Tiernan's Comms Closet Tutorial

PFSense with Multiple Public IPs

May 30, 2015 tiernano

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So, a few weeks back, i got my hands on a Hetzner Dedicated box. It has a quad core Xeon, 32Gb ram, 3x3Tb hdds, RAID controller and KVMoIP. one of the first thing i did was get myself a /29 IP pool (8 total, 6 usable IPs). There where already 3 IPs given to me: 1 for the KVM, one for the box itself, and 1 as the router for the IP block.

So, i need to setup my own router, so i picked PFSense since its what i run in house. I gave it 2 network connections: 1 connected to the main network adapter on the VMWare ESXi box (public) and one to a virtual switch, which is only used by VMs. The public is the WAN link and it gets a static IP from Hetzner, and the virtual switch is then my “LAN” link. This allows me to have standard NATed network connections to any VM i have, but then, what do i do with those IPs?

So, after a lot of digging, i found the answer. So, this should help.

Under firewall, click on Virtual IPs.
Click the plus. I then selected IP alias, selected the WAN interface and set the IP to my first public IP i wanted to give. in my case, i was given a /29 block, and my first address was 176. This is the network address. I used 177. Likewise, my last address is 183, but that cannot be used either as its a broadcast address. give it a description and then hit OK. Repease for all IPs you want to use. TIP: Give each a meaningful description!
Next, click firewall, NAT and 1:1. Click the add button and select your interface as WAN. set the External Subnet IP as the one you want to use and your internal IP as the machine that will have it. Thats all i did on that screen…
Then go to Firewall, NAT, outbound… this is where things got complicated. Set the mode to “Manual outbound NAT rule generation (AON – Advanced Outbound NAT)” and click save.
Then create a new rule: Interface: WAN, Source, Network, IP of the internal machine and then under translation, under address select the IP you want to give it. If you followed my tip in step 2, you should see the descriptions in here.

After saving everything and reloading the firewall, visiting a page like WhatsMyIP or ICanHazIP should show you your public IP. You can then create firewall rules to allow access. Quick idea would be:

Firewall/Rules, Add, Interface WAN, Destination: Local IP you want to use, and give whatever “normal” rules you would (HTTP, lock down to source address, etc). Click apply and hitting that address using what ever method (SSH, HTTP, etc) should work.

YMMV, but hopefully this helps! Any questions, leave a comment.

Quick tip for internet facing ESXi servers

May 20, 2015 tiernano

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Quick tip for all you with internet facing VMWare ESXi Hosts. I
have just got my hands on a box on the Hetzner network (more on
that later) and using their LARA system i installed ESXi on it. All was good, then I tried login in a couple hours later and i kept getting errors about my password being wrong… So, i tried a few more times, got pissed off and rebooted the box (had to do a hard reboot, since i couldn’t even get in over KVM). I though this was a hardware issue, or a config issue, and left it… yesterday, i had the console open most of the day, and when looking at something i noticed this:

Well, that’s why I couldn’t login! So, tip: create a second user account, name it something other than root, give it a secure password and use that to login to your ESXi box. Ideally, your ESXi box should be behind a firewall, but in the case of a dedicated server, that may not be financially feasible… Hope this helps someone!

Bulk compressing images for the Web

April 29, 2015 tiernano

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Now that all my sites are running Jekyll I am trying to get them optimized for SPEED which meant
looking at all the stuff that takes time to download… There are more tweaks (and possibly posts) coming down
the road, but to start, I needed to look at images.

First things first. I’m running this on a Sabayon Linux box, so some of the install commands will be different… (Also, i do need to explain why I moved from Windows to Linux on the GodboxV2, but that’s a different post…)

First, install OptiPNG (they have a Windows build too…) and JPEGOptim

sudo equo install optipng
sudo equo install jpegoptim

[UPDATE] I tried this on an Ubutnu Box, and to install both of these, the package names are the same. so, to install both:

sudo apt-get install optipng jpegoptim

Next, using the Linux find command (this should work also on OSX…) run OptiPNG and JPEGOptim on all pngs and
jpgs in your given directory:

find . -iname "*.png" -exec optipng {} \;
find . -iname "*.jpe?g" -exec jpegoptim {} \;

depending on how many images (and how fast your machine is) it should take a min or two…

That’s it! I did a git status, which showed me all the changed images, and then deployed the Jekyll sites… All
good! That’s it!

