Kudithipudi.Org

May 18, 2012

Brilliant use of DNS

Filed under: Networking,Technology — Vinay @ 8:33 am

I was listening to this week’s edition of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast and Steve talked about a unique way of using DNS. His spintrite application uses DNS to check for the latest version of the application. Most applications use http to check version information. This might pose a problem in environments with proxy servers. DNS traffic on the other hand is generally allowed in most environments. He says his application does a DNS lookup for something like application.version.grc.com and the “IP” address that is returned denotes the major and minor versions of the code. And depending on the response, the application will prompt with a “need to update” message.

Brilliant!!!

Here’s a more technical post way back from 2006 by Jan-Piet Mens on the same subject

http://jpmens.net/pages/checking-current-application-or-data-versions-using-dns/

March 30, 2012

HOW TO : Capture all traffic to and from a host using tcpdump

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking — Vinay @ 10:59 am

Quick one liner for capturing traffic destined to and arriving from a host (IP address) using tcpdump and writing it to a file for analyzing later on

tcpdump -s0 host x.x.x.x -w destination.pcap

March 28, 2012

Project Uptime : Progress Report – 3

Filed under: Databases,HOWTO,Linux,Networking,security,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 11:45 pm

Things have been a bit hectic at work.. so didn’t get a lot of time to work on this project. Now that that the new server has been setup and the kernel updated, we get down to the mundane tasks of installing the software.

One of the first things I do, when configuring any new server is to restrict root user from logging into the server remotely. SSH is the default remote shell access method nowadays. Pls don’t tell me you are still using telnet :) .

And before restricting the root user for remote access, add a new user that you want to use for regular activities, add the user to sudo group and ensure you can login and sudo to root as this user. Here are the steps I follow to do this on a Ubuntu server

Add a new user

useradd xxxx

Add user to sudo group

usermod -G sudo -a xxxx

Check user can sudo to gain root access

sudo su - xxxx
su -

Now moving into the software installation part

Install Mysql

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

you will be prompted to set the root user during this install. This is quite convenient, unlike the older installs, where you had to set the root password later on.

Install PHP

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

In addition to installing the PHP5-mysql, this will also install apache. I know, I mentioned, I would like to try out the new version of Apache. But it looks like Ubuntu, doesn’t have a package for it yet. And I am too lazy to compile from source :) .

With this you have all the basic software for wordpress. Next, we will tweak this software to use less system resources.

March 26, 2012

HOW TO : Route traffic to loopback interface in Linux

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking — Vinay @ 11:02 pm

Back in 2009 (last decade!! :) ), I wrote a blog post on how you can trick windows to route traffic destined to a particular IP address to a black-hole. In it, I mentioned the command to route traffic to /dev/null in Linux was 

<code>route ADD IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1</code>

I ran into a need to try it today and looks like the trick doesn’t work :) . So here is the right command if you want to route traffic to the loopback (or blackhole) destined to a particular IP address 

sudo route add -host IP_ADDRESS_OF_HOST/NETWORK_MASK lo

For example if I want to black-hole traffic destined to 74.205.216.2, I would do the following 

 sudo route add -host 74.205.216.2/32 lo

March 19, 2012

HOW TO : Check SSL certificate validity using curl

Filed under: Networking,security,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 11:01 am

If you want to check the SSL certificate validation (expiry time, hostname match, self signed etc) using curl, you can do it by running

curl -cacert URL_ADDRESS

Example : If you want to check the SSL certificate of GoDaddy

curl -cacert https://www.godaddy.com

March 5, 2012

Project : Uptime

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 5:13 am

The uptime of this blog has been really bad recently. I switched to hosting it on a Rackspace virtual server last year and went with the cheapest option. A 256MB Linux virtual server that was costing me ~$12/month. I never got around to tuning the OS, so the server was always using swap and would go down pretty much every day. Last week, I upgraded the plan and moved to a 512MB server. But the uptime hasn’t been any better. Here’s a report from Pingdom (which by the way is a great service to track the uptime and responsiveness of your website) showing the availability of the site over the last year 96%!!.. And for someone that has been working in the operations and infrastructure world, that is unacceptable :) . So my new goal is to maintain at least 99.5% uptime. Here is my plan to achieve this

  1. Move to a fresh VM with the latest kernel
  2. Upgrade to the latest version of Apache. Initially, I wanted to move to nginx or lighttpd, but with the recent Apache upgrade, I hear good things about Apache working well in low memory situations.
  3. Upgrade to latest version of MySQL and tune it for memory usage
  4. Configure cloudflare to serve a static version of front page, in case the server goes down. Design the static page to point people to my other digital presences (Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr etc)

I plan to blog the progress and learnings as I implement this plan.

December 12, 2011

HOW TO : Modify iptables rules

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking,security — Vinay @ 3:17 pm

Quick how to for my personal records. iptables is an open source firewall (and it does a lot more) included with most linux distributions.

Steps to add new rule to existing configuration

  • Check the list of rules and their corresponding sequence

sudo iptables -vL --line-numbers

  • Add the new rule at the required location/sequence

 sudo iptables -I INPUT LINE_NUMBER RULE

Example :

iptables -I INPUT 8 -s X.X.X.X/24 -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 3128 -j ACCEPT

  • Save the configuration

 sudo serivce iptables save

Thx to Sijis for helping with the commands.

October 31, 2011

HOW TO : Check web services using curl

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking,security,Web — Vinay @ 3:36 pm

Quick note for myself to check web services using curl ([L/U]nix utility to play with http(s) traffic)

 curl https://URL_TO_TEST --insecure --trace-ascii debug.txt

Comments on options :
–insecure is used if you are testing web services served over SSL using self signed certs
–trace-ascii dumps all traffic between the client (curl in this case) and the server in human readable format

August 22, 2011

HOW TO : Apache and SELinux

Filed under: HOWTO,Linux,Networking,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 11:13 am

Quick note for future reference..

If you ever run into errors like this

<pre>Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
(13)Permission denied: httpd: could not open error log file /etc/httpd/logs/error_log.
Unable to open logs
                                                           [FAILED]

And you are scratching your head why Apache is throwing these errors, even when the said directory and files exist. And you have the right permissions!! Check if you have SELinux running and being enforced.
On RHEL, you can check if SELinux is running by

cat /selinux/enforce

The two values are 0 and 1. 0 means, SELinux is not being enforced and 1 means it is.
You can quickly disable SELinux temporarily by 

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

If you want to disable it permanently (i.e. survive reboots), you have to edit the file /etc/selinux/config and change the SELINUX line from enabled to disabled.

July 20, 2011

HOW TO : Export and import certificates using keytool

Filed under: HOWTO,Networking,Technology — Vinay @ 2:55 pm

Keytool is a java utility to manage SSL key databases (stores). Here are a couple of options for using this tool

  • List the certificates in the keystore
keytool -list -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE
  • Export a particular certificate from the keystore
keytool -export -alias ALIAS_NAME_OF_CERT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE
  • Import a certificate into the keystore
keytool -import -alias ALIAS_NAME_YOU_WANT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE -file NAME_OF_CERT_FILE_TO_IMPORT
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