.pQd

squid-based forward proxy that accepts incoming tls-encrypted connections

by .pQd
we needed to do some interoperability testing, and for that we had to allow http client application to talk with http proxy via secure channel. on debian 11 i had to install package squid-openssl and add this line in /etc/squid/squid.conf: the ssl cert was generated by certbot certonly. that’s how i tested it:

MySQL / MariaDB login audit

by .pQd
once in a while i need to review which database accounts are used, from what IPs connections arrive. MySQL / MariaDB does not have built-in mechanism [ unless you want to allow full query log ], but there’s quite easy way to get the data.

online tools to test your mail infrastructure

by .pQd
once in a while i’m involed in moving mail servers around, to and from the could. those tools are useful each time it’s done: also related – a deep dive into e-mail delivery in 2024.

rsync with more efficient compression, hash algorithm

by .pQd
rsync 3.2.0 and newer supports more compression and hash algorithms. zstd compression is well suited for slower network connections [ tens mbit/s ], lz4 – for faster. xxh3 hash is worth using regardless of the network speed. syntax:

nrpe’s check_http – POSTing a file

by .pQd
i needed to monitor some service available via HTTP, this service is expecting to get a file posted – as if it was submitted via HTML form. so the file’s content is in the POST body, wrapped in Content-Type: multipart/form-data and stored between boundaries. Is it possible to simulate via check_http? yes!

Best Practical’s RT – recovering specific tickets from backups

by .pQd
I needed to recover a particular, old and already shredded, RT ticket from a backup to web interface. I’ve restored the database to a separate server and run those commands to get INSERT statements for two tickets i was interested in – 69187, 100112: To be on the safe side – always recover to a ... Read More

mysqldump headaches

by .pQd
over the years i’ve set up multiple backup workflows. one of them is described here. part of the cycles involves taking database backups. for MySQL i’m mostly using mysqldump. it comes with some headaches: it’s single-threaded by nature – both for backup, and restore [ unless you chop the dump file into pieces and try ... Read More

WordPress’ Gutenberg editor failing to save anything

by .pQd
i’ve run into an odd situation – wordpress was working just fine yet the new / Gutenberg editor did not save anything. No errors, but also no content saved – the only thing that was left was ‘Auto Draft’ with an empty content. i’ve tracked it down to fact that .htaccess was not actually used ... Read More

public domain image searchers

by .pQd
https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.org https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=image&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=image https://pixabay.com/

play.pl mobile – 100GB for a month for 5pln

by .pQd
play.pl seems to have never ending promotion where you get 100GB of data traffic for a month when you buy a new starter and activate bonus package. here’s what i do to activate it [ every 30 days ]: buy play-as-you-go sim card e.g. in Zabka convenience store – Play odNowa for 5PLN, register the ... Read More

.net core under linux throws “The remote certificate is invalid because of errors in the certificate chain: NotTimeValid” when communicating with HTTPS server having letsencrypt cert

by .pQd
i’ve stumbled on an issue – simple .net core code using HttpWebRequest failed to communicate with any server that had lets encrypt cert. no matter if the server used new or old certificate chain – i was getting: at the same time curl or wget could communicate with the same site without issues. i’ve tried ... Read More

intellij freezing on startup + putty routinely failing to bind to ports used for ssh tunneling

by .pQd
for the past few weeks i was plagued by putty randomly failing to bind to ports used for ssh tunneling giving me in its log “forwarding failed: Network error: Permission denied” today my intellij failed to launch – it was freezing on the splash screen, C:\Users\xxxxxxxxxxxx\AppData\Local\JetBrains\IdeaIC2021.2\log\log.log had: that brought me to https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-238995 and workaroudn described ... Read More

crude way to restore postgresql database dump to table with a different name

by .pQd
i needed to restore specific table, backed up via pg_dump, to the same database / schema but under different name. that’s what i’ve done pv dump.zstd|pzstd -dc - |sed 's/name_of_original_table/name_of_renamed_table/g'|su - postgres -c 'psql dbname' this only works if all constrains / indices have in their name name of the original table.

booting KVM VM from an iso image

by .pQd
let’s say you have a vm, maybe with debian. and that vm stopped booting, maybe because of grub corruption. what do you do? add under devices – for pc-i440fx arch: and for pc-q35-3.1: then in the os section change boot from dev=’hd’ to dev=’cdrom’: then also – this article describes how to go back from ... Read More

ClickHouse – dictionary with string keys

by .pQd
i wanted to create a clickhouse dictionary that used String as a key, not an int. docs mention here: “A composite key can consist of a single element. This makes it possible to use a string as the key, for instance”. I’ve been trying this and failed few times. creation worked but i could not ... Read More