Hubic and Duplicity

April 1, 2015 tiernano

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I mentioned HubiC in my last post, and in it i said that you could use Duplicity for backups. Well, this is how you get it to work…

First, i am using Ubuntu 14.04 (i think…). I use Ubuntu in house for a few things:

its running Tiernan’s Comms Closet, GeekPhotographer and Tiernan’s Podcast all in house, aswell as being used to build this site. The Web Server and MySQL Server are seperated, MySQL running on Windows, web on Ubuntu… but thats a different story…
I have a couple of proxy servers running Ubuntu also
Other general servers running Ubuntu… dont ask, cause i cant remember what they do half the time…

So, Duplicity is a backup application. From their website:

What is it?

Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.

The duplicity package also includes the rdiffdir utility. Rdiffdir is an extension of librsync’s rdiff to directories—it can be used to produce signatures and deltas of directories as well as regular files. These signatures and deltas are in GNU tar format.

So, how do we get it working? Well, givin that i am on Ubuntu, these are the steps i needed to do:

first, we need some credentials and API keys… If you havent signed up for HubiC Do so now… That url gets you an extra 5Gb if you sign up for free (usually 25Gb) or if you pay 1EUR a month, you get 110Gb (usually 100Gb) and 5EUR a month gets you a staggering 10TB (yup! Terabytes!).
Login to Hubic, and in the menu go to ‘My Account’, ‘Developers’. in here, create a new application (name and URL to redirect to… http://localhost seems to work correctly). Get the Client ID and Secret ID that was given to you.
take the contents of the following gist and replace your own details… I know, i am not a fan of sticking my password in a txt file… but it should be your local machine…
that file should be in your home directory and should be called .hubic_credentials.
add the duplicity PPA project (https://launchpad.net/~duplicity-team/+archive/ubuntu/ppa) to ubuntu using the add-apt-repository command (details on the link above, under the link ‘read about installing’). for me, i just called ‘sudo add-apt-repository ppa:duplicity-team/ppa’
install duplicity by doing ‘sudo apt-get install duplicity’. Dont forget (its in the tutorial above!) to do an ‘sudo apt-get update’ first!
When i ran that, there where a few extra Python packages to be installed, so i was asked did i want to install them… Say, yes.
Now, to run a backup we run the following command:

duplicity ~/ cf+hubic://location

cf+hubic is the backend to use, ~/ is the url to backup (my home directory in this case) and location is where on Hubic we want it stored. If this doesent exist, not a problem… it will create it.
after we run this we… ahhh… i get an error:

BackendException: This backend requires the pyrax library available from Rackspace.

right… pyrax library is from Rackspace and is available to download though pip…
I seem to have python and a few other bits installed on this machine, so running ‘sudo pip install pyrax’ works… Your millage may vary… [eg, this is out of scope for this tutorial! your on your own!]
Other problem… I got a load of weird and wondering errors like this:

AttributeError: 'Module_six_moves_urllib_parse' object has no attribute 'SplitResult'

I fixed these by running:

sudo pip install furl --upgrade

FINALLY! ITS ALIVE!!! by default, it asks you for a key for the GnuPG encryption… and its all good! the first backup creates the directories, required files, etc. the next time you run the command, it will only upload changes. it will also ask for your GnuPG code you entered, so remember it!

And thats all folks! Any questions, leave them in the comments!

Hubic, OpenStack Swift and Curl

March 31, 2015 tiernano

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HubiC is an online storage site, built by the guys at OVH. They are currently offering 30Gb free (if you use the link above) or if you pay, you get 110Gb (insted of the usual 100Gb) for EUR1 a month, or 10.5TB (yup… TERABYTES!) for EUR5 a month… Thats a crazy amount of storage for a not crazy amount of money!

So, while playing around with different things, I found they have an API, so other than the usual apps to play with (like the Hubic Apps for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop and OSX, Duplicity for backing up *nix boxes, and a few others) you can build your own…

But first, i needed to figure out how… So, after a lot of arsing around in Linux shells with curl i finally got some stuff working!

First, i used the Hubic sandbox to get the keys… its quite simple to walk though… this gets you your Access Token (see step 3). next, we need to get the Endpoint from Hubic: This GIST shows more:

Quick walkthough:

the first CURL request is to the HubiC API to get the credentials… this gives you a JSON response with a token and a endpoint URL aswell with an expire time…

The next request gets you a list of all files (or at least a load of files in my case) of whats in your folder. the default name here is my folder… I think its what everyone starts out with in HubiC… if you remove it, you will see all your top level folders.

next request i tried was to upload a file… the filename part is where you want it to be stored. this must exist on your local machine.

finally, downloading of a file… pass in the location of the file on the server (listing files will give you the location) and then -o in curl shows the output location…

Simples! now to get this working in c#… Full OpenStack Swift API is available to show how to do more… hopefully it will help in my C# coding…

IPv6 + MikroTik + Linux + Windows

December 19, 2012 tiernano

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I have been wanting to setup an IPv6 network for a while now, but never had the hardware or network to support it. My broadband Modem, a Cisco EPC3925, was pretty useless… But with the advent of Bridging on the Cisco EPC3925 it now works!

