Blog / Networking

How to find the Wi-Fi network password (and other settings) via command line in Ubuntu

February 7, 2018

While you can get this information via the "Network Connections" GUI, it could come in handy sometimes to know where this is located. For example, you might want to write a script to display the SSID and passwords of all the Wi-Fi networks you've connected to.

Basically, all the network connections are saved under /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections in Ubuntu in separate configuration files. If you want to delete all the Wi-Fi settings in bulk (for privacy reasons …

Setting up an FTP server on Ubuntu using vsftpd and connecting to it using Python's ftplib module

October 13, 2016

I know what you're thinking, "Who in the world still uses FTP these days?". If you were born after year 2000, you may not even have heard of FTP before.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was a popular way to share files back in the AOL days. People will set up these FTP servers where you can upload and download files. I remember spending so much time in chat rooms during my teenage years asking around …

How to find out which web server a website is using with Telnet

March 24, 2014

Here’s a quick and easy way to figure out what kind of web server a website is using with good, old telnet. I like this method as most operating systems (both old and new versions) have a telnet client already installed.

Steps:

1. Open a command/terminal window.

2. Telnet to the server/website on port 80, e.g.

telnet www.glucosetracker.net 80

3. Type the following once you’re connected:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

4. Hit the Enter key …

How to share your local web server to the Internet using a reverse SSH tunnel

July 25, 2013

I was recently working with integrating Stripe payments with a Django app. Since it's a subscription-based web application, it made a lot of sense for us to use webhooks, which Stripe supports. You basically set a URL in your Stripe account settings where Stripe could POST when an event occurs (eg. trial ends, subscription canceled due to an unpaid invoice, etc.). This eliminates the need of having to poll the Stripe server to check …

How to do port forwarding through SSH tunneling on Ubuntu 12.04

January 29, 2013

The place I was staying in last night requires me to register my devices’ MAC addresses with their access points to be given access. I couldn’t help but think that they could be tracking my online activities with this.

Of course, the reason they’re probably doing MAC Address Filtering is to make it harder for people not staying in the hotel to piggyback off their connection. Most places will just have a Wi-Fi password. But …

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