Getting the Git commit id of a Gerrit Change Set

Oddly enough, Gerrit doesn’t report the Git commit id of its Change Sets.

The only way I found to get that piece of information is to use its SSH interface, using the query command.

The syntax is this:

ssh -p 29418 user@gerritHost gerrit query --current-patch-set <ChangeId>

replacing 29418 with the port you normally use to contact Gerrit via SSH.

That will display a number of properties about the Change Set, including the revision parameter which is the extended version of the Git commit id.

You can use the --format JSON option if you want to get a JSON representation of the same data, or you can get the short commit id using for example:

ssh -p 29418 user@gerritHost gerrit query --current-patch-set <ChangeId> \
cut -d':' -f2 | cut -c2-7

List forwarding rules in VirtualBox running headless (even with older VBoxManage versions)

The VBoxManage command is very handy for managing virtual machines in servers running headless. Adding and removing forwarding rules is super simple, you just call for example

# adding "rule1" for "vm_1" mapping TCP host_port to guest_port
VBoxManage modifyvm vm_1 --natpf1 "rule1,tcp,,host_port,,guest_port"

# deleting that same rule
VBoxManage modifyvm vm_1 --natpf1 delete rule1

I created two simple scripts so that I don’t have to remember the exact syntax every time: vm_forward_add and vm_forward_delete. You run the commands with no arguments, and they tell you what you need to add.

Listing the existing rules is a bit more complex, as VBoxManage has no option for that (not the version that I use, at least).

This is where xmlstarlet comes to the rescue. Xmlstarlet is a command-line tool for parsing XML that comes pre-installed in most UNIX systems.

Since forwarding rules are stored in VirtualBox .vbox files, which are just big XML files storing all properties for a VM, we can grab the information we want from there.

This is the script that I use to list all forwarding rules. I can’t guarantee that it works with any version of VirtualBox, but it works with any version <=4.3 (the one I use).

Feel free to use the script, the worst that it can do is… not work 🙂

About things that weren't too obvious: you need to include the XML schema not only in the XPath of the XML node you're interested in, but in all definitions (!).

So, say you have a node with this path and these attributes (xmlstarlet el -a lists all XPaths available in the XML file):

me@server:~ xmlstarlet el -a my_vm.vbox | grep Forwarding
VirtualBox/Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding
VirtualBox/Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding/@name
VirtualBox/Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding/@proto
VirtualBox/Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding/@hostport
VirtualBox/Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding/@guestport

To query those four attributes you need to specify the XML schema using the -N option (easy to find in xmlstarlet‘s docs), but you also need to set that schema for every single attribute name!

So, this will fail:

xmlstarlet sel -N x="http://www.innotek.de/VirtualBox-settings" -t \
-m "//x:Machine/Hardware/Network/Adapter/NAT/Forwarding" -v @name \
-o " " -v @hostport -o " " -v @guestport -n my_vm.vbox

but this will work (note the repeated x:):

xmlstarlet sel -N x="http://www.innotek.de/VirtualBox-settings" -t \
-m "//x:Machine/x:Hardware/x:Network/x:Adapter/x:NAT/x:Forwarding" \
-v "concat(@name, ' - host:', @hostport, ' guest:', @guestport)" \
-n my_vm.vbox

I wish this was more explicit in xmlstarlet documentation!

openfire: fix “there was an error one importing private key and signed certificate”

This took me frustratingly long to find out.

When importing a signed SSL certificate on my openfire server, the web interface would always show me this error:

there was an error one importing private key and signed certificate

Typo aside, that’s some pretty obscure error.

Users have come up with detailed guides on how to convert certificates to other formats, setting system properties to make them work once imported back, but… Nothing helped, in my case.

The solution to my problem was: when you import your certificates (using the form in the Server Settings/Server Certificates section), just… type something on the Pass Phrase used for creating Private Key. Even if you never set a password, type something, anything will do. Just don’t leave it empty.

I’m talking about this guy:

That’s it, you can restart your server. Meh.