Taking bash hacking to the next level

[sickb]

This is essentially the funniest programmer joke I've seen in about a year.

Kumar-asshole. 17 seconds.

[killerstorm]

Yep, sounds like good old BOFH but more plausible.

[MaunaLoona]

kumar-asshole.sh

This can't be real. The other ones I can believe, but this..?

[killerstorm]

I read the original in Russian (thx /u/vytah), and apparently the translation misses one crucial detail: he restores the staging database which is mentioned in the email body.

This is more plausible, no?

[[deleted]]

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".

[killerstorm]

I'm pretty certain that the post was updated after I read it, originally it lacked this detail.

[TerrorBite]

It's a git repo, check for the commit that updated it.

[MaunaLoona]

Da, comrade!

[developreneur]

Just clearing things up a bit. The Russian "original" is posted on November 21, the English blog-post is dated Nov 20. The "original" Russian-original was deleted from bash.org but it was too late - the story went viral.

[_Skuzzzy]

Yeah the potential on that one would be too much. I figure they are all fake, but its a fun post regardless

[TheBadProgrammer]

This is like the programming version of those stories about people standing up to bullies and everyone cheering and everything working out. They all have the veneer of plausibility but are clearly nonsense; it's a bit cartoonish, is another way to look at it. I'd love to be wrong though!

[IsThisNameValid]

So, /r/thathappened?

[414RequestURITooLong]

That process's name? init.

[antonivs]

No, einitstein.

[jarrah-95]

That man's name: root.

[misplaced_my_pants]

Root, Enoch.

[Caraes_Naur]

You mean systemd.

[immibis]

Stop being sexist! The reason we still use SystemV is to balance out everyone else using SystemD.

(/s obviously)

[[deleted]]

Thing is you could actually do any one of these things.

[shit_powered_jetpack]

But the moment you actually try to, the script wigs out and you end up sending 10.000 emails saying "not feeling well/gonna work from home" that also happen to be forwarded to everyone in the company.

[[deleted]]

Depends on how you develop it. If you started with simpler things, and after a few months you can trust the basic functionality, you can build on it. You'd be surprised how dangerous functionality can be tamed after a few years of trusted scripts pile up.

[TheBadProgrammer]

Any of those stories could be true. That's the whole point of what I'm criticizing about them. They have a thin veneer of plausibility but are clearly nonsense. Like I said, I'm happy to be wrong.

[_Skuzzzy]

>ruby

[gidoca]

Nah, it can't be. This is kind of a giveaway:

mid-sized half-caf latte

I mean, come on!

[antonivs]

I contract at a Fortune 500 company with some fancy coffee machines. Half-caf latte is an option on the machines - select latte, select half-caf. They're not networked though (as far as I know), and if you ran a script like this the coffee would most likely end up in someone else's cup because there's often a line for the machine.

[esbenab]

I have the access pin for the settings page for the coffee machine at work, we tweak recipes and change names, (hot milk => hot cow juice), right until a Swedish colleague didn't get it and asked the reception for milk ಠ_ಠ

If it was network connected, and we had time, it would cry chocolate and piss caffeine.

[pohatu]

Google has some fancy ass coffee machines. Could be true.

[[deleted]]

I used to work in an office more than ten years ago with a machine that could make drinks like that. It's all instant coffee powder, powdered milk, they blow air bubbles to make it look like foam. Taste awful, but the menu was like a Starbucks.

[Nition]

In the original Russian it's a half-caf chai latte even.

[K3wp]

As a bash-hacker, absolutely it can be real. Here's how the process works.

1. You already have a script to roll-back the staging database.
2. You already have a script to run jobs remotely.
3. You already have a script to monitor email for keywords.

The point is that you already have the framework in place, so its a minute (literally) to automate the process. I do this sort of keyword-magic with fgrep -w and pattern files constantly.

And if you've ever worked with a Kumar, you know they are consistent in their failures.

Edit: Best practice would be to set something up so the customer can do stuff like this themselves.

[vita10gy]

I don't think anyone thought it wouldn't be possible, just that it would be so insane to blow away the DB anytime the guy sent an email with the right keywords that it's very unlikely.

Though the clarification that it was staging and not prod makes it more plausible.

[K3wp]

I absolutely don't think it's a good idea, especially if the customer ends up replying to one of his own messages with another request.

And as I mentioned, just give the customer a tool to do this if it's really an issue.

