Linux: Splitting a Large File into Small Files

Recently I was trying to transfer a large ISO file across a horribly unstable VPN. The transfer would fail at various amounts of transfer percentages. So, I thought I'd best split the file up into 10MB chunks, then rsync those over and stitch it back together.

That way if it failed 90% of the way through, I wouldn't have to resend all the data, just that last 10%. The way I managed to do this, was to:

split --bytes=10m file.iso file_part 

What happens now is, you have a bunch of 10MB files called

file_partaa
file_partab
flie_partac
file_partad
...

So, just rsync all those files to the destination:

rsync -e ssh -a --progress file_part* user@desination.host.com:

When that completes, login to the remote host and put them back together:

cat file_part* > orig_file.iso

Done and done.

Gluster Setup in the Cloud: Simple, Easy

Here, I'll spin up two instances and configure distributed, replicated storage between them. I'll do two instances but I've actually done it for up to six instances. I have no idea how far it would scale but I'm guessing 30 or more would work fine using this method.

First I fired up two CentOS 5 instances which will be talking to each other over the private network. I'll name them node-1 and node-2 and add entries for both to /etc/hosts, like so:

10.19.128.5             node-1
10.19.128.6             node-2

They are in the same security group, so they can see each other. After you add the entries, ping the other side, like this:

[root@node-1 ~]# ping node-2
PING node-2 (10.19.128.6) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from node-2 (10.19.128.6): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.140 ms
64 bytes from node-2 (10.19.128.6): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.138 ms

--- node-2 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.138/0.139/0.140/0.001 ms

Next, grab and install the software:

wget http://download.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/LATEST/RHEL/glusterfs-core-3.1.3-1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/LATEST/RHEL/glusterfs-fuse-3.1.3-1.x86_64.rpm

rpm -Uvh gluster*.rpm
rm gluster*.rpm

Then, load the fuse module:

modprobe fuse

Then, start glusterd

/etc/init.d/glusterd start

Pick some directories to use, in this case, gluster will use /export/queue-data and you and your apps will use /queue. So, don't every access files in /export/queue-data, gluster owns that directory:

mkdir /queue /export/queue-data

Setup the clients so they can see/talk to each other, run this on each system. From node-1:

[root@node-1 ~]# gluster peer probe node-2
Probe successful

[root@node-2 ~]# gluster peer probe node-1
Probe successful

Next, create your directories on both systems:

[root@node-1 ~]# mkdir -p /queue /export/queue-data/
[root@node-2 ~]# mkdir -p /queue /export/queue-data/

Now, create your volume:

[root@node-1 ~]# gluster volume create queue-data replica 2 node-1:/export/queue-data node-2:/export/queue-data
Creation of volume queue-data has been successful. Please start the volume to access data.

Ready to start the volume export:

[root@node-1 ~]# gluster volume start queue-data
Starting volume queue-data has been successful

To manually mount the volume, run:

[root@node-1 ~]# mount -t glusterfs 127.0.0.1:queue-data /queue

You can see that it's been mounted here:

[root@node-1 ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             2.0G  1.5G  445M  77% /
/dev/sda2             7.9G  152M  7.4G   2% /opt
none                  256M     0  256M   0% /dev/shm
glusterfs#127.0.0.1:queue-data
                      2.0G  1.5G  445M  77% /queue

To mount it automatically on boot, run:

[root@node-2 ~]# echo "127.0.0.1:queue-data    /queue     glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
[root@node-2 ~]# mount -a

If you're doing something different and want to be able to run VM's off your glusterfs, add this to fstab:

127.0.0.1:queue-data          /queue                   glusterfs direct-io-mode=disable,_netdev 0 0

And you can see that on node-2 it's also been mounted:

[root@node-2 ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             2.0G  1.5G  445M  77% /
/dev/sda2             7.9G  152M  7.4G   2% /opt
none                  256M     0  256M   0% /dev/shm
glusterfs#127.0.0.1:queue-data
                      2.0G  1.5G  445M  77% /queue

