Getting rid of GUI password prompt in EasyPG

EasyPG is a package used by GNU Emacs to simplify work with files encrypted by GnuPG (GPG). Extremely useful package, it has a bad habit of relying on external tools to prompt for the password. One of such tools is 'gpg-agent'. In Debian/Ubuntu this agent usually replaces 'ssh-agent'. It's a good tool, but it uses a GUI dialog to prompt for the password. This makes your work with EasyPG and Emacs rather uncomfortable.

There's a number of advices on how you can suppress that GUI dialog. I prefer another one, I simply removed 'gpg-agent'. It did not affect the functionality, since it was replaced by 'ssh-agent'. Now, EasyPG prompts for the password in Emacs mini-buffer

moreutils

Discovered 'moreutils' package in Ubuntu. It features a list of nice tools, of which my favorite are 'ts', 'pee' and 'vipe'.

'ts' puts timestamps to every line of text that is piped through it. Like,

$ ping google.com|ts
Dec 14 14:18:45 PING google.com (209.85.173.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
Dec 14 14:18:45 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=88.5 ms
Dec 14 14:18:46 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=92.5 ms
Dec 14 14:18:47 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=90.5 ms

I love timestamps! I put them everywhere I can, it helps so much to find out later what was going on. 'ts' will certainly help me.

Another tool is 'pee'. As 'man pee' puts it, it's like 'tee', but for pipes. 'pee' reads standard input and sends it to a number of commands supplied as arguments to 'pee'. Like,

$ cat file.txt |pee 'wc -c' 'wc -w' 'wc -l'
5870
257
257

And, finally, 'vipe' — it's a way to edit data produced by one program before they are piped into another one. 'sed' is good enough, but when some interactivity is needed, 'vipe' should be handy.

Real conversations in Gmail

Organizing your email in the Gmail way, by conversation, is very handy. What always annoyed me in the Google implementation was that the sent emails did not appear in the default folder. I know it is called Inbox. But sent messages do appear there, too, as soon as the recipient replies to me.

When I used other email clients, like Pine or Thunderbird, I used to set up FCC (folder carbon copy) in the outgoing messages to my Inbox. This gave me a conversation-like structure better than the one found in Gmail. Finally, I have the same structure in Gmail.

To see all your outgoing messages in (so called) Inbox, even when there are no replies in the conversation, create a new filter. Put your address to the From: field. Click "Next Step". Select "Never send it to Spam" and "Create Filter". That's it.

Update list of directories exported by NFS on the fly

NFS configuration rarely changes on my servers and I always forget how the file /etc/exports may be re-read without stopping the NFS daemon:

exportfs -r

The case of slow MySQL connect

Quite of a sudden, PHP scripts on one of my servers became very slow. Other servers worked fine. PHP-FPM logs showed that the biggest delays happened during database operations. The database server, though, recorded nothing in the mysql-slow.log.

Then, we had a look at the process list in MySQL. There were some dozens of lines like these:

| 1409888 | unauthenticated user | 11.11.11.11:59585    | NULL | Connect     |   NULL | login                                                          | NULL             |
| 1409889 | unauthenticated user | 11.11.11.11:59584    | NULL | Connect     |   NULL | login                                                          | NULL             |
| 1409890 | unauthenticated user | 11.11.11.11:59587    | NULL | Connect     |   NULL | login                                                          | NULL             |

where 11.11.11.11 is the IP address of that application server whence the connection was opened. Google said that these messages usually indicate at DNS problems. One of possible solutions would be to restart MySQL with --skip-name-resolve option, but we didn't want to stop the database. So, we added the hostname of the application server to the /etc/hosts file on the database server, and voilá! Unauthenticated users were gone in some seconds and the performance was restored.

The hosting company had informed us before of the planned maintenance, but they only mentioned their own website and their 'whois' server. They must have done something wrong with their DNS servers, too, which caused our database accept new connections very slowly.

Browsers: use TAB to move between form fields

In Firefox, there's a useful setting that allows you to use TAB key to move between form fields only, skipping links. To do so, open "about:config" page, find "accessibility.tabfocus" variable and set it to 3. It took me quite some time to make Chromium to behave in a similar way. This solution was found here

Edit ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences. Find the section called `webprefs`. Add the following line at the beginning of the section:

        "tabs_to_links": false,

You can add the line at any place of the section, actually, but keep an eye on commas, they should appear at the end of all lines but the last one. The recipe was not tested on Google Chrome, but I see no reasons why it shouldn't work.

Lennart Poettering and the death of BSD

Lennart Poettering, the author of Avahi, the most often purged package in Linux, thinks that BSD isn't relevant anymore. What other proof do you need that BSD is still alive and kicking?