحمدك..أشهد ان لا اله الا أنت..أستغفرك و أتوب إليك