Category Archives: Tips

Tips and Tricks

Reason #… I’ve lost count…not to use Microsoft.

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Welcome all windows, and samba users. Please read badlock.org for why poor decisions have led to this day.

There is a known vulnerability with samba, please read the site listed. If time permits I will update this article with better info.  However, if you are running Samba the shame on you… especially the old version. I have not “had to run samba”, for anything in several years now.

Please read my article on using AFPd in linux to use it as a time machine  backup.  Works great! Or my preference is NFS on a LAN. 

Either way, I  hope this helps a few people. Please share the article if it helped.  There is a patch with CVE on the way according to their site.

Sincerely,
M

NAOMI Updated Pics

Here is the latest picture I have of the ‘Semi-Portable’ version of NAOMI.

This includes the following:

  • 30AH Battery @ 2.2a (tested)
    • 35AH LiON Cells “Quick Drain”
  • Touch Screen 7″
    • Mounted Externally in own case
      • Not Permanent, built for bench
  • RPI2
  • 1TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive
  • Bluetooth Dongle
    • Not Shown
  • Powered USB Hub
    • Replaced/Rebuilt for one with switched ports
  • Logitech C170 USB Camera/Mic

Quick Tip of the Day.

Not that I have them daily, but I might if I get a good response.

Have you ever tried logging into an SSH server, and get a weird error:

/.ssh/config: line 22: Bad configuration option: 342200202

This is a very simple issue but it can be a huge PITA if you can’t fix it quickly.  This is especially true for those of us that have to use an enormous amount of keys in our daily lives.  I know, I have a fairly simple config for SSH, but I still ran into this issue when I pasted a block of text in  ~/.ssh/config.  I opened the file with VI, and NANO. I was only able to get it to work when I removed the spaces before each line it complained about.  I then just put them back as normal, and saved.

It turns out, that copying from another place can have the spaces not interpreted properly. They are tabbed indentations actually.  Once manually removed they are replaced by a normal “space” in the code and it should work properly.  I hope this saves some time for some people.

 

Thanks,
Matthew D. Curry

 

Time Machine Backup with Ubuntu 15.x and OSX 10.7+

In the Older versions of this how-to, you will see people use the method shown just below.  Obviously that no longer works.  I will walk you through setting up TimeMachine via AFP over your LAN.  This is using an Ubuntu 15.04 machine; but since all the packages are common and in the base repos; I don’t see there being a problem getting it to work on any distro.

 OLD METHOD:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
NOTE: Any OSX after 10.6 Lion, will have to use the method demonstrated here.

 

Step 1: Install Netatalk

Install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install netatalk libc6-dev avahi-daemon libnss-mdns

Step 2: Configure /etc/nsswitch.conf

Once those packages are installed, we have to adjust 4 configuration files:

sudo nano /etc/nsswitch.conf

Locate the following:

hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

Add ‘mdns‘  as below:

hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 mdns

Step 3: /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

sudo nano /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

Paste the following:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
    <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
    <service>
        <type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
        <port>548</port>
    </service>
    <service>
        <type>_device-info._tcp</type>
        <port>0</port>
        <txt-record>model=TimeCapsule</txt-record>
    </service>
</service-group>

Step 4: /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

Now we setup the share:

sudo nano /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

At the bottom the section that reads:

# The line below sets some DEFAULT, starting with Netatalk 2.1.
:DEFAULT: options:upriv,usedots

# By default all users have access to their home directories.
~/                      "Home Directory"

# End of File

Change the path “~/”  to your share directory.

IMPORTANT:  Don’t forget to add ‘tm’ to options:upriv,usedots
As seen below:

# The line below sets some DEFAULT, starting with Netatalk 2.1.
:DEFAULT: cnidscheme:dbd options:upriv,usedots,tm

# By default all users have access to their home directories.
/path/to/share                       "Time Capsule"

# End of File

Step 5: /etc/default/netatalk

Now, we need to adjust netatalk settings.

sudo nano /etc/default/netatalk

Locate the following section:

#### Set which legacy daemons to run.
#### If you need AppleTalk, run atalkd.
#### papd, timelord and a2boot are dependent upon atalkd.
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

Update it to reflect the following:

#### Set which legacy daemons to run.
#### If you need AppleTalk, run atalkd.
#### papd, timelord and a2boot are dependent upon atalkd.
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

Once all is completed, and all the services have been restarted on the Ubuntu server.  The drive should show up under “Select Disk” under “Time Machine Preferences”.  If you have an old one, you may have to remove it.  Once selected you can use it as if it were physically plugged in.

 

*TIP – Use a wired connection only, and a gigE network will help immensely.  I do not recommend WiFi .

TCPDUMP with Date for Wireshark

Just another handy snippet:

It will date the output, and also put it in a handy pcap for Wireshark.

tcpdump -i eth1 -s0 -v -w /tmp/capture_`date +%d_%m_%Y__%H_%I_%S`.pcap

*Note: Should work on all Linux distros (make sure to have the right network interface selected, Ex: eth1); it might have to be slightly modified for Mac. Windows can go DIAF.

 

Search entire server for Q4 2015 obfuscated PHP malware of unknown origin.

