automation | VPetkov.net

30Sep 2018

Easy fully automated WordPress plugin update system

A long time ago I became frustrated with having to update my WordPress plugins manually, so I created a Perl script and a blog post (https://blog.vpetkov.net/2011/08/03/script-to-upgrade-plugins-on-wordpress-to-the-latest-version-fully-automatically/) that explained how to automate this. The idea was quite simple: feed a plugin name, have the script check the WordPress plugins page for the latest versioned download, grab it, and extract it over the specified blog plugins directory and thus update the plugin.

The script was simple and it worked very well. It made dealing with plugins many times easier. However, there was one big down side as some users pointed out — it did not actually check if a plugin needed to be updated. It blindly replaced the current plugin with the latest version. This meant that there was no way to “efficiently” automate it. If you cron-ed it directly, it would simply pull and update all your plugins at whatever period you specified. For the longest time this really irritated me, but I didn’t have time to dig through WordPress to understand how the engined checked and signaled for local plugins. One particular user (Joel) forked a copy and made many improvements to deal with this specific issue.

As time went on, I decided to look at this problem again. A couple of years ago I solved it in a really elegant way, but I didn’t have time to update the blog post. A few days ago, after looking at the blog statistics, I realized that the WordPress article was one of the top 10 most popular ones. So, with that said, here is:

A new simple and elegant solution

The idea is to use the WordPress CLI in order to “query” the local plugins database for plugin names, version number, and “activated” status, and then compare the “local” plugin version with the “remote” plugin version. If the plugin is active and in need of an update, fall back to my original Perl script to update it. Aha! And now we have something that can be cron-ed 🙂

To get started, first grab the WP CLI utility. We are going to rename it, move it to an accessible place, and take care of permissions so that we can use it:


curl -O  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wp

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wp

Continue Reading →Easy fully automated WordPress plugin update system

25Jul 2017

The perfect OpenConnect GUI Menu Bar App with 2FA/Duo support – for Mac OS X

by Ventz ⋅ Leave a Comment

You need to connect to a Cisco AnyConnect (or Juniper Pulse Connect) VPN, and you cannot stand the default client for a variety of reasons (slow connects, crashes, unable to start, pointless pop-up notifications, crashes, pid-loss, etc), and so, you look for alternatives.

You find OpenConnect – the perfect solution, only to realize that the 3rd-party GUI is basically broken and actually doesn’t work (last checked on 8-14-17) with 2-Factor authentication (ex: Duo).

At this point, you can run OpenConnect from a terminal, which works, but you have to keep the terminal open and you have to wrap the long command in a shell script.

Or, you can use my little solution which seems to work perfectly.

Everything you need to get started is on GitHub:
https://github.com/ventz/openconnect-gui-menu-bar

Continue Reading →The perfect OpenConnect GUI Menu Bar App with 2FA/Duo support – for Mac OS X

20Feb 2012

Speak SMS over the Head Phones only when they are plugged in

by Ventz ⋅ 14 Comments

[updated: March 29th, 2015 | Aman Surana created a great youtube video on how to do this. The main difference is that he is using a plugin (comes as an app which extends Tasker) called AutoNotification. The biggest benefit is that it abstracts the application notification layer into a standard set of variables. This allows you to utilize apps other than the main SMS app (ex: now you can use things like WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, etc). It also works with the latest version of Android, which I am starting to get the feeling that my profiles bellow do NOT work with anymore. Anyway, you can find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=37&v=c-Kp9KynlV4, and read the post here since the idea behind how to do this still holds. That and it’s an interesting way to accomplish this task – no pun ;)]

I walk outside listening to Pandora quite a lot, and today I realized that I miss about half the SMS’ that I get. Either because it’s too noisy, or maybe because the SMS’ are not loud enough and I use a single beep, or because the sound trigger gets interrupted by Pandora, but either way, it’s a bit annoying. I have been considering some sort of a solution that will play incoming SMS messages when my headphones are plugged in for quite some time, but I couldn’t think of an efficient way to do it — that is, efficient on the battery. I think I came up with one today.

The idea behind this Tasker program is the following:

There are two Profiles: ‘Detect Headphones‘ and ‘Play Text Over Headphones‘. Only one Profile has to be actually active at all times – the Detect Headphones one. When you plug in your headset (with microphone, or just regular headphones), the profile sets a variable %HEADPHONES to ‘yes’. It then turns on the second Profile – the one that monitors incoming SMS messages and plays them over the headset if your %HEADPHONES variable is set to ‘yes’.