The first thing i needed to do was setup a Tunnel Broker Account with Hurricane Electric. I got a /64 block of IPv6 addresses, which should do me for a while… 🙂

Next, I followed the config example from the MikroTik Wiki Page: My First IPv6 Network. In my case, i only ran though most of router 1’s config, and did not create the “routing between segments” and “ospv-v3” backbone… I did give my internal LAN port an IPv6 address, as well as an IPv4 address.

Next, on my Windows Server machine, i gave it a static IPv6 address (since i dont have an IPv6 DHCP setup… yet…) and told it to use the IPv6 address i gave the RouteBoard as its gateway. Then i told it to use the OpenDNS public IPv6 address. I then visited IPv6 Test and Google’s IPv6 page to confirm connectivity… SUCCESS!!!

On my Linux box, I followed Soflayer’s Adding an IPv6 IP tutorial.

So far, so good…

enabling VNC from SSH on OSX

November 29, 2012 tiernano

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I have a Late 2008 MacBook Pro in the house, and SSH is enabled on it. I usually leave it on when in work. Anyway, SSH is enabled, but VNC access is not… I found the following command on Ryan’s Tech Notes allowing you to enable it though SSH:

** NOTE ** Change mypasswd to your own password!!!

If you need to disable it, use the following:

Also, of note, I am using RealVNC client for Windows to connect.

moving your TMG SQL server Logs DB and other TMG tips

November 22, 2012 tiernano

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In house, I have been using Microsoft TMG 2010 Server for a while now. I use it as a firewall for some of the machines on the network, and also as a proxy for most, if not all, machines. When acting as a Firewall, all traffic flows though the machine, be it HTTP/HTTPS, SMTP/POP3/IMAP, or anything for that matter. You can also lock down ports on the box, which is a feature of most firewalls, but i like TMG due to its relitive ease of use…

Anyway, one problem with routing all traffic from different machines though TMG is after a while, the logging starts getting big. Single TMG by default is set to use SQL Server, it can start using lots of memory, hard drive space, etc. So, there are a couple of articles which should make moving your TMG’s SQL DB to a different machine easier…

Some other tips you may find useful

If you have Malware Inspection turned on, but you know there are certain sites that wont serve Malware (for example, Ubutnu Archives or YouTube.com) you can add these to the “Destination Exceptions” list. Under “Web Access Policy”, click “Malware Inspection” and click “Destination Exceptions”. Double click on the “Sites Exempt from Malware Inspection” and add your URL. I put *.ubuntu.com and *.youtube.com in here (Microsoft Updates are already on the list). Now, when downloading files from these locations, they do not run though inspection and save CPU cycles. WANRING You need to trust these sites!
There is a nice little app to add into TMG called Bandwidth Splitter which allows you to not only monitor what traffic is going though your network, but also put limits on different machine sets, users, etc. There is a Free editon which works with only 10 clients, but does what i need it to do to start with.

RouterOS Using Host names in Firewall Rules

October 12, 2012 tiernano

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on RouterOS Blocking Machine access to all but one IP, I thought I would show how to add extra IPs to that list, without having a shedload of firewall filters.

First things first, get your list of IPs you allow access to. In my case, I just did an NSLOOKUP on the name and got the IPs.
Create an “Address List” in RouterOS. This can be done on the Web Interface by going to IP / Firewall / Address List and clicking Add. I had none previously, so I created a new rule, naming it ExpressVPN (the lads I use for VPN access) and added the first address.
this is where things get interesting. for extra IP (for ExpressVPN, I have 4) you create a new address with the SAME name, but different IP.
in your firewall rule, you should have either an src address or a dst address. in my case, I had both, but this was a change for the dst address. I removed the address from the rule, and I added it as a dst address list entry. If you have multiple address lists, you will see them here.

to do this at the command prompt:

this will block any traffic, other than the IPs in the expressVPN address list, for the machine 192.168.0.123.

RouterOS Blocking Machine access to all but one IP

October 11, 2012 tiernano

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So, I have a machine on my network, which should be only connecting to the internet through a VPN. I needed to tell my RouterOS box to block all access, except to this said IP address… The following should do the trick… YMMV

this will drop any packets from the srcaddress (IP address) that are not for the destination dstaddress (IP address). in my case, dstaddress is the VPN server I want to connect to. So, in theory, all packets should just go through the VPN and not leak out into the rest of the network… again, still testing this so be careful!