A strange message was recently received from a Bash script running under Linux Mint 18:
Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%{ <-- HERE (.*?)}/ at /usr/bin/print line 528.
Error: no such file "test\n"
Slightly confusing, as it reads like a Perl error, rather than bash. Below is another variety of the same thing
Continue readingThe Linux firewall is a great way to secure a server, especially one that is Internet facing. Together with ipset and an appropriate blacklist, it can protect your server from the worst the Internet can throw at it. However, netfilter (aka iptables), can generate a lot of messages. By default they go to the kernel logging channel, flooding out log files such as messages, syslog and kern.log.
It is important to keep log files clear so that system issues are not missed. For example, a hardware or memory error message might be written to kern.log, but could be difficult to notice due to many thousands of firewall messages. Worse, over time, the important message will be moved into a historical log files due to the action of logrotate.
This article explains how to send firewall messages to their own log file, using the example of a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian 9 (Debian Stretch). After a small configuration change, netfilter messages go to their own file instead of clogging up the general logs.
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This article explains how to create some simple mathematical shapes with graphics.py, a popular graphics library for Python written by John Zelle. Graphics.py is a single file containing graphics functions such as Point, Line, Circle and Rectangle. In this article though, we are just going to use it to plot single points.
At the top of the page is a blancmange like shape. The program that drew it is at the bottom of the article, if you want to jump straight there. Otherwise, a couple of simpler plots will be demonstrated first, just to show a couple of underlying principles. Continue reading