Continue Reading →Speak SMS over the Head Phones only when they are plugged in

01Feb 2012

Timed Blackberry Sound Profiles for Android

by Ventz ⋅ 10 Comments

The general idea behind this is that it utilizes my original Blackberry Sound Profiles for Android and it adds a “timer” element which can be set. Upon setting the timer, it will set a temporary task until the timer runs out. The idea came from one of my visitors who asked me how to do this. At first, I had no idea how to do it. About 30 minutes later I had a semi-working prototype. Another 3 hours later (had to figure out how Scenes worked and interacted with variables and the rest of the system) I had the final version with a working GUI.

The first thing that you need are my Tasker Blackberry Sound Profiles found here: (http://blog.vpetkov.net/2011/05/10/my-tasker-program-blackberry-sound-profiles-for-android). If you don’t have them yet, follow the super quick “Getting Started” section. Once you have the tasks and you have them working (if you want this to work out of the box, grab at least the “Work” task and the “Sleep” task), download the Timed extension:

Note: You need the current BETA to import this profile: http://tasker.dinglisch.net/beta.html (1.2.1b4m)

Timed.zip
(md5: 5709a9ed0b139a027900d9f8f1e2e92a)

Now unzip it and follow the same steps from the original post – grab the “Timed.tsk.xml” file and import it into the the Tasks tab, and then grab the “TimedScene.scn.xml” file and import it into the Scenes tab. Go to your home screen and create a Tasker widget of your “Timed” task. Every time you select this task, it will pop a box which will let you use a slider or directly type in a number. After this, when you hit “Set Profile”, the temporary task (by default “Sleep”) will get activated for the number of minutes you set. After that time period it will go back to the other (by default “Work”) task.

Continue Reading →Timed Blackberry Sound Profiles for Android

27Dec 2011

Tasker – ICS (Android 4.0) – BlackBerry Sound Profiles

by Ventz ⋅ 2 Comments

This is an update to the article “My Tasker program – BlackBerry Sound Profiles for Android” (http://blog.vpetkov.net/2011/05/10/my-tasker-program-blackberry-sound-profiles-for-android). Download the new file here, read through “what has changed”, and “what I have updated”, and then definitely read the original post (url above) as it contains all the details and how-to information.

What Has Changed:

There are a couple of things that Google has drastically changed in ICS 4.0 when it comes to Sound, Vibrate, and Volume.

First of all, they have greatly simplified the Sound Settings. The Volume menu now contains: “Music,Video, Games, and other media” as one volume toggle, then “Ringtone and notifications” as another, and Alarms as a third. Something to note here is that the keyboard “clicking” sound can now be found under the keyboard settings -> under Advanced.

The Second change is the way “Vibrate” has been re-implemented. The new “Silent Mode” controls three things currently: Sound, Mute, and Vibrate. This is important as this was completely broken on 2.3. The next thing to note is the “Vibrate and Ring” option, as this has a negative effect when toggled on via Vibrate (it’s still sticky for some reason, but due to Silent Mode being fixed, we can now un-toggle it via Tasker).

Continue Reading →Tasker – ICS (Android 4.0) – BlackBerry Sound Profiles

26Aug 2011

Pandora Music Access-Vulnerability

by Ventz ⋅ 2 Comments

UPDATE: Please check out latest version from my git repo: http://git.vpetkov.net/projects – project name: “pandora”

It seems that Pandora is not putting too much time or thought into how they provide and access music online through their website. I really hope they fix this since it’s irresponsible as far as the the DMCA is concerned. Each song is simply an encoded token, and it’s pulled down directly from, presumably, one of their proxy server. If you look at the stream while playing songs on pandora.com, you will notice something like this (ex: not real):


access/197185343492159781?
version=4&amp;lid=######&amp;token=Rqcw8pKLwxByRVLM6SynyT%2Fw0yGw2F3WW8efWPzuBSsaQTUKz
obvQ3A8Q0Z0uDm1FiUpSiWMqH5CUwW%2B51WJs7IhT9O%85DLlKtVZuYO55LpLuaeooiYTIFvdeCyHaM
i%2Fq8%2FClLJuDEipmt6%2FMR8QvwebIF8rt2Hlcqwj70Stc7E2TeB8021eG60OV%2B%2FCbVMhL3Sh
0qdGSLnHK55xabtdZSoES7HYGPPG7wLjNurP%2FTGjqx%2Bz9%afdsjx2jdhg%2FMZX3A7zx8DlNEPy5
ahaM8z3VjjfDGhWTElBIzveYigBdLq7j9t7mUHjtwEJZ3yHKhHNapEtmb8ZSOIwbAUfqjMiJtk7WXVDq
qBZZ7

access/197185343492159781?

