Darkshade Forum

It has been a long running joke that so many people have been using WinRAR for free past the 40 day trial period.  Now the joke is on you, if you haven't updated your copy already.  Hackers in Russia and China are using a serious exploit in WinRAR to run malicious scripts on victim's computers.

Docker is what I use to run a lot of my services (including this web site!).  It keeps them contained and avoids having to clutter my host server with all sorts of dependencies needed by each service.  It also makes staying updated easier.

However.

I used to use Portainer to manage my docker images and containers.  Works great but for one of my services, rather than just downloading the updated image, it would download ALL images from all time for all architectures.  Basically, it would fill my disk if I let it.  So I moved away from Portainer.

Watchtower sounded like it did what I wanted, but I kept reading it was unsupported, then back, then deprecated, then back, then retired.  Not instilling me with confidence.

So I went wholly command line, writing scripts that would download the latest image, create the container, and update.  I still didn't know if there were updates actually available.  I just forced it every so often.

Today I found on Stack Overflow a script that lets me know if there's updates available for any of my running containers.

#!/bin/bash

DATAPATH='/data/docker/updater/data'

if [ ! -d "${DATAPATH}" ]; then
        mkdir "${DATAPATH}";
fi
IMAGES=$(docker ps --format "{{.Image}}")
for IMAGE in $IMAGES; do
        ORIGIMAGE=${IMAGE}
        if [[ "$IMAGE" != *\/* ]]; then
                IMAGE=library/${IMAGE}
        fi
        IMAGE=${IMAGE%%:*}
        echo "Checking ${IMAGE}"
        PARSED=${IMAGE//\//.}
        if [ ! -f "${DATAPATH}/${PARSED}" ]; then
                # File doesn't exist yet, make baseline
                echo "Setting baseline for ${IMAGE}"
                curl -s "https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/${IMAGE}/tags/" > "${DATAPATH}/${PARSED}"
        else
                # File does exist, do a compare
                NEW=$(curl -s "https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/${IMAGE}/tags/")
                OLD=$(cat "${DATAPATH}/${PARSED}")
                if [[ "${VAR1}" == "${VAR2}" ]]; then
                        echo "Image ${IMAGE} is up to date";
                else
                        echo ${NEW} > "${DATAPATH}/${PARSED}"
                        echo "Image ${IMAGE} needs to be updated";
                        H=`hostname`
                        ssh -i /data/keys/<KEYFILE> <USER>@<REMOTEHOST>.com "{ echo \"MAIL FROM: root@${H}\"; echo \"RCPT TO: <USER>@<EMAILHOST>.com\"; echo \"DATA\"; echo \"Subject: ${H} - ${IMAGE} needs update\"; echo \"\"; echo -e \"\n${IMAGE} needs update.\n\ndocker pull ${ORIGIMAGE}\"; echo \"\"; echo \".\"; echo \"quit\"; sleep 1; } | telnet <SMTPHOST> 25"
                fi

        fi
done;
Personally, I commented out the ssh line that does email notification, and will just run the script manually to check my images.  Clearly this was meant as a cron job that would run automatically, which you could do if so inclined.

I just wanted to capture this here should I need to find it again, and for anyone else who might be looking for a scripted solution.

Zellers Diner on wheels!  They're adding a Food Truck that will appear at different locations to serve up some classic fare.  The schedule thus far is:
March 23: Scarborough Town Centre in Scarborough, Rideau Centre in Ottawa, Sunridge Mall in Calgary and the Kingsway Garden Mall in Edmonton.
March 24: St. Laurent in Ottawa and White Oaks Mall in London
March 25: Erin Mills Town Centre in Mississauga, Cataraqui Town Centre⁣ in Kingston, Cambridge Centre in Cambridge and the Medicine Hat Shopping Mall in Medicine Hat.
March 26: Burlington Mall in Burlington and Pen Centre Shopping Plaza in St. Catharines.

In this day of high inflation and mass layoffs, it will be refreshing to have another discount department store other than just Walmart.  HBC, who owns the Zellers brand, has announced they're opening new stores, including one in Cambridge!  After Target lost $5.4 Billion trying to replace Zellers in Canada, I really hope the original is able to come back strong.  I actually liked their little in-store restaurant, and it was always the first store I'd visit for new every-day-wear clothes.  The price was right.

Let's face it.  Twitter is done.  Elon Musk has killed it by laying off half the employees, banning remote work, adding a monthly subscription cost, and even considering putting content behind a paywall.

Twitter users are looking for a new home, and many of them are flocking to Mastodon.  This is a distributed social media that's been around for several years, and lets you host your own server.  Darkshade even has an instance!

It's like twitter, but tweets are called toots (following the elephant theme) and accounts are named @user@server.  You can follow me @diddly@darkshade.social