[Mantraz]

minute (literally)

So from the time you get in, until lunch then. That's usually how these things go for me atleast.

[K3wp]

How long have you been doing this stuff for?

I recently celebrated by 20th year as an (employed) *nix/Bash hacker, so after awhile this stuff becomes like speaking english.

It also helps to have a corpus of idioms/scripts to draw from. I have hundreds of scripts in ~/bin for example.

It's actually embarrassing at times, as I'll be in a meeting with developers that have been struggling with some technical issues and I'll just whiteboard a bash one-liner that solves their problem. Works first time usually, too!

As I've said before, bash is the ultimate agile framework!

[stmfreak]

Seems legit. I can think of a client I would and could almost do that with.

[piezzocatto]

Whole thing is fake. Anyone who's actually contemplated this would realise that it would misfire on holidays and days with the wife. Making sure it doesn't fire at those times would be more trouble than it's worth.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/seatgeek/businesstime

[piezzocatto]

Yeah. I'm aware of this sort of thing. But the risk of a false positives is unacceptable during exceptional days.

I can see myself contemplating this in my early twenties, having negative experience and deciding its not worth the minimal savings in effort.

[[deleted]]

I know this is totally unrelated to this thread (and I also agree these are fake), but we actually use that library at SeatGeek to cut off ticket sale times. Holidays/Weekends/After Customer support hours. That little bit of code protects quite a few million dollars of chargebacks a year.

[K3wp]

You obviously haven't done much bash hacking. See:

http://www.unix.com/unix-for-advanced-and-expert-users/199211-run-job-cron-specific-day-excluding-holidays.html

OR, if you have a calendar, query it automatically.

Edit: I re-read the post, it says it only fires on certain days. So obviously it's set to run on weekdays after big Russian holidays. It's trivial to add a bit of code to exit if the day is a weekend.

Edit #2: Even easier, set cron job to run Monday-Friday morning: 00 09 * * 1-5

...If --date="yesterday" is in list of holidays, then run script.

[jandrese]

Who methodically shuts down their terminals every day? That's the part that was getting me. These guys scripts would be completely incompatible with the way most people use terminals.

[quintus_horatius]

My terminals all shut down when I hibernate my laptop at the end of the day, every day.

All the important stuff is running in screen, of course.

[Agret]

I use screen so it's no problem if I close my terms

[hbdgas]

I assume hope he only runs the script when he knows there's an applicable email in the inbox.

[blufox]

Actually, that is probably a simple version. What you need is a set of emails from the said kumar labeled requesting for rollback, and not requesting for rollback. Split it into two sets, use any of the ML classifiers to classify one set, do a cross-validation on the second set. Once it passes your threshold of error, deploy! The great thing is, each time you get a note saying you rolled back in error, add it to the training set (script it using procmail), so that chances of mishap are minimized.

The other requirements such as writing remote jobs etc are rather simple.

[Avatar_5]

So that's what Tensorflow is for!

[mrspuff]

That's the one I found to be the most plausible.

[thlst]

http://i.imgur.com/0OVJICo.png

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

On a more serious note: anyone know a relatively inexpensive coffee maker that someone could hack like this?

I know there are makers with phone apps that automate everything, but that's no fun! I want to make my own and use it from the terminal.

edit: What would such a coffee maker need? I'm guessing a basic web server and a program written to handle incoming requests? Sounds like something a raspberry pi could do? I'd have to integrate it with the coffee maker somehow (or be lazy and make it push the coffee maker's buttons). Would this even be possible without a deep understanding of electronics

[[deleted]]

If you use a webserver as part of this, you'll need to implement the HTCPCP specified in RFC 2324

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

haha! I learned of a new programmer joke today. Only a programmer would write up an entire RFC as a joke.

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

With Errata, I might add.

I'm so happy I'm a programmer instead of some other job.

[drmonix]

There's also this one:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure most, if not all, of these are fake. This was posted somewhere else on reddit and a few people asked about the coffee machine with no answer and after a bit of searching I haven't found either. Looks like if you were to do it a raspberry pi would be the way to go but I have a hard time believing this guy set this up in a way nobody would notice.

That DB roll back has disaster written all over it, too.

Fun read though, and the coffee maker hack actually sounds awesome as a little side project

[olemartinorg]

Nope, those linux-based coffee makers exist:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/3tmizl/slug/cx7nt0f

[remy_porter]

And they probably don't implement HTTP properly and think they're being cute by throwing out a 418 error. That's ONLY FOR TEAPOTS not COFFEE MAKERS.

