This post appeared originally in our sysadvent series and has been moved here following the discontinuation of the sysadvent microsite
Ever wanted to record a log of an interactive console session? Easy, just use
the script utility. It’s probably already present on your system, no
installation required.
To start recording, run script --timing=script.tim script.log. This spawns a
new shell, recording stops when you exit from it.
To replay the log, run scriptreplay script.tim script.log. It is also
possible to speed up or slow down the playback speed. For example, in order to
play back the recording at half of the original speed, use scriptreplay
script.tim script.log 0.5. Ctrl+S pauses the playback, Ctrl+Q resumes.
The nice thing about script is that it records everything that happens on the
console, it’s not just a simple log of invoked commands. If you open a text
editor like vi in the recorded session, you’ll be able to see exactly how and
where you navigate the cursor, exactly how and when text was changed -
including any typos that were later corrected, and so on.
For the full documentation, check out the manual pages script(1) and scriptreplay(1).
The irony of insecure security software
It can probably be understood from my previous blog post that if it was up to me, I’d avoid products like CrowdStrike - but every now and then I still have to install something like that. It’s not the idea of “security software” per se that I’m against, it’s the actual implementation of many of those products. This post lists up some properties that should be fulfilled for me to happy to install such a product.