System Administration

Delete Files With Special Characters

by
Midjourney-generated image of a man standing in water looking at a city skyline with stars above

I use SecureCRT for my terminal application, partly because it supports native zmodem transfers, and that makes moving files back and forth between my desktop super easy (if you have lrzsz installed you can just “sz filename.txt” to send something over). Occasionally, though, the transfer aborts and the shell vomits things to files with special characters in their names, like: $ ls -rw-r–r–. 1 plankers plankers 0 May 9 14:00 ”$’\326”y’$’\342”[‘$’\305”X’ -rw-r–r–. 1 plankers plankers 0 May 9 14:00 ”$’\370\343”4’$’\361′ How do you deal with files with special characters? There are a number of tricks that work: The inode number method is super easy to use if you have shell …

Read More

Easy Dell PowerEdge Firmware Updates

by

With all the CPU and other hardware vulnerabilities present in modern servers it’s very important to keep your Dell firmware updated. Various operating systems, like VMware ESXi, Linux, and Microsoft Windows ship CPU microcode with their OSes, but that only updates the CPUs. There are still other vulnerabilities that exist, like in the Intel Management Engines, memory controllers, UEFI firmware, and so on that if left unpatched present an opportunity for attackers. I dislike complexity. A lot. Adding more tools to an environment in order to do a job, like managing Dell firmware updates on servers, also adds complexity. Thankfully, on Dell PowerEdge servers there are a couple of approaches …

Read More