This is just a snippet I have used before to identify some malicious code on web servers.  This will not work on everything; but it will give you a way to find suspect files.  It is easy to cron in a script with others to make a nice daily report if you have those concerns.

#!/bin/bash
# Malware Search Script
# 11/1/15 – Matthew D. Curry
# Matt@MattCurry.com

echo “Search entire server for Q4 2015 obfuscated PHP malware of unknown origin.”

find / -name *.php -exec grep -Hn .1.=…….0.=…….3.=…….2.=…….5.= {} ;

 

Hope this helps, enjoy.

Remove Spaces (or any character) from File Names in Linux

This is actually a pretty common thing to run into in a Linux file system.  It is especially prevalent in the files that are moved from another operating system (Usually Windows).  So if you get files that need to have a space or a character removed, the below snipped is a very simple, and handy way to fix this issue.

└─(11:26:40)-(~/Example)->ls
file 1.txt
file – 2.txt

So, from here we want to rename the file “file 1.txt” to “file_1.txt”.  This would be done as follows:

rename ‘s/ /_/g’ file 1.txt

This will remove any spaces in the file-name listed.  If you want to do all the files in a directory:

rename ‘s/ /_/g’ *

Here is an example output if we run it on all the files in the directory (as seen above):

└─(11:33:59)-(~/Example)->ls
file_1.txt
file_-_2.txt

 

Note:  If you are new to Linux; and you haven’t heard of the “sed” command, that is the syntax used in the command.  If you get comfortable with this, then you can easily learn sed, which is a great tool to have on the command line.

Want to use DNF? What to expect…

DNF actually DOES stand for something… Not sure where that started.

DNF stands for Dandified yum

DNF started showing up in Fedora 18, and Fedora 20 was the first Linux distro that welcomed users to utilize  DNF in place of YUM.

The technical challenges of DNF are that there is little or no support for features:

  • Debug
  • Verbose output
  • Enable Repository
  • Exclude packages during install
  • No effect of –skip-broken switch
  • The command resolvedep unavailable
  • The option skip_if_unavailable is ON by default
  • Dependency resolving process is not visible in Command Line
  • Parallel downloads in future release
  • Undo History
  • Delta RPM
  • Bash completion
  • Auto-remove
  • many others…

 

In short, if you drink the cool-aid then you should run this in a lab only.  I know people that try to run this stuff in production.  You are just asking for a serious problem. Other than that, I hope it gets there, DNF is just too new.

If you use Microsoft, you get what you deserve…

…only if you read this and keep using it…

🙂

     If you use Microsoft, it doesn’t make you dumb. We all know its the most popular, and shoved down your throat by the $2,000,000,000 they spend a year trying to sway your opinion.  Not to mention the bullying tactics I have seen first hand in the B2B space.

Keep in mind I am not talking solely about privacy as seen in the picture below.  However, that alone should be enough for any business to stop using them immediately.  Most companies are afraid of change, because it usually costs money. Although, if you truly calculate the costs of running Microsoft as an OS you will see that it is much higher.  Not only is it fiscally irresponsible (not to mention ethically/morally), but if you are a software company; or one that relies on it heavily.  You will find that the completely horrid security of windows makes it a great target.  Combine that with uneducated users and you get the hackers favorite playground.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned performance comparisons.  Thats because windows doesn’t even come close to the stability and speed of Linux/BSD.  Here is an experiment for you Windows users.  Try turning it on, and not doing anything and let it run for a month straight.  Then make note of when it crashes (because it will).  Then do the same with a vanilla Linux install. I turned my last laptop off after 376 days of uptime.

Microsoft

The Nightmare of Azkaban with Hive (Hadoop)

I have been working on a deployment of Azkaban for about a week now; and getting the server up and running was easy.  However I have had many major issues with Azkaban since day one.  I feel like sharing this could help someone else if they decide to use it.

Pros:

  • It has dependency flows that are easy to use.
  • ACLs
  • Pretty Graphs
  • Scheduling (Kinda its purpose)
  • Good API

Cons:

  • Hive/Pig and Possibly other Jobtypes simply do not work.
    • After many hours of searching I found there is a bug in the jobtypes plugin, and it has not been fixed.
      • You must completely recompile with the newer version to have these job types work.
    • The Newest version of Azkaban is no where close to the version they have on their site.
      • This also is not compiled, you will have to do it manually.
    • The Documentation is full of errors, bad links, and omissions (at best).
      • Not to mention it is all for 2.5, when 3.x is out.
      • SSL Keystore Doc Links are all bad (major setup step).
    • No Packages for YUM/APT/ZYPPER/etc
      • I would have thought someone would have done this by now
        • I created some using FPM
    • No INIT script built. (Azkaban Init Script)

So, in closing as you can see the project has good intentions but that’s about it.  Its not ready for prime time, and they really need to get their stuff together.  If it were cleaned up and recompiled, and packaged.  It would probably be an OK product. However, the lack of organization and communication will be what prevent me from recommending this for any of my personal customers going forward.  I hope this helps anyone considering this product.

 

Sincerely,
Matthew Curry