This week on the podcast, Dan shares some follow-up on the his Caps Lock key change, Kyle shares his SSH setup and has some ideas to improve the Data Migration Workbench. Then Dan and Kyle discuss the Forgot Password functionality in PeopleSoft.
Show Notes
- Caps Lock Key Follow-up @ 2:45
- PuTTY Security Update @ 5:00
- Data Migration Workbench @ 11:30
- Forgot Password Site @ 21:30
I think most commonly people swap the function of the caps lock and control keys so that both are still available. As an emacs user I like to have convenient access to all the meta keys so for many years I’ve rotated the mapping of Alt – Ctrl – Caps Lock to put the most important function (ctrl) on the most convenient key (caps lock) and the least important function (caps lock) on the hardest to type key (alt). Emacs uses Alt a lot too so it goes to the original Ctrl key.
One annoying disadvantage of remapping your keys is that once you come to rely on it it can become harder to work on a keyboard with the default mapping. I’m extra awkward when I have to type on a regular keyboard, frequently turning on caps lock by mistake. Ctrl is used everywhere including copy and paste shortcuts and bash readline line editing (which I leave on the emacs defaults rather than using vi mode).
I like that idea of swapping the Caps/Ctrl keys so you still have the functionality. I still use the normal Ctrl key at times, so it would take me a while to get used to it. And yes, I completely agree that switching to a different computer make it tough if you are used to remapped keys 🙂
Your discussion from about the 6 to 11 minute mark about preferred or usual work flow/tools to get server access was interesting. I think most PS Admins spend a significant portion of their work week wrangling servers, so efficient tools and techniques to access those servers can really save time and improve productivity.
Ultimately I’m trying to use DevOps to reduce the need to login to specific Linux servers to perform admin tasks, but our work still requires a command prompt on several or more Linux servers every day.
Even in the small team of three PS admins I belong to, each admin has distinctly different strategies and tools for accessing our Linux servers. (We only have a small number of Windows servers for nVision, Change Assistant and the client tools for developers so I think everyone just uses the Microsoft RDP client.) The differences seem to be primarily caused by the different backgrounds of the admins. The admin with more Windows experience often uses PuTTY to connect directly to each Linux server, whereas the admin with Unix experience prefers to use PuTTY to connect to a single central Linux utility server and then use ssh at the bash prompt on the utility server to get to the other servers.
My preferred tool is Emacs, so I launch graphical Emacs on the target hosts so that the Emacs windows are displayed on my desktop through the magic of ssh X11 forwarding. This can be very convenient if you enjoy using Emacs, so I found it worthwhile to invest in the extra setup required compared to command line ssh. (Emacs must be installed on the target systems, a fast network connection is a must as is a good X Window System server on your desktop, must have X11 forwarding over ssh, etc.)