TIL - read-only variables in Linux

 A co-worker was seeing an exception: -

 line 8: TMOUT: readonly variable

when trying to SCP a file from a remote Linux box.

I did some digging and found a RedHat article: -

Why does it prompt "bash: TMOUT: readonly variable" when sudo'ing or ssh'ing to the system? 

that said, in part: -

The TMOUT variable is usually defined read-only to avoid users from unsetting or modifying its value. Due to this it's not possible to set it twice.

I reproduced the problem on my Ubuntu 18.04 box: -

-bash: TMOUT: readonly variable

with a pair of scripts: -

The first script: -

cat /etc/profile.d/a.sh

readonly TMOUT=500; export TMOUT

sets TMOUT as readonly

The second script: -

cat /etc/profile.d/b.sh

TMOUT=600; export TMOUT

then tries to override it

which I validated: -

fgrep -R TMOUT /etc/profile.d/

/etc/profile.d/a.sh:readonly TMOUT=500; export TMOUT

/etc/profile.d/b.sh:TMOUT=600; export TMOUT

I left my colleague to dig into /etc etc. and see what was going on, but TIL about read-only variables 

Having fun and games with Kubernetes networking

I'd forgotten how much I simply enjoy the opportunities for hacking - in the original naive sense of the word - that Kubernetes (K8s) offers.

Today I've been working to find out why CoreDNS didn't work in my cluster - clue, it was containerd that did it

However, I then started seeing: -

failed to allocate for range 0: no IP addresses available in range set: 10.48.131.1-10.48.131.62

from my CoreDNS pods, having "fixed" containerd.

Thankfully, Google Cloud have a doc for that: -

Pods display failed to allocate for range 0: no IP addresses available in range set error message

In part, it required me to stop containerd and kubelet, and clear out the previously defined IP address range: -

mkdir /var/lib/cni/networks

Once I did this, and restarted containerd and kubelet, we're back in the game !

Munging JSON with JQ - without using grep and awk

Further to a previous post: -

Grep AND awk

I wanted to achieve much the same, but only using jq

So here we go: -

ic is images --output JSON | jq -r '.[] | {Name:.name,Architecture:.operating_system.architecture,Status:.status} | select((.Name | contains("ubuntu")) and (.Architecture | startswith("s390x")) and (.Status | startswith("available")))'

which returns: -

{

  "Name": "ibm-ubuntu-18-04-1-minimal-s390x-3",

  "Architecture": "s390x",

  "Status": "available"

}

as opposed to the alternative: -

ic is images | awk '/s390x/ && /ubuntu/ && /available/'

r018-e3d94080-972f-4f18-8a79-60a12d0b61c2   ibm-ubuntu-18-04-1-minimal-s390x-3                 available    s390x   ubuntu-18-04-s390x                   18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver Minimal Install   2               public       provider     none         -   

Git and Ubuntu - not branching out

 Whilst trying to make some changes to a GitHub project, using an Ubuntu box, I hit an interesting issue with git switch - namely that it doesn't work 

So I'm running Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS: -

lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic

and had created a new branch: -

git branch

  test_doc_update
* develop

and then tried to switch to it: -

git switch test_doc_update

but instead got: -

git: 'switch' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

I checked the version of Git: -

git --version

git version 2.17.1

and even tried upgrading it: -

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y git

...

The following packages will be upgraded:
  git git-man
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.

...

but to no avail: -

git --version

git version 2.17.1

Instead, as per this Git: ‘switch’ is not a git command. See ‘git –help’  I used this instead: -

git checkout test_doc_update

Switched to branch 'test_doc_update'

git branch

* test_doc_update
  develop

Sorted !

For the record, I have a more up-to-date version of git on the Mac, via Homebrew

ls -al `which git`

lrwxr-xr-x  1 hayd  admin  28 19 Apr 08:59 /usr/local/bin/git -> ../Cellar/git/2.36.0/bin/git

git --version

git version 2.36.0

with which git switch DOES work

Tinkering with arrays in ZSH

Someone had asked: -

if you have a command that returns two values, can you assign each value to a separate variable? For example, I have a command that returns two lines, and I want NAME to be set to the first line and TITLE to the second line. I seem to recall doing this in the past, but I can’t find an example or a note on it.

which made me think about how one might achieve this

I'm using zsh, and looked at dumping the output from a command into an array

I started with the sw_vers command: -

ProductName: macOS
ProductVersion: 12.3.1
BuildVersion: 21E258

and found a way to dump the multiline output into an array: -

array_of_lines=("${(@f)$(sw_vers)}")                                 

and checked each of the elements in the array: -

echo $array_of_lines[1]                                                    

ProductName: macOS

echo $array_of_lines[2]

ProductVersion: 12.3.1

echo $array_of_lines[3]

BuildVersion: 21E258

I also used ${#array_of_lines} to get the size of the array: -

echo ${#array_of_lines}

3

to iterate through the array and dump out each element in turn: -

for ((i = 1; i<=${#array_of_lines}; i++)); do echo $array_of_lines[i]; done

ProductName: macOS

ProductVersion: 12.3.1

BuildVersion: 21E258

Whether this helps, we shall see ....

AirPlay and  TV and macOS Monterey

For those using AirPlay to mirror to an external screen e.g.  TV etc. you can toggle whether the Screen Mirroring tool shows up in the Menu Bar - or not - via System Preferences -> Dock & Menu Bar -> Screen Mirroring

This is especially useful for me now that we're back in the office in meeting rooms equipped with  TV