My notes, things I have learned, and documentation I have created.

Here a nice trick to get around the seemingly impossible “Your connection is not private” page when you try to access a site with a self signed certificate. I really don’t understand why nobody comes up with a better way to deal with this. We need the transport on our LANs to be encrypted using https. It should be easier to get this done.

Anyway, this is how you get the screen:

This applies to the “Your connection is not private” that has the “NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID” message in it.

Click anywhere on the background of the page, and type “thisisunsafe” and hit Enter. Then, you will proceed to site.

Note: This happens in MacOS, and I seen this is the latest versions of Chrome on linux.

OS: Debian 10
Desktop Environment: XFCE

Install RDP on a system running a desktop environment is really pretty simple with one caveat. It seems that you cannot steal a session from the console by logging with that same username. So, if you know you are going to need the desktop environment, make sure you log off the console, if logged into the desktop environment, before attempting to login remotely. If you do forget, you make only get part of the environment, but have no way really do anything until you logoff from the console session.

Install RDP:

# apt install xrdp xterm

Enable xrdp and xrdp-sesman:

# systemctl enable xrdp
# systemctl enable xrdp-sesman

Start both services:

# systemctl start xrdp
# systemctl start xrdp-sesman

If you do not have a desktop environment setup:

# apt install xfce4 xfce4-goodies xorg dbus-x11 x11-xserver-utils

Verify that xrdp is running:

# systemctl status xrdp
● xrdp.service – xrdp daemon
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/xrdp.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2021-03-28 19:49:01 PDT; 4 weeks 0 days ago
Docs: man:xrdp(8)
man:xrdp.ini(5)
Main PID: 724 (xrdp)
Tasks: 2 (limit: 4915)
Memory: 22.2M
CGroup: /system.slice/xrdp.service
├─ 724 /usr/sbin/xrdp
└─19572 /usr/sbin/xrdp

Apr 26 10:22:30 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] xrdp_wm_log_msg: connecting to sesman ip 127.0.0.1 port 3350
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[INFO ] xrdp_wm_log_msg: sesman connect ok
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] xrdp_wm_log_msg: sending login info to session manager, please wait…
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] return value from xrdp_mm_connect 0
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[INFO ] xrdp_wm_log_msg: login successful for display 10
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] xrdp_wm_log_msg: started connecting
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[INFO ] lib_mod_log_peer: xrdp_pid=19572 connected to X11rdp_pid=19575 X11rdp_uid=1000 X11rdp_gid=1000 client_i
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] xrdp_wm_log_msg: connected ok
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] xrdp_mm_connect_chansrv: chansrv connect successful
Apr 26 10:22:31 lm xrdp[19572]: (19572)(140553222580032)[DEBUG] Closed socket 18 (AF_INET6 ::1 port 59468)

Add xrdp to ssl-cert group:

# usermod -a -G xrdp ssl-cert

Reboot:

# shutdown -r now

To find the endpoint name:
Login in AWS console.
Click Services, and search for RDS (Managed Relational Database Service).
Click on Databases.
Click on the DB Identifier under the cluster DB Identifier you to connect to using MySql Workbench.
The endpoint for that database will be displayed under Connectivity & security.

This will be in the same location as the identifier.

Login to the EC2 Console.
Go down to Elastic Block Store.
Select Volumes.
Select the volume
Click Actions and then Modify Volume.
Enter the new size and click Modify.

At this point, you will need to extend your volumes and partitions.

In this case, I was not using LVM, so it was a pretty simple process.

Check to see which partition you want to extend:

$ df -hT
/dev/xvda1 xfs 8G 8.7G 8G 97% /

Determine the block device and the partition number:

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda 202:0 0 8G 0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1 0 8G 0 part /

Expand to partition to all the available unallocated storage on the disk:

$ sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1

Verify to see if the partition has been extended.

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda 202:0 0 30G 0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1 0 30G 0 part /

Extend the filesystem on the partition:

$ sudo xfs_growfs -d /

Verify:

$ df -h
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1 xfs 30G 9.1G 21G 31% /

OS: CentOS 7
There are a few ways to enable query logging in MariaDB. I did it by editing the server.cnf file.

# cd /etc/my.cnf.d
vi server.cnf
…
[mariadb]
log_output=TABLE
general_log
…

Restart mariadb:

# systemctl restart mariadb

The output is put in the mysql.general_log table. Fortunately, I had used unique userid for each of my applications. This allowed me to be able to query the table to find those queries for a particular database. For example, an application using dbuser for database access:

MariaDB [mysql]> SELECT * FROM general_log WHERE user_host like ‘%dbuser%localhost%’;

You are going to want to truncate this log once in a while, because it will get very large depending the on the activity.

MariaDB [mysql]> TRUNCATE mysql.general_log

I have to write these things, so I can find them when I inevitably need them again.

