A coworker asked an interesting question yesterday. He noticed that, when running the command scp to copy a file to a remote system, if he checks the process table both on the client and the server, the command itself appears to be running with different options. In particular, the command on the server is running with options that he did not pass when he first ran it on the client. The answer can be found on the O'Reilly SSH book. Notice table 3.8.1 on that page. When a plain scp command is run on the client, its counterpart on the server will run with the following options:

scp -d -t dir

Notice that some of those command options are undocumented. {link to this entry}

So, after upgrading my laptop to Debian 11 (bullseye), which I usually do by actually reinstalling the OS (yes, I know Debian usually upgrades to new releases quite cleanly, but I take it as a chance to do some major disk clean-up), I installed VMWare Player, ran it as root the first time to rebuild all the necessary kernel modules, then ran it as a regular non-root user, and it doesn't truly let me proceed. As reported elsewhere, it launches the welcome window, it asks me to accept the license, then to choose between the commercial or the free license and, when I hit the button to continue, it doesn't appear to do anything. Now, if I launch it manually from a terminal window, I then notice that it is showing a dialogue in the background asking me to enter my password. Yet, when I enter it and hit the enter key, it always returns an error. Searching around was not much help, to be honest. In the end, since I remembered having run into similar issues in the past whenever I was asked to enter a password, I decided to switch my X session from bspwm (the window manager I use on a regular basis) to GNOME and, sure enough, it came up with a pop-up window asking me to enter the password, and now it worked. After that initial hiccup, I can just switch back to bspwm, and it all works as expected. {link to this entry}

Just a couple of tips. First of all, trying to configure neomutt on a laptop running Debian testing, I encountered the error "Encrypted connection unavailable". The fix is to add the following to the muttrc:

set ssl_starttls=no
set ssl_force_tls=no

There is also some useful information on Debian bug #963107.

Also, on a different note, the pointing stick on my old Lenovo Thinkpad T530 kept annoying me, and I had to find the way to disable it. I found the answer here. {link to this entry}