Generate a secure GPG key

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 10:22:56 +0000

For some reason gpg gen-key still defaults to SHA1 and RSA2048, due to the known weaknesses of SHA1 it is probably a better idea to use SHA256.
First of all, we need to create a configuration file.

cat ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf"
---
personal-digest-preferences SHA256
cert-digest-algo SHA256
default-preference-list SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 AES256 AES192 AES CAST5 ZLIB BZIP2 ZIP Uncompressed

To generate a new key type (also specify to use RSA 4096):

gpg --gen-key
### or
gpg --full-generate-key

Other useful commands are:

Pacman email updates notification

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 18:54:24 +0000

Pacman as long as I know does not provide any method for sending an email notification when there are updates available.
SSH into the Arch box just to find out if there are updates available is really annoying so I wrote a simple bash script to do the dirty work on my behalf.

[root@arch ~]# cat /etc/cron.daily/check4updates.sh 
#!/bin/bash

HOST=hostname
DOMAIN=domain
SUBJECT="System update: $HOST@$DOMAIN"
EMAIL_ADDR="name@domain"

### Query pacman for available updates
updates_raw=$(pacman -Syu <<< n)

if echo $updates_raw | grep "there is nothing to do"
then
	echo Everything is up to date
else
	updates=${updates_raw#*Packages ([1-9])}

	### extract packages update list
	up_raw=${updates%Total Download*}
	up=$(echo $up_raw | tr ' ' '\n')
	#echo -e "$up" > report.txt

	### extract update size
	us=${updates#*Total Download*}
	#echo -e "\nTotal Download $us" >> report.txt

	### compose email
	email_text="New updates available for host $HOST\n\n$up\n\nTotal Download$us"
	echo -e "$email_text" | mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL_ADDR"
fi

To schedule the cron job to run everyday at 1 am edit the following files:

Email on nagg.eu

Generate a secure GPG key

Pacman email updates notification