Now, let's make sure it works. I'll create a file on node-1 and then make sure it exists on node-2:

[root@node-1 ~]# cd /queue && dd if=/dev/zero of=output.dat bs=1M count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 0.572936 seconds, 18.3 MB/s

And, here I see it on node-2:

[root@node-2 ~]# ls -al /queue
total 10276
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     4096 Apr  5 12:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root     4096 Apr  5 12:43 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 10485760 Apr  5 12:49 output.dat

And, there you have it. If you require iptables rules, which I don't because I'm already behind ec2's ACL's, add something like this to node-1 and changing the IP for node-2:

# /etc/sysconfig/iptables
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 24007 --source 10.19.128.6 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 24008 --source 10.19.128.6 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 24009 --source 10.19.128.6 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 24010 --source 10.19.128.6 -j ACCEPT

You could also just do something like this:

A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 24007:24010 --source 10.19.128.6 -j ACCEPT

Ruby and Rails and MySQL and Apache and Passenger and Git: Install on CentOS 5

My New Years resolution was to learn ruby on rails, the popular web application framework. It just so happens I've been assigned a ruby project at work. Go figure..

I've been watching some screen-cast stuff my buddy at Pivotal lent me and the first thing to do was to install the stuff. Looks like it's pretty much dominated by people that develop on their Mac, then push apps to some public Rails hosting company. That's fine but I have a hankerin to install in my own CentOS 5 environment. It was actually a lot more tinkering than it should be, which is weird. So, I figured I'd better lay it out so I don't forget how it's done. Hopefully this'll help others. The latest version of ruby comes with ruby gems, the ruby package manager. So you don't need to install that separately.

Something that is interesting to note, Passenger is really mod_ruby - an apache module. They don't call it mod_ruby but that's what it is. Similar in theory to mod_perl and mod_php.



You'll get the latest stable ruby as of this writing (ruby-1.9.2-p136) + rails 3.0.3.

Another note, I'm using MySQL as my back end database but to do default 'bundle installs', you need sqlite so I'm installing that as well.

#

# Install deps
# Install the latest version of Ruby and Rails and Git to run in Apache + Passenger.
# Includes MySQL and sqlite.

yum -y install httpd zlib-devel curl-devel openssl-devel httpd-devel apr-devel apr-util-devel

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p136.tar.gz
tar -xvf ruby-1.9.2-p136.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.2-p136
./configure --enable-shared --enable-pthread
make && make install
cd ext/zlib
ruby extconf.rb --with-zlib-include=/usr/include --with-zlib-lib=/usr/lib64
cd ../..
make
make install
ruby --version

# Installing sqlite
wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
tar -zxf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400
./configure && make && make install


gem install rails
gem install passenger
gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-conf=/usr/bin/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib64/mysql


wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.3.2.tar.bz2
tar xvf git*.*
cd git*
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local install


# run this by hand because you have to answer some questions.
# passenger-install-apache2-module

Next, you'll want to configure a hosting environment with a custom http config:


vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/rails_app.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.domain.com
    DocumentRoot /opt/rails/myapp/public
    <Directory /opt/rails/myapp/public>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Creating a Virtual Private Cluster with OpenVPN

I'd like to change gears and look at using the cloud in a bit of a new way for me. That is, as a direct extension of the LAN. This post represents a bunch of research on my part. It's what I spent the 2010 Christmas holiday working on. If you get bored with all the tech stuff here, make sure you read the last couple of paragraphs in this post so you can see what the end-goal really is. Overwhelming possibilities is all I can say. It's more than the title implies - so keep an open mind after it's all setup and working.

