virt-install with cloud-init

If you have not heard about cloud-init then you should definately search for it and learn about cloud-config as well. You can find the documentation for cloud-config here. It is used for configuring VMs when running in cloud environments. Specially useful to inject the ssh keys or set the root password but you can do anything in the cloud-config as there is a section where you can run bash commands. While this is useful for cloud instances, you can make use of this feature when running your vm with qemu or libvirtd. All you need to do is either attach a iso disc with user-data and meta-data files in it or even simpler, you can use virt-install command. The command that I use is as follows

Stay safe from phising

Generally when you get a phising mail, the biggest challenge is finding if the site is genuine or not. And URL shortening services do not make it any easy. Earlier I had posted about using curl to expand the url in this post. However you might not be on a Linux terminal all the time (for example - you are checking something on your mobile), in that case what do you do?

Curl to exapnd short url

Many times I receive short urls in mail and other places like chats and messages. I first like to see the destination before I click on the url. I was looking for some way to do this in bash. I realized that this could be very simply done by looking at the Location header in the response from curl.

Example

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curl -I https://bit.ly/32WwCp4|grep location

and the output should be something like

Sleep infinitely in bash

I am sure that you would have got a lot of instances where you have wanted to sleep for infinity and ended up doing this

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2
3
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while [[ 1 ]]
do
	sleep 3600
done

or some other such similar loop to sleep for some time and wrap it in infinite loop.

I learned something new recently and found it very useful. You can do the above with

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sleep infinity

and you can use that even for a while loop

Ignore case when completing file names in bash

Sometimes you don’t want to have the bash completion work with case completion. There could be several reasons like one I dont like is the default xdg folders starting with capital letters.

So, if you know that bash uses readline for a lot of configuration then there is a very easy solution, you can just run this command and start a new bash shell :)

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echo 'set completion-ignore-case on' >> ~/.inputrc

Enjoy 👍

Tunneling/Pivoting with proxychains and msfconsole

Buffer Overflow NX enabled (mprotect and read) to get root shell from SUID binary