Tag Archives: solved

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Finding Your Router’s Public IP Address

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It’s easy enough to find your home router’s public facing IP address (the one your ISP assigns) via a Google search; they even make it the first result on the page. But what if you want to find it via a script?

That’s the challenge I’m trying to solve. What’s more, I want to do this without calling something on an external service. I’ll only be looking it up once every five minutes or so, but I’d prefer to not be a nuisance. (And if something goes wrong and my script runs in a tight loop, I’d rather not have the polling hammer someone else’s server.)

I found a script on the Linux & Things blog which almost does what I want. That script doesn’t quite work for me though, my route command doesn’t flag the default gateway.

But that’s OK, the bulk of what that script does is to look up the local network’s name for the router. That’s a nice bit of robustness, just in case the router’s name does change for some reason (e.g. switching from Fios to Comcast, you’d get a new router and the new router would likely have a different default name). But for my purposes, it’s good enough to know that the router’s name is always going to be Fred. (No, not really, that would be silly. My router’s real name is Ethel.)

So from a bash prompt, we end up with this snippet of code:

external_address=$(nslookup Fred.home | grep Address | tail -1 | awk ‘{print $2}’)

That one-liner really breaks down to five parts.

nslookup Fred.home looks up Fred’s entry in the local DNS. What I get is something similar to:

Server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Name: Fred.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
Name: Fred.home
Address: 172.217.8.14

Now none of that’s my real network information, but what we’re after is that last “Address” line.

Piping the output of nslookup through grep Address throws away every line which doesn’t contain the word “Address”, leaving this:

Address:        192.168.1.1#53
Address: 192.168.1.1
Address: 172.217.8.14

Getting closer, next, it gets piped through tail -1 which grabs just the last line:

Address: 172.217.8.14

Excellent! That’s almost what we want.

The next step in the chain is to run it through awk '{print $2}' which uses the AWK tool to output just the second token in the stream.

Finally, the entire thing is wrapped in the $() operator, which captures the output of those four steps and allows us to assign them to the 

external_address

variable, which allows the external address to be used elsewhere:

external_address=$(nslookup Fred.home | grep Address | tail -1 | awk ‘{print $2}’)
echo $external_address
172.217.8.14

This (obviously) runs at a bash prompt. I’ve tried it out on Ubuntu and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, though I can’t imagine it wouldn’t work on other distributions as well. Most of the magic in this is text parsing. The Windows version of nslookup provides similar output, just formatted differently; there’s no reason a PowerShell script couldn’t do some similar processing to find the address.

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Fixing Evernote’s “Could not add tray icon, error: An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.” message

I reinstalled Evernote a week or so back and every time I fired it up, a background window would also open containing the message “Could not add tray icon, error: An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.” Every time this happened, I’d dismiss the message and move on with what I was working on.

This routine got old pretty quickly so I did what any other geek would do and Googled for the message. Apparently the message has been around for a while, with the suggested fix being to reinstall Evernote. So I uninstalled Evernote, waited a few minutes, and then reinstalled it. Then I went back into the application and a background window opened with the same message.

This time, after closing both the pop-up and the main application window, I took a look in the system tray and discovered that Evernote’s “running in the background” icon was also missing. I also realized I’d never been prompted to run the installer as an administrator.

I run my computer differently than most people – the user account where I do my day-to-day work has reduced privileges. There’s a separate login for anything requiring elevated privileges, such as installing software. Most installers will either prompt you to either login as an administrator, or else they’ll install to an alternate location (generally somewhere in the %APPDATA% folder). I didn’t dig too deeply, but my best guess is that Evernote was doing the latter, but the system tray icon requires something to be installed with higher privileges.

In the end, I uninstalled Evernote again and this time made sure to re-install with admin privileges.

I haven’t seen the error message since.

(Public domain image, via pixabay)

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Problem: chmod is ignored in the Git Bash prompt

So here’s a strange one that had me baffled for a bit – the chmod command is pretty much a null operation from the Git Bash prompt (MingW64). This initially showed up on a script for launching a Docker container, but as nearly as I can tell, it happens for any shell script.

So, we have a simple script that prints out “Hello World!”.

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ cat foo
echo Hello World!

Simple enough. Now the thing is, I want to make this script executable. Now this particular Bash implementation will let me run ./foo and it’ll execute, but my real use case (running a Docker container) is going to have a somewhat longer name. Just as a matter of convenience, I’d like to to type just the first few characters, press tab, and have the filename expanded. And besides, your executable files should always be marked as executable.

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$

OK, this is an easy fix, I just need to run chmod and set the execute bit to on, right?

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ chmod 744 foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

The execute bit didn’t change. Maybe I need to use the u+x syntax instead?

$ chmod u+x foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

Still no luck. So why is bar marked as executable? What’s the difference between these two scripts? The answer turns out to be one line of code:

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ chmod u+x foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ cat bar
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello World!

Do you see that first line, where it says “#!/bin/sh”. That’s how Bash knows what interpreter to pass the script to. It also turns out, in this particular implementation, that’s how Bash knows the file contains an executable script instead of just text.

So we modify foo, and get this result:

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test$ cat foo
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello World!
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rwxr--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo*

(Image credit: Screenshot by ThatBlairGuy)

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git error: Permission to user-B/repo.git denied to user-A

I have two GitHub accounts: UserA and UserB. Over time I’ve been switching to working with UserB, but the switchover was a bit difficult.

I created a test repository on GitHub at https://github.com/UserB/test

On the local system, from the command prompt

cd \git
git clone https://UserB@github.com/UserB/test
cd test
# make some changes to README.md, add a new foo.txt
git add *
git commit -m "Banana!" # In real life, you'll probably want a more useful comment.

And that’s where the train went off the rails…

C:\git\test>git push
remote: Permission to UserB/test.git denied to UserA.
fatal: unable to access 'https://UserB@github.com/UserB/test/': The requested URL returned error: 403

So git’s saying that even though I expressly got this as UserB, it still thinks I’m UserA

Google came back with lots of stuff about making sure you have the right SSH key (apparently the cool kids do everything over SSH).

A few search results make reference to the Windows Credential Manager. Apparently the Windows version of Git hooks into that somehow. What’s the Windows Credential Manager? Well, from the name, it sounds like something that might be used for storing userids and passwords.

OK, so how do I invoke it? Dunno. Let’s try the search box on the START menu. Aha! Two entries. One for “Credential Manager” and one for “Manage Windows Credentials.”

So let’s try the first one. Hey! This looks promising:

About halfway down the list, there’s one labeled “git:https://github.com” Let’s expand that.

Oh, looky there! Username and password.

Now what I did was to remove the entry and then push again. I was prompted to enter a userid and password. I still had to type the password at the command prompt, but IT STUCK.

C:\git\test>git push
Counting objects: 3, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 304 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/UserB/test
5e74c47..cf2ca13 master -> master

I probably could have clicked “Edit” and changed the userid and password, and just kept going, but I didn’t notice the “Edit” right away.

It looks as though you might actually be able to have multiple entries for git:https://github.com, but I haven’t tried that yet.

(Public domain photo from PublicDomainPictures.net)