My Little Pocket Universe
If you get the error: It is easy to fix. This happened to me when I installed the MacPorts version of OpenSSH on my Mac (because work blocks the native ssh app rather than the port; we won’t get in to the silliness of that). Rather than trying to disable the MacOS ssh-agent (which apparently … Read more
For some strange reason, with the new ARM based Macs with X11 xquartz from either the official download, or from Mac Ports, when a remote java (of course it’s a problem with java), when the mouse moves, the colors of the window(s) will invert, making them very difficult to see/read. Fortunately, there are a couple … Read more
With Ubuntu starting to push their snap architecture, more and more apps break using old school X11 remote display methods. With traditional applications, you can just ssh to a remote host with -X or -Y to get X11 forwarding. You just run the X11 command, and it’ll “magically” come back and display on your local … Read more
As anyone who has upgraded to Ubuntu 22+ will know, they have deprecated and removed the traditional firefox package, and only the snap version is available and supported. And this is fine for anyone running the desktop. But for those of us who use the server version of Ubuntu, and often need to use a … Read more
So you have your nice shiny linux box, and you are properly not allowing remote root logins, but you still need to be able to run X11 apps as root through ssh. But when you try, you get the dreaded error like: Gtk-WARNING **: 19:41:13.383: cannot open display: localhost:10.0 Well that is a pain. This … Read more
Having MFA on a server is a good thing. But it can be a real PITA when you are required to pull out your phone for every single connection to the server, especially if you are performing some kind of automated task. Fortunately, ssh provides a mechanism to allow you to use the proper authentication … Read more
One really nice feature of MacOS is the integration of ssh keys with the OS keychain. This allows you to put a password on your ssh private key(s) that will unlock when you log in. Using this feature, combined with the ssh agent, and you can have a password protected ssh key, and not have … Read more
To add an extra layer of security to your server, especially when you are working on a shared client, you can add SSHFP records to the DNS record of the host. This allows the ssh client to pull the hash of the server from DNS to add an extra layer of verification that the host … Read more
If you have the HashKnownHosts option for your ssh client set to yes, then you have a more secure known_hosts file so that a bad actor cannot easily get a list of the hosts you connect to, which is a good idea. However, it also hides it from you, so if you need to remove … Read more