Kirsle.net
Recently, I was developing a Python/Flask app to implement Web Hooks for a third-party API that I was working with. The API recommended the use of ngrok during local development so that the server running on your local computer could be accessed publicly over the Internet (so that their API could reach yours).
ngrok is cool and all, but for their free plan they randomize the subdomain they give you every time you start the program. This meant I always had to log into my API account and change my Web Hook URL each day.
What ngrok is doing is nothing new: I've written about using SSH to forward ports between machines, and figured it should be easy enough for me to configure a subdomain on my own server that forwards traffic to another port that I could open when I need to.
Manually managing a music collection of MP3 files on disk is such a pain in the ass that I felt like blogging about it.
First, you have cloud music services like Google Play Music which can't detect duplicates properly.
The next version of Fedora (24) is coming out soon, so I decided a couple weeks ago that I'd take a tour of all the different desktop environments and see if I like any of them enough to switch from Xfce. My original desktop environment of choice was GNOME 2, and I had jumped ship to Xfce after GNOME 3 was released because I was no fan of the tablet-focused, feature-stripped interface of the new desktop and GNOME 2.32 was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor for Linux.
In user interface and software design, the principle of least astonishment states that "if a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature." It means that your user interface should behave in a way that the user expects, based on their prior knowledge of how similar interfaces behave.
This is a rant about Mac OS X.
The free SSL certificate authority Let's Encrypt went into public beta earlier this month, and I updated all of my sites to use SSL now. I still had several more months before kirsle.net's old certificate from Namecheap expired, but I switched to the Let's Encrypt certificate because I could include all my subdomains instead of only the www one.
Check out their website and get free SSL certificates for your sites, too. I'm just writing this blog with some personal tips for how I configured my nginx server and a Python script I wrote to automate the process of renewing my certificates every month (Let's Encrypt certs expire every 90 days).
Last weekend I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Time Warner Cable already supports IPv6 at my apartment.
They shipped me a newer cable modem/WiFi router combo device earlier this year as part of their plan to upgrade everyone's Internet speeds in Los Angeles. I didn't realize that this modem also supported IPv6, and it wasn't enabled by default.
Today I picked up a Macbook Air (13", early 2015 model) because I wanted a new laptop, as my old laptop (the Samsung Series 5) has a horrible battery life, where it barely lasts over an hour and gives up early (powering down at 40% and not coming back up until I plug it in). This is also my first Apple computer. I'm the furthest thing from an Apple fanboy, but the choices I was throwing around in my head were between an Apple computer and a Lenovo Thinkpad.
I was given a Thinkpad as my work laptop, and it's by far the most impressive PC laptop I've ever used; it can drive three displays and run lots of concurrent tasks and has an insane battery life. Every PC laptop I've owned in the past have sucked in comparison. I hear people compare Apple computers to Thinkpads, so that's why the choice came down to one of these, and I didn't want another Thinkpad sitting around the house. ;)
Months before getting a Macbook I was looking into what kind of effort it takes to install Linux on a Macbook. There's a lot of information out there, and most of it suggests that the best way to go is to install a boot manager like rEFIt (or rEFInd, since rEFIt isn't maintained anymore). I saw some pages about not using rEFIt and installing Grub directly, which were from a Debian and Arch Linux perspective, and it sounded really complicated.
It seems that nowadays, with a user friendly Linux distribution like Fedora, a lot of this works much more flawlessly than the dozens of tutorials online would suggest. I just made a Fedora LiveUSB in the usual way (as if installing on a normal PC), rebooted the Macbook while holding the Option key, so that I was able to select the USB to boot from.
When installing Fedora to disk, the process was very much the same as doing it on a normal PC. I let Fedora automatically create the partition layout, and it created partitions and mount points for /, /boot and /home like usual, but it also created a partition and mount point for /boot/efi (for installing itself as the default bootloader in the EFI firmware on the Macbook). After installation was completed, I rebooted and the grub boot screen comes up immediately, with options to boot into Fedora.