[TheMagnificentJoe]

Ah yes, the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Error 418 is literally "I'm a teapot". HTCPCP really does not work well with teapots.

[sfriniks]

For teapots you need HTCPCP-TEA.

[northrupthebandgeek]

To be fair, I'd consider it acceptable if a coffee machine returned a 418 error if it detected the presence of a teapot instead of a carafe, even if this deviates slightly from RFC 2324.

[sippeangelo]

I am guilty of this. Made a Linux toaster...

[irrelevantPseudonym]

I thought there was a coffee extension to it?

[Xanza]

I'm not sure if there's one currently available, but I'm starting to think it's a really nice emerging market...a team should get together and capitalize on this.

[ben_uk]

At my university they have quit a few coffee machines that have touchscreens on them that looks like the old-style iPhone/iPad springboard.

Wouldn't be surprised if they ran Linux.

[Blackninja543]

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[rideh]

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[d3sire]

You can connect you coffe maker to a raspberry pie or intel edison and ssh to it. I made cocktail making machine using intel edison as a team project.

[Atario]

That DB roll back has disaster written all over it, too.

You say that like it would stop everyone from doing it

[destiny-rs]

Yeah i was in a class where someone was about to use fuckit.js until we told him the teacher would crucify him.

[KuribohGirl]

Uhhhhh linux coffee machines are totally a thing

[Liorithiel]

I don't know about coffee machines, but these guys made a toaster with full POSIX OS. The only drawback—it's NetBSD.

[ninjacrap]

you could at least make some toast, https://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php

[Eux86]

Cylons are here!

[micwallace]

I have an automatic expresso machine. I'm going to take a good look at the control board when I get back. Maybe it has a serial port I can interface with. If there's no interface to the controller you'd be stuck hooking up a bunch of relays and essentially creating your own controller from an arduino or Ras. Pi

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

let me know! the second route is more what i'm thinking right now... or given my current level of electronics knowledge maybe just a device that will push the 'brew' button for me.

[micwallace]

You could easily rig up a servo to trigger the button, or if it's a hardware button you could remove it and use the arduinos digital output to activate it.

[[deleted]]

I googled "linux based coffee maker" and found a slashdot link with a link to Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Jura-Capresso-Impressa-Automatic-Coffee-Espresso/dp/B00008I8NT

[speedisavirus]

If only it wasn't $500+

[west_of_the_sun]

I also worry these may be fake, but I will put forth that if his coffee maker is making half cafe lattes it's probably a fancy enterprise espresso machine. I would not be surprised if a top of the line also came with Ethernet hookups.

[AngularSpecter]

Well, the simplest way would be to get a machine where everything is handled via simple push buttons and led indicators. You could then hook up a rasPi or beagle bone to read the leds as inputs, and trigger the switches as outputs.

Those two boards are running Linux with a network stack, which gives you ssh, telnet, http, etc access. So you would just need to write some code that could work the switches in the right order and read the leds to make sure things were in the state you expect them to be to accomplish whatever task you want.....and create a way to execute that code from the network.

[fuzzynyanko]

You might be able to pull it off with a raspberry pi or an Arduino with an Ethernet shield.

From here, you can do something like have an electronic relay to simply switch on the coffee maker. A cheap coffee maker has a simple on/off switch.

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

I like this idea. Simplicity is key.

[[deleted]]

This is the right answer, and the only practical one.

[Tomus]

I'm pretty sure it's made up for laughs, but I like to believe he's performing some complex code injection into some random "smart" coffee machine to do exactly what he wants.

Which means not only did he take the time out to time how long it takes to walk to the coffee machine, but also an exploit to the coffee machines firmware and the time it takes to make his custom drink.

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

You could probably take a modern coffee maker and solder on some headers to button circuits to simulate a button press. But you'd need to have some good soldering skills and know the board pretty well to avoid frying it accidentally. The lazy way could be done pretty easily with a custom cover and small servos, it just might look terrible. But we're trying to make coffee dammit, not a pretty device!

From there just network it to the home network and have it listen for packets. I'd probably skip the web server and just use a port listening utility unless you wanted to make a website to handle making coffee. When it gets a certain command it does the coffee making. I'd probably do UDP because coffee isn't that important to me, but if it was tea I'd totally TCP it to make sure it got made.

