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  1. Naming Shell Scripts

    You're writing a shell script to do... something. Whatever it is, it will hopefully make your life easier in some way or other.

    But what do you call it?

    This touches on a pet peeve of mine. Whatever you do, do not call it somescript.sh. You should never use …

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  2. Making SSH Easy

    SSH is great. But it does mean typing longer commands than you otherwise would have done.

    For example, if your local user name is joe but your user name on a remote server is jbloggs, then you have to specify the user name whenever you use SSH to communicate with …

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  3. Using Bastion hosts with SSH

    Sometimes companies' security policies dictate the use of "bastion hosts": Hosts that you have to "jump through" to get to the network behind the host - i.e. you cannot connect directly to a host "behind" the bastion host.

    This does improve security a bit, but the most visible effect is …

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  4. Christmas - the Danish way

    Although I live in the UK, I often get questions about what is different about Christmas the Danish way.

    Well - that deserved a blog post.

    First of all, Christmas in Danish is Jul - cognate to the old English word Yule - they're pronounced almost the same way.

    Keeping the pre-christian name …

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  5. Passwords Are BAD

    Password are awful.

    Unfortunately, it is the "least worst" solution to the problem of authentication in most cases.

    Sure, there are lots of other authentication methods out there, each with their own problems which (on balance) usually ends up being worse:

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  6. Why So Many Passwords?

    Every site (or every account) you use should have a different, distinct password. Every single one. Never re-use passwords.

    That way: if one site gets hacked (and your password leaked on the darker parts of the web), only that account is leaked. The potential damage is reduced. The bad guys …

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