One weird thing is, the grub screen apparently sees something related to Mac OS X (there were two entries, like "Mac OS X 32-bit" and "Mac OS X 64-bit", but both options would give error messages when picked).
If I want to boot into OS X, I hold down the Option key on boot and pick the Macintosh HD from the EFI boot menu. Otherwise, if the Macbook boots normally it goes into the grub menu and then Fedora. So, the whole thing is very similar to a typical PC dual-boot setup (with Windows and Linux), just with one extra step to get into OS X.
Update: I'm keeping a wiki page with miscellaneous setup notes and tips here: Fedora on Macbook
First and foremost: this requires the victim to click not one, but two random links sent to them over Pidgin (or any other program that does URL auto-linking the way Pidgin does). So it's not exactly the most severe vulnerability, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
I jumped ship from GNOME 2 to XFCE when GNOME 3 was announced and have ranted about it endlessly, but then I decided to give GNOME 3.14 (Fedora 21) a try.
I still installed Fedora XFCE on all the PCs I care about, and decided my personal laptop was the perfect guinea pig for GNOME because I never do anything with that laptop and wouldn't mind re-formatting it again for XFCE if I turn out not to like Gnome.
After scouring the GNOME Shell extensions I installed a handful that made my desktop somewhat tolerable:
(Click for bigger screenshot)
And then I found way too many little papercuts, some worse than others. My brief list:
Settings weren't always respected very well, and some apps would need to be "coerced" into actually looking at their settings. For example, I configured the GNOME Terminal to use a transparent background. It worked when I first set it up, but then it would rarely work after that. If I opened a new terminal, the background would be solid black. Adjusting the transparency setting now had no effect. Sometimes, opening and closing a tab would get GNOME Terminal to actually read its settings and turn transparent. Most of the time though, it didn't, and nothing I could do would get the transparency to come back on. It all depended on the alignment of the stars and when GNOME Terminal damn well feels like it.
Also, I use a left handed mouse, and GNOME Shell completely got confused after a reboot. The task bar and window buttons (maximize, close, etc.) and other Shell components would be right handed, while the actual apps I use would be left handed. So, clicking the scrollbar and links in Firefox would be left-handed (right mouse button is your "left click"), and when I wanted to close out of Firefox, I'd instead get a context menu popup when clicking the "X" button. Ugh!
I wanted to write this blog post from within GNOME but it just wasn't possible. With different parts of my GUI using right-handed buttons and other parts using left-handed ones, I had context menus popping up when I didn't want them and none popping up when I did. After a while I thought to go into the Mouse settings and switch it back; this didn't help, instead, the parts that used to be right-handed switched to left-handed, and vice versa. It was impossible to use. I just had to painstakingly get a screenshot off the laptop and to my desktop and deal with it over there instead.
These things just lead me to believe the GNOME developers only develop for their particular workflows and don't bother testing any features that other mere mortals might like to use. All the GNOME developers are probably right-handed, and they have no idea about the left-handed bugs. All of the GNOME developers don't use transparency in their terminals, evidenced by the fact that the transparency option disappeared from GNOME 3.0 and only just recently has made a comeback (in GNOME 3.12/Fedora 20).
XFCE is going back on this laptop.
A while after the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability made headlines, Wired.com ran an article titled "It's Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet" urging everyone to deploy SSL/TLS encryption on their sites.
SSL certificates tend to be pretty expensive, though, which is one reason I hadn't looked into it that closely in the past. In a Reddit comment thread about that Wired article some people mentioned Namecheap as a good option for simple SSL certs. So, I got a simple domain-level certificate for $9 for Kirsle.net. :) So all kirsle.net URLs are now running over https! This blog post is about the experience of setting up SSL and wrestling with various applications in the process.