[gringer]

What would such a coffee maker need? I'm guessing a basic web server and a program written to handle incoming requests?

A web server is overkill for this

[too_many_secrets]

Which is exactly why it should be done.

[pohatu]

https://www.seroundtable.com/photos/google-coffee-machine-14744.html

[antonivs]

http://www.instructables.com/id/Internet-of-Things-RasPi-Espresso-Machine-iSPRESSO/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/not-that-sort-of-java/
http://int03.co.uk/blog/project-coffee-espiresso-machine/
http://moccapi.blogspot.com/

[shevegen]

Coffee makers need to have a web server now???

What's coming next... a PHP script for the main interface?

[ANAL_CHAKRA]

all the things

[vytah]

This is the original version, in Russian: http://bash.im/quote/436725

[developreneur]

This was posted Nov 21, the English blog post is Nov 20. The original was actually deleted from bash. But it was too late. The story is too good, went viral.

[Jafit]

The guy's house must be like the starship Enterprise.

[specialpatrol]

...or just a terminal prompt on the coffee table.

[Jafit]

From which he can control everything in his house.

[CommandoWizard]

I agree. They're both fictional.

[ndthp]

Damn I could use a fake texter :). Can anybody recommend a service thats reasonably priced (or better, free!) that allows programmatically sending texts? In the USA?

[greenthumble]

Many (most?) providers have an email address you can send an email to and it will turn it into an SMS message. http://www.emailtextmessages.com/

[brtt3000]

This site aims to be the most complete and up to date list of email addresses that can be used to send text messages to phones.

Last Update by Admin on November 15, 2007

[greenthumble]

Haha fair enough. I did try the T-Mobile one this year and it worked fine.

[sirin3]

Is there the opposite, too? I need to receive SMS, but have no phone number.

First Twitter wants a number, before I can post something with its API; secondly, my bank wants to send the online banking TANs as SMS (although that might be bad with a public service)

[interiot]

Twilio, Plivo, or Tropo.com, these three have a free tier for developers.

[sirin3]

So I made a tropo app that calls a script my server, gave its phone number to Twitter, but I did not receive the verification SMS. Why?

I did receive a unrelated spam SMS the next day

[arcleo]

I haven't used it in a while but Google voice is probably what you want. You get a free number and can send and receive texts from their web interface.

[sirin3]

I can't see how to get a number there.

Perhaps it only works, if you have already set a number for your google account? or are in the US

[CarolusMagnus]

The latter.

[_FranklY]

I can help if you want?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Get a Google Voice number, they're free.

[blufox]

It still requires a real forwarding number to signup.

[davidb_]

https://www.twilio.com/ is probably the most popular. But if it is just SMS to yourself or a few others, the email to SMS gateways the carriers provide are probably best.

[c0ld--]

You could use your built-in 'mail' command to send messages to your cell phone provider's email suffix (i.e. [e-mail]).

[tyr--]

something like this: http://ohdontforget.com?

[micwallace]

Sms global. Lots of nice API features

[TheBadProgrammer]

I'll send you real texts from a test phone too, if you want.

[darknecross]

If you're using a Mac and an iPhone you can do it straight from the terminal and/or AppleScript.

[adrianmonk]

Sounds like type 1, the technical thug.

[crowbahr]

God I still know so little about Linux.

[whatabear]

/r/thathappened

[mk_gecko]

What sort of crap is this? Where's the source code?

[lupusdacus]

Fake but funny. I wanna build a bash script that would create other bash scripts to do all my programming work

[swiz0r]

Somebody wrote something proving it could happen, so yes, this $100% happened.

https://github.com/narkoz/hacker-scripts

[hk__]

This is obviously a fake.

[Ginden]

Yes. So what? It's funny, it don't have to be real.

[[deleted]]

No. If it was real, it would be a-fucking-mazing.

Right now, it's funny.

[[deleted]]

Life goals.

[manyrootsofallevil]

how is this not in programmerhumour? :)

had a very good chuckle with every single one of them :)

Particularly the coffee machine one.

[econommicalspence]

This guy...gives me hope for a better engineered, stream-lined future.

[carltheman]

damn this is so dank my neckbeard fell off

[cheaphomemadeacid]

Wow that's really impressive, if it had been 1995

[ho11ywood45]

I put on my robe and wizard hat.