Entries tagged cgi

Back in 2017 I announced that the https://Debian-Administration.org website was being made read-only, and archived.

At the time I wrote a quick update to save each requested page as a flat-file, hashed beneath /tmp, with the expectation that after a few months I'd have a complete HTML-only archive of the site which I could serve as a static-website, instead of keeping the database and pile of CGI scripts running.

Unfortunately I never got round to archiving the pages in a git-repository, or some other store, and I usually only remembered this local tree of content was available a few minutes after I'd rebooted the server and lost the stuff - as the reboot would reap the contents of /tmp!

Thinking about it today I figured I probably didn't even need to do that, instead I just need to redirect to the wayback machine. Working on the assumption that the site has been around for "a while" it should have all the pages mirrored by now I've made a "final update" to Apache:

 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteRule   ^/(.*)  "http://web.archive.org/web/https://debian-administration.org/$1"  [R,L]

Assuming nobody reports a problem in the next month I'll retire the server and make a simple docker container to handle the appropriate TLS certificate renewal, and hardwire the redirection(s) for the sites involved.

Tags: apache, cgi, debian-administration, wayback-machine | 1 comment

I'm not sure if I've talked about my job here, but I recently celebrated my one year anniversary - whilst on a company offsite trip to Sweden. When I joined the company there were approximately 100 people employed by it. Nowadays the numbers are much higher.

Having more people around is pretty awesome, but I realized that there were a lot of people wandering around the office who I didn't recognize so it occurred to me to make a game of it.

I had the idea I could write a slack bot to quiz me on my colleagues:

• Show a random face, using the Slack profile picture.
• Give a list of 5 names.
• Ask me which was correct.

I spent an hour messing around with various Slack APIs, and decided the whole thing was too much of a hassle. Instead I wrote a simple script to download the details of all members of the workspace:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Profile picture URL.

Then using that data, users.json, I hacked up a simple web application in Python, using the flask API. There only needed to be two pages:

• A page ("/") to show five random images, each with five random names beneath them.
• A page ("/quiz") to receive the HTTP POST, and score.

All in all this took only two hours or so. Old-school CGI is pretty awesome like that - Hidden values meant the whole thing could be stateless:

 <input type="hidden" name="1answer" value="Bob Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1url" value="https://.." ..

 <input type="hidden" name="2answer" value="Sally Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2url" value="https://.." ..

The only downside is that I don't have any authentication, so there is no ability to have a leaderboard. I've looked at the Okta samples and I think it would be easy to add, but I guess that would make it more complex and less portable. That said I'm not sharing the code this time, so who cares if it is tied to the company?

Anyway sometimes I forget how fast and easy it is to spinup a random virtual machine and present a HTTP(S) service for interactive use. This is one of those times when I remembered.

Tags: cgi, python, slack, work | 2 comments