This will give you the last element in a delimited string:

awk -F “:” ‘{print $NF}’

Here is an example:

$ echo “elemet1:element2:element3:element4” | awk -F “:” ‘{print $NF}’
element4

UPDATE: What outlined below did not work, so here is what I ended up doing:

Change directory to:

$ cd /etc/apt/apt.conf.d

Edit the 20auto-upgrades, and change the Lists setting from 1 to 0:

$ sudo vi 20auto-upgrades
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists “0”;
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade “1”;

Now, with the list disabled the service should never find anything to update.

Another option is just get rid of the service:

$ sudo apt remove unattended-upgrades

Note: The following did not work in Ubuntu 18.x:

For reason, I don’t know if this an Azure deployment issue or an Ubuntu decision, but I have found automatic updates turned on by default in a couple VMs. Not sure why you would ever want your production server automatically updating, so:

Check to status of the unattended-upgrades service:

$ sudo systemctl status unattended-upgrades

Stop the service:

$ sudo systemctl stop unattended-upgrades

Disable the service. NOTE: Services that have this as a dependency will start the service despite it being disabled. I am not aware of any for this service, but just putting it out there.

$ sudo systemctl disable unattended-upgrades

To prevent the unintended situation above, mask will create a link to /dev/null to prevent the service from being started whether there are dependencies or not.

$ sudo systemctl mask unattended-upgrades

I needed to cleanup an issue with an OpenVPN user. I cleaned was using a multi-factor solution with OpenVPN. The multi-factor solution was case sensitive, while the VPN was not. To clean up the mess, I needed to remove the certificates from the certs SQLite database.

Database location:

# cd /usr/local/openvpn_as/etc/db

Connect to the database:

# sqlite3 certs.db

List the tables in the database:

sqlite> .tables

List column names in the table:
sqlite> pragma table_info(certificates);

List all the common_name records in the database:
sqlite> select common_name from certificates ;

Delete records with the common name somename:
sqlite> delete from certificates where common_name=’somename‘;

This worked well to clean up the database, and get the user working with a correct ovpn file.

Note: You could also edit the ovpn with data from the database as well.

Here is how you display a table (log in this instance) layout:

sqlite> .schema log

I used the following to query the login activity. You have to convert the timestamp in the start_time column. Also, the duration is stored in seconds, so I converted it to minutes.

sqlite> select username,strftime(‘%m-%d-%Y’, datetime(start_time, ‘unixepoch’)),duration/60 from log;

To run it from a script, save your query in a file (zreport) and run the following:

sqlite3 log.db < zreport

OS: CentOS 7
Install Docker:

# yum install docker-ce-cli docker-ce

Start Docker:

# systemctl start docker

Help:

# docker –help

You can tack on a –help on the end of any command to get help of that specific option:

# docker pull –help

Pull in an image from hub.docker.com:

# docker pull ubuntu

To list your installed images and obtain the IMAGE ID:

# docker images

To run an image:

# docker run -it -d ubuntu

To view running images:

# docker ps

To stop a running container:

# docker stop ‘CONTAINTER ID‘

To execute a command in a container (In this case, bash in the ubuntu image.):

# docker exec -it ‘CONTAINTER ID‘ bash

To view all container, including those that are not running:

# docker ps -a

To remove a container:

# docker rm ‘CONTAINTER ID‘

To remove an image:
# docker rmi ‘IMAGE ID‘

To stop and remove a running container:

# docker rm -f ‘CONTAINTER ID‘

To save changes to a container:

# docker commit ‘CONTAINTER ID‘ ‘NEW IMAGE NAME‘

To remove all running containers:

# docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)

NOTE: INSTANCE ID can refer an image or container. The next two command will return the information in json format.
To view a container’s history:

# docker history ‘INSTANCE ID‘

To view information about a container:

# docker inspect ‘INSTANCE ID‘

If you want to upload your container to hub.docker.com the container must have a name in the following format:

# docker commit ‘CONTAINTER ID‘ ‘dockerhubuserid’/’newimagename’

To run a container and map a host port to the container port:

# docker run -it -d -p 82:80 jgz/apache2

Then, in this case, I would access my container web server from my LAN by accessing my docker host name and the port 82. So, if my hostname is jims.domain.local, the I would browse to http://jims.domain.local:82.

A Dockerfile is how you can create a container and run some commands when you start it up:
Building a Dockerfile (YAML file):

# mkdir /usr/local/docker
# cd /usr/local/docker/
# vi Dockerfile
…
FROM ubuntu
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install apache2
ADD . /var/www/html
ENTRYPOINT apachectl -D FOREGROUND
ENV name jgz

This will build the container and execute the RUN commands and ENTRYPOINT command:

# docker build . -t new_dockerfile

# cd /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/

Make a backup copy of the org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy file:

# cp -p org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy.orig

Edit the org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy file:

# vi org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy

In the <action id=”org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system”> section, look for
<allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> toward the end of the section.

Change that line to:
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>

# shutdown -r now