Automation

When first moving to i3 as a window manager, you may have relished the opportunity to learn a tonne of new shortcut keys on your journey to being the neckbeardiest of them all (I know I certainly did). At some point along the way, you probably realised that it would be useful to start certain programs/scripts when you first login. As this is linux, there’s about 15 different ways to do this, but I’m going to show you my favourite. It’s my favourite for a few reasons: ...

Tell me if this rings a bell: You run something from pip and get told that your pip version needs an upgrade. You run pip install --upgrade pip and then think about how many other packages might need an upgrade… So, you run pip list --outdated and it returns a tonne of packages. You then spend a stupidly long amount of time trying to figure out why there’s no auto-upgrade option for pip which eventually results in you upgrading each package manually, cursing every time. ...

So I had a need earlier on today. The need for simple end-user notifications. This need has some backstory, however… The plex container that I run on Docker is basically bulletproof. It does everything super quickly and is easy to restart for updates or to clear out some disk I/O issue with my NAS. The NAS is the only thing that’s really causing it issues because it’s a 5 year old Drobo which is in serious need of an upgrade! So if the Drobo locks up and kills all of the I/O to it, the containers need a reboot. Oddly enough, the Drobo itself doesn’t need a reboot (or even to be remounted) but that’s an investigation for another day. Here, we come to my need: to alert users when the container was ‘down for maintenance.’ ...

Week 2 of “Isn’t AutoIT Cool’ is a brief one. More of a code snippet than the last post. It’s something that I figured out when I was looking into exfiltrating data from a target machine. The idea was this: plug a flash drive into a PC, have it automatically run an exe (this was back in the autoexec.bat days so the theory was that you’d call said exe from autoexec.bat) and copy a bunch of interesting files to itself and then prepare for removal. This was back before the days of the USB Rubber Ducky as well (I think the USB Switchblade was the new hotness at that point). I’ll eventually get into my full script for this process, as it wound up being quite useful. Nothing quite as useful as the LEDs on the Bash Bunny or anything but this was many years before the Hak5 crew had those for sale. ...

AutoIt is amazing. They have a website. Read about it there because it would be a waste of my time to try and explain it to you. The help file is massive so anything you need, you can find there. Also, if you want to use the user created functions and such, everything’s in the help file. It really is rather extensive. So, onto an example. This is basically an example of a script that you can run from an autoexec.bat on someone else’s computer to give them a fake and very obvious virus. Let’s begin: ...