Cli on Aaron West's technology blog

Exporting and Importing GitHub Labels

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:46:00 -0500

At work we’re in the process of migrating all of our code repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub. Our main driver for this change, and something I should probably write about here, is integrating all of our project management and process orchestration in one tool. This brings our issue management, project planning, state visualization, and more into the tool we use to manage code.

A large part of the migration process is moving our individual repos and getting them set up like they were on Bitbucket. One of these tasks is configuring GitHub Labels in each repo/project. We have a documented and standardized set of labels and I began the process by manually adding each label into the first repo. Then I did the same thing for a second repo. It’s fairly tedious work so I looked around to see if you could export/import labels in GitHub.

How to Background Linux Console Processes

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 13:30:00 -0500

This week our data team were talking about ways to run a Python script without having the execution attached to your console session. There’s more than way one to accomplish this but here’s the one they settled on.

nohup python python_script.py </dev/null &

The discussion reminded me of a similar, and equally useful, workflow we had a Dataium. We used all kinds of databases over the years but in the beginning MySQL 5.5.x was our goto. We operated a fairly sizable database which served as a backend to a desktop Adobe AIR / Flex application. One of the challenges we had with the configuration was performance following a database restart. We approached this problem by writing SQL scripts which mirrored common query patterns from our users. This concept of warming the MySQL query cache was incredibly useful.

How to Retrieve Your Wi-Fi Password on Mac

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 08:00:00 -0500

I don’t generally forget the password for Wi-Fi networks I use, mainly because I use 1Password to store all secrets. But, I ran across the ability to retrieve the password, in plain text, from the OS X Keychain of an SSID I’ve previously connected with. Not a huge amount of utility to this but it’s interesting the capability exists.

In the command below I read the the keychain and hone-in on just the password portion. Replace <SSID_NAME> with the name of of a valid SSID you’ve connected with in the past. Keep in mind case sensitivity matters. You can leave off | grep password and retrieve the whole item too. This command requires authentication so you’ll be asked to enter your username and password.

Flushing DNS Cache on Mac OS X

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:43:00 -0500

Below are the various Bash commands needed to flush DNS on Mac OS X. There are several different versions of the commands depending on which version of OS X in use. Ensure you are selecting the command appropriate for your OS. HT to OSXDaily for additional explanations on what is happening under the covers.

Flush DNS on OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 and Newer

When 10.11.x aka ‘El Capitan’ ships this command should continue to function. This set of commands will flush all DNS caches on OS X including Multicast DNS and Unicast DNS.

Generating SSH Keys on Mac OS X

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 16:41:00 -0500

Generating an SSH key without a password. For example, for passphraseless old school Hadoop clusters. This is generally done from within a users home directory such as /Users/username on Mac.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -P ""

Generating an SSH key with a password. This is generally done from within a users home directory such as /User/username on Mac.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

How to copy a generated SSH key to the Mac clipboard. This is arguably better than manually copying and pasting.