Data Archives - Igor Oseledko

To Mask or Not to Mask

Igor — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:10:54 +0000

Originally published March 31, 2020 @ 3:17 pmEffectiveness of face masks against the coronavirus has been debated to death in both popular and scientific literature. Here are the two most common mistakes made by journalists and by people who should know better. Asking the Wrong Question “Can Face Masks Prevent Coronavirus?” or “Can wearing a […]

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Checking Linux Account Password

Igor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:57:45 +0000

Originally published March 25, 2020 @ 4:48 pmOn occasion you may need to check if an account has a specific password. For example, when you build VMs, you may use some default passwords for some default accounts (i.e. root) that should be changed later by your password management application. Except that the password management application […]

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The Coronavirus Discussion

Igor — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:06:25 +0000

Originally published March 5, 2020 @ 12:42 pmJust a few words about the coronavirus. Clearly, the Internet is in need of my contribution to this topic. You might’ve noticed this: whenever there is a discussion about the coronavirus, some dolt appears out of nowhere and says something along the lines of “to put things in […]

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Updating Lynis

Igor — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:22:08 +0000

Originally published February 29, 2020 @ 5:04 pmLynis is an excellent security audit tool for Linux and various Unix derivatives. I have a small wrapper script that runs Lynis via a cron job, does a selective diff with the previous run’s output, and sends me an email. Unfortunately, Lynis does not update itself automatically and […]

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Hiding Passwords

Igor — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:16:29 +0000

Originally published February 21, 2020 @ 9:02 amI’ve touched on this subject previously, but suddenly felt I should repeat myself. The big issue with using passwords from command line is shell history. Regardless of how careful you are, eventually you’ll enter a password in clear text in your terminal session. It will then end up […]

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Backing Up WSL Images

Igor — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:53:28 +0000

Originally published January 4, 2020 @ 3:19 amMicrosoft’s WSL is interesting. I’d go as far as to say that I like it. The mistake here would be to forget that your Linux image is running under Windows, with everything this entails. Making a reliable backup of this thing proved harder than I expected. I have […]

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Home-Brew Ransomware Defense

Igor — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 08:18:31 +0000

Originally published December 28, 2019 @ 12:42 amThe first well-known case of ransomware was documented in 1989. The so-called AIDS Trojan was delivered on a floppy disc; encrypted data; demanded $189.00 (nearly four hundred bucks in today’s money) as a “license fee.” The trojan was quickly defused due to its reliance on weak symmetric cryptography. […]

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Fuzzy Search with Linux

Igor — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 05:59:24 +0000

Originally published November 25, 2022 @ 11:01 pmThis is a quick look at several handy utilities that will allow you to find, navigate, and edit directories and files easily. This overview includes such tools as fzf, rg, fd-find, bat, and the fzf.vim plugin for VIM. The fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. . The […]

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Appending Filenames

Igor — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:16 +0000

Originally published November 17, 2019 @ 11:39 amIf you google how to append, say, current timestamp to the filename in Bash, almost every suggestion boils down to something really basic along the lines of mv $somefile $somefile_$(date +'Y%-%m-%d'). Technically, this is correct and, yet, this is not what was needed. Most filenames have extensions that […]

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Basic Data Recovery in Linux

Igor — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:02:05 +0000

Originally published November 1, 2022 @ 8:22 amHave you noticed how the letters “e” and “r” are neighbors on your keyboard? And an unrelated question: do you know the difference between crontab -e and crontab -r commands? Look it up if you don’t. Honestly, I’ve never used the crontab -r command in my many years […]

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