The simplest guide I found that I followed to make a certificate was Generate CSR - Apache OpenSSL. One command creates a passphrase-protected key file, the next one generates the signing request:
openssl genrsa –des3 –out kirsle.key 2048
openssl req -new -key kirsle.key -out kirsle.csr
You apparently need a 2048-bit RSA key these days before a Certificate Authority will consider your signing request. I pasted in my CSR file and filled out some forms, got an e-mail verification sent to the address on my WHOIS record for my domain, and before I knew it I was e-mailed a zip file containing my certificate and the Comodo CA certificates.
Various apps will need your Certificate Authority's chain to be in a single file. You can create this file by catting the certificates into one file in "reverse" order, with your site's certificate on top, and the root certificate on bottom. Comodo gave me these files (and this is also the order for the chain file):
www_kirsle_net.crtCOMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crtCOMODORSAAddTrustCA.crtAddTrustExternalCARoot.crtSo I generated the chain as follows:
cat www_kirsle_net.crt COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt \
COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt > cacert.pem
I'm running a Debian server, so I just symlinked the ssl.load and ssl.conf files from my /etc/apache2/mods-available into my mods-enabled, and then edited the ssl.conf. All I changed in it was to uncomment the SSLHonorCipherOrder on line.
I removed the sites-enabled/default-ssl and then edited my Kirsle.net config file to add a <VirtualHost *:443> version. I had to look at the default-ssl file to get an idea which options were needed (if I missed any, Apache would fail to start!)
Relevant SSL options for my VirtualHost:
# SSL
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/crt/cacert.pem
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/crt/www_kirsle_net.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/crt/kirsle.key
SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
BrowserMatch "MSIE [17-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown
Note: if you leave out the chain file, web browsers will still behave fine (because they're smart enough to download the intermediary certificates themselves), but other things will break. For example, the Python requests module will throw an SSL exception if the server doesn't give it the intermediary certificates!
After making sure https://www.kirsle.net/ was working, I made an update to my Rophako CMS to support SSL sites better and then made the switch-over. Any requests going to my HTTP Kirsle.net are redirected to the SSL version and given a Strict Transport Security header.
As a fun side note, Apache supports Perfect Forward Secrecy by default (using the default SSLCipherSuite option of HIGH:MEDIUM:!aNULL:!MD5).
Starting or restarting Apache requires you to enter the SSL key's passphrase at the command line. For simple config updates, service apache2 graceful will reload them without needing a full restart, so you don't need to enter the passphrase then.
I use Dovecot for my IMAP mail server on Kirsle.net, and I wanted it to use my shiny new SSL certificate. Before this, I was using a self-signed certificate, and apparently Thunderbird doesn't even warn you if that self-signed certificate changes at any point. After the Heartbleed vulnerability was fixed, I re-generated new self-signed certs and was shocked that Thunderbird happily accepted the new certificate without even telling me. It would've been extremely easy to Man-in-the-Middle my e-mail server. (I had since then installed an extension in Thunderbird to police SSL certificates for me as a workaround).
So, configuration is pretty simple, just edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf and enter in the new paths to your chain file and private key. Note that if you use just your domain's certificate, clients like Thunderbird that support SSL properly will complain about the certificate being insecure, and unlike web browsers, Thunderbird doesn't bother downloading the intermediary certificates itself.
One catch with Dovecot is that if your private key file is encrypted with a passphrase like mine is, doing service dovecot restart won't work. Dovecot will start in a way where it won't support TLS but will otherwise appear to function normally.
To start Dovecot with a passphrase, you need to run dovecot -p (as root) to start the service. It will prompt for your passphrase at the command line and then start up. The service can be stopped normally using service dovecot stop.
This one I'm a bit upset about. Postfix has absolutely NO support for using a passphrase protected TLS key file! Even their official documentation states that the key file must not be encrypted.
That is so full of wtf. Postfix is a widely deployed SMTP server for Linux, and it has to use insecure, unprotected TLS key files. So, I'm still using a self-signed certificate for Postfix (and my Thunderbird add-on will tell me if this certificate ever changes, so don't get any ideas!). I don't send outgoing mail very often, anyway, and if I care enough I'll PGP encrypt. But, I'll be looking into an alternative SMTP server sometime soon.
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