Life after rm -rf

You just ran rm -rf ... for the ump...zillion...th time in your life and guess what, today you mistyped!!! What to do?

• Identify your OS and see if there are proper recovery tools
• Linux?
  • You're fudge'd! but there is hope ...
  • Do NOT quit your session (bash session, terminal window or remote ssh session), do NOT quit/exit it.
  • Use the history command and recreate your .bash_history file:

    history | cut -c 8- > ~/.bash_history

  • Use your wisdom of the ages to go through the compacted version of your history and recreate whatever you can.

    cp ~/.bash_history ~/.bash_history_backup
    awk ' !x[$0]++' ~/.bash_history > ~/noDuplicates
    mv ~/noDuplicates ~/.bash_history

  • If you were on an AWS image, rejoice! It will at least partially recover the basics of your home (~/) directory.
  • Set up daily snapshots and backup processes into place.
• Mac?
  • There are some decent recovery tools like MacKeeper but chances are that by the time you download it, you'll end up overwriting disk sections that you wanted to recover.
  • Know when to give up on a lost cause, get out your blanky, assume the fetal position, suck on your thumb and cry to momma.

Securing ElasticSearch for direct access via a Jetty plugin

1. The elasticsearch-jetty plugin can be used to secure an ES instance for direct access.
2. If the first wall you hit, happens to be a "gap" in Jetty know-how then refer to the following to get up to speed:
   • http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Newbie+Guide+to+Jetty
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Tutorial/Realms
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Tutorial/Embedding_Jetty
   • http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Walkthrough+jetty.xml
   • http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Syntax+Reference
3. Next, you may struggle with your wish for Jetty to be super-secure vs. how to make it happen:
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Howto/Secure_Passwords
     • Sidebar: The required JAR files will be present in ES_HOME/plugins/jetty once you've setup elasticsearch-jetty.
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Reference/SSL_Connectors
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Howto/Configure_SSL
4. Getting a CA-signed cert is always such a pain so if you can re-purpose an existing one ... great!
   • Need to perform some transformations on the available keys & certs? You may refer to http://www.sslshopper.com/article-most-common-openssl-commands.html ... I found the following instructions provided there to be particularly useful:

     Convert a PKCS#12 file (.pfx .p12) containing a private key and certificates to PEM
     openssl pkcs12 -in keyStore.pfx -out keyStore.pem -nodes
     You can add -nocerts to only output the private key or add -nokeys to only output the certificates.

   • Using Portecle (wrapped with Jar Bundler) or KeyStore Explorer works well too.