Code.RogerHub » ssh

Taking advantage of cloud VM-driven development

Roger Chen — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 06:39:48 +0000

Most people write about cloud computing as it relates to their service infrastructure. It’s exciting to hear about how Netflix and Dropbox et al. use AWS to support their operations, but all of those large-scale ideas don’t really mean much for the average developer. Most people don’t have the budget or the need for enormous computing power or highly-available SaaS data storage like S3, but it turns out that cloud-based VM’s can be highly useful for the average developer in a different way.

Sometimes, you see something like this one-liner installation script for Heroku Toolbelt, and you just get nervous:

wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh

Not only are they asking you to run a shell script downloaded over the Internet, but the script also asks for root privileges to install packages and stuff. Or, maybe you’re reading a blog post about some HA database cluster software and you want to try it out yourself, but running 3 virtual machines on your puny laptop is out of the questions.

To get around this issue, I’ve been using DigitalOcean machines for when I want to test something out but don’t want to go to the trouble of maintaining a development server or virtual machines. Virtualized cloud servers are great for this because:

They’re DIRT CHEAP. DO’s smallest machine costs $0.007 an hour. Even if you use it for 2 hours, it rounds down to 1 cent.
The internet connection is usually a lot better than whatever you’re using. Plus, most cloud providers have local mirrors for package manager stuff, which makes installing packages super fast.
Burstable CPU means that you can get an unfair amount of processing power for a short time at the beginning, which comes in handy for initially installing and downloading all the stuff you’ll want to have on your machine.

I use the tugboat client (a CLI ruby app) to interface with the DigitalOcean API. To try out MariaDB Galera clustering, I just opened up three terminals and had three SSH sessions going on. For source builds that have a dozen or more miscellaneous dependencies, I usually just prepare a simple build script that I can upload and run on a Cloud VM whenever I need it. When I’m done with a machine, I’ll shut it down until I need a machine again a few days later.

Running development virtual machines in the cloud might not drastically change your workflow, but it opens up a lot of opportunities for experimentation and massive computing resources when you want it. So load up a couple dollars onto a fresh DigitalOcean account and boot up some VMs!

elementary OS, a distribution like no other

Roger Chen — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 04:55:48 +0000

There are a surprising number of people who hate elementary OS. They say that elementary is technically just a distribution of linux, not an OS. They say that it is too similar to OS X. They say that the developers are in over their heads. All of these things may be true, but I do not care. I am sick of ascetic desktop environments without animations. I am tired of not having a compositor. I don’t need a dozen GUI applications to hold my hand, but I hate having to fix things that don’t work out of the box. You are not Richard Stallman. Face it: modern people, whether or not they are also computer programmers, do not live in the terminal, and most of us aren’t using laptops with hardware built in 2004. And finally, I am sick of blue and black window decorations that look like they were designed by a 12 year old.

Elementary OS Luna is the first distribution of linux I’ve used where I don’t feel like changing a thing. The desktop environment defaults are excellent, and all of Ubuntu’s excellent hardware support, community of PPA’s, and familiar package manager are available. At the same time, there is a lot of graphical magic, window animation, and attention to detail that is quite similar to OS X. There is a minimal amount of hand-holding, and it’s quite easy to get used to the desktop because of the intuitive keyboard shortcuts and great application integration.

You can’t tell from just the screenshot above, but elementary OS is more than just a desktop environment. The distribution comes packaged with a bunch of custom-built applications, like the custom file manager and terminal app. Other apps like a IRC client, social media client, and system search are available in community PPA’s. I do most of my work through either the web browser, ssh, or vim. Important data on my laptop is limited to personal files on my Google Drive, and a directory of projects in active development that’s regularly backed up to my personal file server. Programs can be painlessly installed from the package manager, and configuration files are symlinked from my Google Drive. I’m not very attached to the current state of my laptop at any given moment because all the data on it is replaceable, with the exception of OS tweaks. I don’t like having to install a dozen customization packages to get my workflow to how I like it, so out-of-box experience is very important to me.

I would say that if you’re a regular linux user, you should at least give elementary OS Luna a try, even if it’s on a friend’s machine or in a VM. You may be surprised. I was.

Protecting yourself on open wifi with Firefox

Roger Chen — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:32:14 +0000

So, I’m sitting in the back of Brewed Awakening right now in the midst of café-goers, some of which I know must be sniffing packets from the several overlapping open wifi networks around this dense part of campus. The spread of free wifi access points is an excellent direction for humanity, but it comes with its risks. Unless you’re browsing through HTTPS, anybody with a capable wifi network adapter can sit innocuously across the café and record everything you’re transmitting and receiving on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone. It may not seem immediately concerning that strangers know what kind of sick forums you frequent, but it becomes a security issue when you start transmitting your passwords in the clear (you know, the same ones you use for banking and email).

It just so happens that Linode, the hosting company that hosts the RogerHub network, recently announced a 10x increase in bandwidth caps for all their clients, and Opera announced their decision to move their browser line over to Webkit, sparking conversation about our complacency with Safari/Chrome. These two together motivated me to return to Firefox and recapture their vast add-on ecosystem to try to address this issue.

ssh -D 1025 rogerhub

You’re probably familiar with ssh‘s ability to forward TCP and erect ad-hoc SOCKS proxies. If not, you should definitely check out man ssh and read through the -L and -D flags. This command sets up a SOCKS proxy on localhost:1025 (ports below 1024 are privileged and can only be bound by root) through which you can forward web traffic and stuff.

Now, Google Chrome’s proxy support isn’t great for two reasons: first, they’ve had corporate adoption in mind since the beginning, so Chrome has historically read proxy settings from the environmental variables/group policy/system configuration, whatever it is on your system. In their Windows version, there’s also a UI to set proxy settings, but it isn’t their main focus. Second, their extension API doesn’t allow for the same kind of deep integration with the UI and with the program internals as Firefox’s add-on environment allows.

So, I opened up Firefox and installed FoxyProxy, the popular proxy-switching add-on, and configured it with the SSh proxy. I also pulled in NoScript for the sake of locking down the browser itself.

NoScript comes with a bunch of draconian defaults, and isn’t very useful without a bit of configuration (you could, for example, just turn off scripts in Firefox instead of keeping its defaults). Enabling same-origin scripts (Base 2nd level domains works well for me) will let most sites and their CDN subdomains to function the way they were meant while ignoring the GA, Facebook, and ad network trackers. Of course, this isn’t very good practice for casual browsing, but open wifi is a battlefield.

Altogether, it makes for enough security to give you peace of mind while browsing on public wifi. Firefox, as a browser, has really improved over the years as well, especially its web developer tools which (back in the day) once consisted of an Error Console and the imperative to install/learn Firebug. Also, splitting search and location just makes sense.