Monday, September 29, 2008

OpenSuse 11

So far the new version seems to work very well.

I updated to KDE 4.1.

The trick with Alt-Gr No-Dead Key is now built in. No need for own keyboard table anymore.

Setting brightness was a big pain. The add to modprobe.conf.local:
options thinkpad-acpi brightness_enable=1
blacklist video

and in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-laptop-panel-hardware.fdi
setting laptop_panel.brightness_in_hardware to false

Saturday, September 13, 2008

SSH ProxyCommand without netcat

The ProxyCommand is very useful when hosts are only indirectly accessible. With netcat it is relative strait forward:
ProxyCommand ssh {gw} netcat -w 1 {host} 22

Here {gw }and {host} are placeholders for the gateway and the host.

But it is also possible when netcat is not installed on the gateway:
ProxyCommand ssh {gw} 'exec 3<>/dev/tcp/{host}/22; cat <&3 & cat >&3;kill $!'

The /dev/tcp is a built-in feature of standard bash. The files don't exist. To check whether bash has this feature built-in use run cat < /dev/tcp/google.com/80 on the gateway. To make sure that bash is used, use:
ProxyCommand ssh {gw} "/bin/bash -c 'exec 3<>/dev/tcp/{host}/22; cat <&3 & cat >&3;kill $!'"

And it even works together with ControlMaster.

(Updated on Oct 22 to include kill to clean up background cat)
(Updated on Mar 3 2011 to make placeholders more clear and explain /dev/tcp)