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Detect Visitors DNS Provider

Recently I had bought a new router and was in the process of setting it up, during that process I started looking for various DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS providers. That’s when I came across NextDNS, on the setup page I saw the following:

I thought what!? How do they know that? After some investigation it all made sense, I’ll share what I found and a demo implementation.

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util' on Ubuntu

Not on Ubuntu?

If you’re using Ubuntu 16.04 or newer and want to use Python 3.7 and newer with pip you have probably seen this error message ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util'.

On later versions of Ubuntu the error message will be: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.cmd'. This fix will still work.

bmcculley@hakk:~$ pip3

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/pip3", line 5, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main import main
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main.py", line 10, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.autocompletion import autocomplete
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/autocompletion.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main_parser import create_main_parser
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main_parser.py", line 7, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli import cmdoptions
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/cmdoptions.py", line 19, in <module>
    from distutils.util import strtobool
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util'
Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 63, in apport_excepthook
    from apport.fileutils import likely_packaged, get_recent_crashes
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/__init__.py", line 5, in <module>
    from apport.report import Report
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/report.py", line 30, in <module>
    import apport.fileutils
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/fileutils.py", line 23, in <module>
    from apport.packaging_impl import impl as packaging
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/packaging_impl.py", line 23, in <module>
    import apt
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/__init__.py", line 23, in <module>
    import apt_pkg
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'apt_pkg'

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/pip3", line 5, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main import main
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main.py", line 10, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.autocompletion import autocomplete
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/autocompletion.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main_parser import create_main_parser
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main_parser.py", line 7, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli import cmdoptions
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/cmdoptions.py", line 19, in <module>
    from distutils.util import strtobool
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util'

Solution

Don’t worry, it’s a pretty easy fix. The module not found error just means that the nessacary packages aren’t installed. To fix this, just run the following in the terminal:

How to Install Python 3.8 on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04

Python is one of the most popular and most widely used programming languages in the world at this time. The philosophy behind the Python programming language is most likely the reason. It’s very easy to learn with its simple syntax, that same syntax makes the language very readable, therefore easy to understand what someone else wrote. From this the Python ecosystem has grown into a massive juggernaut, encompassing everything from basic scripts to web applications, to machine learning algorithms, process automation and everything in between.

How to Install Telnet on Mac [2025]

Need to use Telnet on your Mac? Only to find out at the most inopportune time that Telnet is no longer on MacOS? Well, take solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Telnet has been removed from modern versions of the system software starting from MacOS Mojave and newer. These instructions will work for MacOS Mojave and newer, including Sonoma and Sequoia (These are the steps that I have personally used to get Telnet back).

Setting up www-data for git deployment

A brief guide about setting up the www-data account so it’s able to clone and/or pull from a git repo.

This was done for GitHub, it will be a very similar process for other git hosting services, I believe.

After creating a git repo and a githook listener (I’m planning a future post for this), there are a few more steps that need to be taking before the listener will be able to pull down the new code or posts. In my particular case the githook listener was running as www-data on Ubuntu.

Generate Wildcard SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt using Certbot

First make sure certbot is installed on your system, the instructions below assume that you’re using Ubuntu.

If you just want to create the Certificate, skip to Step 2.

Step 1: Installing Certbot

First you’ll need to add the repository:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

After that run update:

$ sudo apt-get install certbot

Now that certbot is all installed, it’s time for the certificate.

Step 2: Generate The Wildcard Certificate

certbot certonly \
	--manual \
	--preferred-challenges=dns \
	--email letsencrypt@example.com \
	--server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory \
	--agree-tos \
	-d *.example.com

Step 3: Verify Domain Ownership

After executing the above step, Certbot will ask you to create a DNS text record.

Ubuntu apt update/upgrade sa-compile E: Sub-process

A quick post with some notes on how to solve this issue. When running apt update and apt upgrade on Ubuntu I received this error message:

Errors were encountered while processing: sa-compile E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

So I tried running sa-compile myself which returned the following:

sa-compile: not compiling; 'spamassassin --lint' check failed!

It wasn’t obvious to me at first but running spamassassin --lint helped. It lead me to my main.cf which I had changed and never checked 😖

Python One liners

A couple of helpful(?) one liners in python, I use these for quick development or when troubleshooting and testing.

Start a static file http server in the current directory

python -m http.server

If you only want it to listen on localhost you can pass a bind parameter

python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1

It’s also possible to specify a port (default is 8000)

python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 8080

If you need an smtp server for trouble shooting, it’s possible to fire one of those up in one line. It will just print all output to the terminal but most of the time that works just fine for my purposes. You my need elevated privileges to run on port 25 or any other privileged port.

Setting up MariaDB on FreeBSD

This will briefly cover building from source and some notes for some silly mistakes that I made and how to “fix” them or at least get things working. Let’s get started.

Make sure everything is up to date

Before starting anything else make sure that all ports are there and up to date.

root:~/# portsnap fetch update &&  portupgrade -a

Note: If this is new install you might need to extract first, portsnap extract.

Exploring Python Metaclasses

In this post I will take a look at using the type keyword to create dynamic classes on the fly (metaclasses). I’ll focus on type first and then look at using it as it relates to creating metaclasses.

Type

The most widely known use of type is to determine the type of an object. Python is an object oriented language which means that everything has a type. Let’s take a look at some examples: