As I said in the previous post I’m in love with Cygwin… but I’m also in love with Keepass… and I also live with ssh… so how to make my life easier?

The answer is simple: KeeAgent

KeeAgent is a Keepass plugin that can work as a ssh agent, in this way:

1. you can save you ssh private keys in a safe and encrypted Keepass database –> NO MORE PRIVATE KEYS ON FILESYSTEM
2. you don’t have to deal with ssh private keys passphrases, because they’re stored in the Keepass entries where you’ll save private keys –> NO MORE UNENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEYS
3. you can easily retrieve public keys to authorize hosts access without searching like a hound on your filesystem, in a couple of clicks KeeAgent will provide them

Apparently the setup of all this thing may seem complex, in reality it’s quite simple:

1. download and install KeeAgent from https://github.com/dlech/KeeAgent/releases
2. in KeeAgent options (Tools -> Options -> KeeAgent) put this string into “Cygwin/MSYS Integration” Path

   %UserProfile%/.keeagent.sock

3. restart Keepass and check if there’s the file .keeagent.sock in your home and it’s a socket file

   file ~/.keeagent.sock

4. export SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable and put it on your .bashrc file, the value of the variable should be the path of the socket file you set at the point number 2.

   echo "export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~/.keeagent.sock" >> ~/.bashrc

5. make sure you have installed Cygwin OpenSSH and you’re not using Windows ssh

The setup is complete, now you only have to create key entries in your Keepass database, attach private key files, fill the password field and enable those entries to be loaded with KeeAgent.

For more details check the super clear KeeAgent documentation.

Working as a GNU/Linux sysadmin means working all day long on a terminal, it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a server, a container or a Kubernetes cluster, and for me terminal means Cygwin.

Microsoft made huge changes since Windows 10 to make it easy to work with GNU/Linux on a Windows workstation, think about OpenSSH available by default or WSL, but for me Cygwin is still the 1st choice, no virtualization, no  WSL network issues, (almost) all the GNU/Linux utils available, fast and native to Windows.

But sometimes having two home directories (one for Cygwin, one for your Windows user) is not convenient at all… but there’s a solution for that, it’s easy and it’s fast and do not involve any workaround or symlinks, you can tell Cygwin to use the Windows home directory as a Cygwin home.

For doing it you simply have to edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file and change the db_home variable, using as value “/%H”, here’s the result:

tas@tas ~
$ grep ^db_home /etc/nsswitch.conf
db_home: /%H

The next terminal you’ll open will have its home into “C:\Users\<user>” or if you are a Cygwin lover “/cygdrive/c/Users/<user>” ;)

Windows Even Log is PITA, it always has been, It will always be…
Today I had an alert about an unexpected reboot from one of the few Windows Servers I have and I want to find why it happened and who did it.
Everytime I try to search something in the Even Log I want to cry, it’s one the most time consuming and painful activities I can think about…

But today I found a nice Powershell command that will sort this out in no time… or at least the time taken by the system to search inside the damn Event Log, which usually is quite long…

Get-EventLog -LogName System |? {$_.EventID -in (6005,6006,6008,6009,1074,1076)} | ft TimeGenerated,EventId,Message -AutoSize –wrap

I hope this will come handy