version=4&lid=######&token=Rqcw8pKLwxByRVLM6SynyT%2Fw0yGw2F3WW8efWPzuBSsaQTUKz

obvQ3A8Q0Z0uDm1FiUpSiWMqH5CUwW%2B51WJs7IhT9O%85DLlKtVZuYO55LpLuaeooiYTIFvdeCyHaM

i%2Fq8%2FClLJuDEipmt6%2FMR8QvwebIF8rt2Hlcqwj70Stc7E2TeB8021eG60OV%2B%2FCbVMhL3Sh

0qdGSLnHK55xabtdZSoES7HYGPPG7wLjNurP%2FTGjqx%2Bz9%afdsjx2jdhg%2FMZX3A7zx8DlNEPy5

ahaM8z3VjjfDGhWTElBIzveYigBdLq7j9t7mUHjtwEJZ3yHKhHNapEtmb8ZSOIwbAUfqjMiJtk7WXVDq

qBZZ7

Some assumptions: the “version=4” is high quality or what used to be CD quality (192 kbps). The “lid=#####” is the “login id”, or your unique user number. The “token=…” is the actual song, encoded. By finding the host of these requests, and putting it all together, where the lid is completely optional, you will have a full request URL to a song.

Imagine putting it together like this: (example as a POC, like this)


#!/bin/bash
tshark -i en0 -l -T fields -E separator="," -e http.host -e http.request.uri -R
"http.request.uri contains token and http.host contains pandora" | ./worker.pl

#!/bin/bash

tshark -i en0 -l -T fields -E separator="," -e http.host -e http.request.uri -R

"http.request.uri contains token and http.host contains pandora" | ./worker.pl

Then having something that parses this “buffer”:


#!/usr/bin/perl
use Tie::File;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $tokensdb = '.tokens.db'; my $songsdb = '.songs';

unless(-e $tokensdb) { `touch $tokensdb`; }
unless(-d $songsdb){ mkdir $songsdb or die; }

tie our @tokens, 'Tie::File', $tokensdb;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$mech->timeout(5);
$mech->quiet(1);
$mech->agent_alias( 'Mac Safari' );

while (<STDIN>) {
    my ($host, $token) = split(/,/, $_);
    $token =~ s/&lid=(\d*)//g; chomp($token);
    my $url = "http://$host"."$token";

    if ( grep { "$_" eq "$token"} @tokens ) {
        print "Token Already Seen...\n";
    }
    else {
        push(@tokens, $token);
        print ">> New Token Added!\n";
        $file = time;
        # Code removed in order to prevent Abuse!
    }
}

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Tie::File;

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $tokensdb = '.tokens.db'; my $songsdb = '.songs';

unless(-e $tokensdb) { `touch $tokensdb`; }

unless(-d $songsdb){ mkdir $songsdb or die; }

tie our @tokens, 'Tie::File', $tokensdb;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->timeout(5);

$mech->quiet(1);

$mech->agent_alias( 'Mac Safari' );

while (<STDIN>) {

my ($host, $token) = split(/,/, $_);

$token =~ s/&lid=(\d*)//g; chomp($token);

my $url = "http://$host"."$token";

if ( grep { "$_" eq "$token"} @tokens ) {

print "Token Already Seen...\n";

}

else {

push(@tokens, $token);

print ">> New Token Added!\n";

$file = time;

# Code removed in order to prevent Abuse!

}

One way for them to fix this would be to session encode the requests. You should not be able to make requests that originate from outside of pandora.com directly to the servers. Also, the requests should be authenticated. As an addition, they could potentially be checked against what is “played” and controlled for streaming mechanisms. I really hope this fix this as soon as possible.

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Tag Archives: Automation

Easy fully automated WordPress plugin update system

A new simple and elegant solution

The perfect OpenConnect GUI Menu Bar App with 2FA/Duo support – for Mac OS X

Speak SMS over the Head Phones only when they are plugged in

Timed Blackberry Sound Profiles for Android

Tasker – ICS (Android 4.0) – BlackBerry Sound Profiles

Pandora Music Access-Vulnerability

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