In this post, I'll create a new security group and connect it to my office network via a VPN tunnel. Then, I'll route packets to instances running in that security group through the tunnel, just as if it were on my local office LAN. You just need a single port open to the security group to create the tunnel. I'll also mention that you can spend a lot of money and pay for something similar, however by rolling your own you have way more flexibility. It's an investment to understand how it all works together to be sure but once I got it down I feel like I'm on another, higher level of understanding networking. For me it was a really great project.

So, let's get started. First, I'm going to create a new security group and call it vpc for virtual private cloud:

ec2-add-group VPC -d "Virtual Private Cloud"
GROUP VPC Virtual Private Cloud

Now, I'm going to authorize two ports for my group, 1194 for the tunnel and 22000 for sshd while I get everything configured. Keep in mind I usually run sshd on a port other than 22 because of annoying scan-bots. I'll de-authorize port 22000 when I'm up and running.

# ec2auth -Ptcp -p22000 VPC
# ec2auth -Pudp -p1194 VPC

Now, I'll spin up an instance, install openvpn and configure the service. The following instance is an AMI I created that doesn't have OpenVPN installed.

# ec2run -k joeyssh -g VPC pmi-182a79e7

Ok, I'm going to start another instance in that VPC so we can test end-to-end connectivity once we get the tunnel setup. Same command as above.

Now I can check the IP's of my instances and login.

# ec2din

Ok, now I'm logged into one of the instances I'm going to rename openvpn-server because it's going to be my OpenVPN server system.

# hostname openvpn-server

Next, I'm going to add the RPMForge repos to this system and install it. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you'll solve all of OpenVPN's dependencies at the same time. They are stuff like openssl-devel, lzo-devel, pam-devel, etc.

So, install the RPMForge RPM for your architecture:

# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS//rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

Then, install OpenVPN:

# yum -y install openvpn

Now that the software is installed, let's configure the OpenVPN server. We're going to create a set of certificates for authenticating connections. We're going to create 3 certs. One is the certificate authority, or CA. This will be used to sign both the server certificate and the client certificate. Next, I'll create the server and client certs that will be used to authenticate and encrypt the tunnel. In order to do this, I'll use the 'EasyRSA' software that comes with openvpn. This is specific to CentOS, your distro's methods may vary.

Copy easy-rsa into /etc/openvpn/

# rsync -a /usr/share/doc/openvpn-2.1.4/easy-rsa/2.0/ /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/

Before we create our certificates and keys, I'm going to edit the vars file which contains the default values for my certificates. They're at the very bottom of the file, look for KEY_COUNTRY through KEY_EMAIL and customize them for your environment:

# vi /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/vars

This is a bit of a hack but for some reason all the shell scripts that easy-rsa provides aren't marked as executable. So, to fix that I ran:

# cd /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/
# file * | perl -lane 'system "chmod 755 $1" if (/(.*?):.*?Bourne.*?/)'

Next, source the vars file and build the Certificate Authority certificate:

# cd /etc/openpvn/easy-rsa/
# . vars
# ./clean-all
# ./build-ca

Ok, next we'll create the openpvn server's certificate:

# ./build-key-server openvpn-server

Next, we build the Diffie-Hellman key:

# ./build-dh

And finally, we'll build our client certificate which will be installed on a PC at the office to setup the tunnel.

# ./build-key openvpn-client

Now, we'll configure the openvpn server. Before doing so, we need to know two things. One, the network information for my office LAN and the network information for the AWS LAN. In my case, they are:

Office: 172.20.0.0/24
AWS: 10.19.237.80/28

That plays into my config file, notice the customizations, "push route" and "route". Note also that for the tunnel itself I'm using 172.16.130.0/24. You can just leave that alone, or change it. It doesn't really matter what you use there. It's less confusing to use something that doesn't overlap with either your office or AWS networks though. Create a file (/etc/openvpn/vpc.conf) and add the following:

# OpenVPN Server Config
port 1194
proto udp
dev tun

# Certificates
ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt
cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/openvpn-server.crt
key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/openvpn-server.key # This file should be kept secret
dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem

server 172.16.130.0 255.255.255.0
push "route 10.19.237.80 255.255.255.240"
log-append  /var/log/openvpn.vpc.log
verb           3
status         /etc/openvpn/vpc_status.log
keepalive 20 100
persist-tun
persist-key

push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8"
client-to-client
client-config-dir /etc/openvpn/ccd
route 172.20.0.0 255.255.255.0

user nobody
group nobody
comp-lzo 

We haven't configured OpenVPN to use pre-shared (aka static) keys because that's less secure. Static keys are bad because if a system with the shared key is lost or stolen, the shared key must be regenerated and replaced on all systems running OpenVPN. We're running asymmetric (or two-way) encryption to ensure the identity of the VPN partner. The way that works, is the client and server both have a public and private key. They trade public keys when the connection starts and start encrypting traffic for the partner with the public key. They decrypt traffic with the private key. Only the recipient's private can decrypt data encoded by his public key. If a system is lost or stolen an administrator can simply revoke the certificates (on openvpn-server) that belong to the client in question.

In our configuration we're using asymmetric public key encryption to establish a session, then OpenVPN negotiates a static key between hosts for tunnel encryption. These expire on a regular basis and are regenerated. I see things in my logs like:

TLS: tls_process, killed expiring key

I think this is because if there's a man-in-the-middle type of attack, by the time they decrypt that static key and can actually eavesdrop on the session, the key has expired and been regenerated. By default, the time is 60 seconds - which seems good to me? :)

Now, before we start the service, it's important that both systems have accurate clocks. If the time is off by more than 5 minutes on either side, the tunnel goes away and doesn't come back until the clocks are back in sync. The easiest way to manage that is just run ntpd:

yum -y install ntp
chkconfig ntpd on
service ntpd start

Now, let's fire up OpenVPN:

# chkconfig openvpn on
# service openvpn start

You should now see openvpn running as user nobody and listening on port 1194:

# lsof -i:1194
COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
openvpn 1448 nobody    4u  IPv4   4866       UDP *:openvpn 

If you have any trouble starting the service, look in: /var/log/openvpn.vpc.log for errors.

Ok, so that's the server side config. Now, we need an OpenVPN client on your LAN to create our tunnel. So, pick a box on the network and install OpenVPN. In my case, I'm going to use a Xen instance on an existing infrastructure system but you can use a desktop system or an old PC or whatever.

If you're running CentOS x86_64, use the instructions above to install RPMForge and OpenVPN.

I've called this system 'openvpn-client' and installed the software I need. So now, I need to copy down the keys I generated for this host from the OpenVPN Server in the cloud. To do this, simply:

# mkdir /etc/openvpn/keys/
# cd /etc/openvpn/keys/
# scp -P 22000 -i ~/.ssh/mykey root@publicipofopenvpnserver:/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/openvpn-client.crt . 
# scp -P 22000 -i ~/.ssh/mykey root@publicipofopenvpnserver:/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/openvpn-client.key .
# scp -P 22000 -i ~/.ssh/mykey root@publicipofopenvpnserver:/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt .

Ok, now we need the OpenVPN client configuration. The changes to this file you'll need to make are the name/location of the certificates and the PUBLIC IP of your OpenVPN server. Create a file on the openvpn-client system (/etc/openvpn/vpc.conf) and add the following:

client
dev tun
proto udp

remote 204.231.109.96 1194
resolv-retry 10
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca   /etc/openvpn/keys/ca.crt
cert /etc/openvpn/keys/openvpn-client.crt
key  /etc/openvpn/keys/openvpn-client.key

verb           3
status-version 2
log-append  /var/log/openvpn.log

syslog
mute 10

# Enable Compression
comp-lzo

Now, fire up the service on openvpn-client, which will create the tunnel:

# chkconfig openvpn on
# service openvpn start

On the client, you should see that a new virtual tun interface has been created, tun0:

# ip addr show tun0
4: tun0: -POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP- mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 100
    link/[65534] 
    inet 172.16.130.6 peer 172.16.130.5/32 scope global tun0

So, we've established a connection to the VPN server, which is great. That's the magic part, it makes the systems in the cloud only one hop away through the virtual network:

# traceroute 172.16.130.1
traceroute to 172.16.130.1 (172.16.130.1), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  172.16.130.1 (172.16.130.1)  110.496 ms  111.075 ms  111.100 ms

Now, you'll also notice that I have a route, automagically added by the openvpn software that makes the cloud LAN, local (in a sense). In this example, the cloud systems have LAN addresses of 10.19.237.80/28 and I have a route for that network now, through my new tunnel:

# route -n | grep ^10
10.19.237.80    172.16.130.5    255.255.255.240 UG    0      0        0 tun0

So, in theory, I should be able to ping the eth0 interface of my cloud instance, which you can see below:

# ping 10.19.237.82
PING 10.19.237.82 (10.19.237.82) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.19.237.82: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=202 ms
64 bytes from 10.19.237.82: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=131 ms

And of course I can now access that instance directly from my LAN. No need to hit the big bad internet:

ssh -l root -i ~/.ssh/yoursshkey root@10.19.237.82 -p 22000

That's a beautiful thing! Now, I can turn off (or revoke) the ACL that allows ssh access into port 22000 from my security group:

ec2-revoke VPC -Ptcp -p22000

We're still not done yet, we need to turn on packet forwarding on both openpvn-server and openvpn-client. Simply do this on both systems:

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Now, you're going to need to add a route, on your office gateway system. That route is going to tell all the hosts on your network that if they want to get to the AWS LAN network, they need to go through the openvpn-client system. In my case, it's something like:

# ip route add 10.19.237.80/28 via 172.20.0.9

That's because my gateway is a Linux box but all the DSL/Cable routers have the ability to add routes. Just figure out how to do that on your gateway router.

In addition, you're going to need to add routes to each instance in AWS that tells each system how to get to your office LAN. So in my case I have two instances currently running in my VPC security group. The openvpn-server and a subversion server, called svn. So, I log into the svn server and run:

# ip route add 172.16.130.0/24 via 10.19.237.82

Where 10.19.237.82 is the eth0 IP of my openvpn-server system. So now, I can ping my SVN server from my LAN. Alternatively, you could make your office the default route for all the AWS systems which may make sense in some situations.

That's pretty much scratching the surface here..

Now, what's really pretty cool about this setup, is that if you had say a San Francisco office, you could build out another openvpn-client system in SF and route packets between sites, securely through your cloud instances. Not only that but you could just make the cloud, your default route for both office networks and install Snort or whatever IDS you want and maybe a firewall distro on an instance if you want.. how about a PBX like trixbox? Total control over your networks. This concept really offers overwhelming possibilities. An office SMB share mounted on an EBS drive for example - basically you can move your IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Another possibility is that because OpenVPN supports HTTP and SOCKS proxies, you could tunnel a network from your office, through the HTTP proxy and have the public AWS systems be local to your LAN there by making those systems totally 'greenside', this is if you worked for say, some telecommunications giant with a tightly controlled internal network, for example.

If you were to run OpenVPN in bridge mode (using the tap interface) you could even route broadcast traffic and even IPX and non-IP packets to the other locations. And, there's more, traffic shaping isn't only possible it's built in to OpenVPN. In addition, if you loose your IP on the DSL office line and re-up to your Internet provider, the tunnel is re-established so quickly that none of your SSH sessions will die, they'll simply freeze up for some seconds while one of the partners gets a new IP, and then continue working normally.

Ok, also now that I've showed you how to do all this by hand, there are some dedicated firewall/gateway distro's, like Shorewall that I haven't used but that have built in support for OpenVPN, so the client config and routing stuff are done in a WebGUI. Might be a fun experiment at some point.

Then of course you can have your telecommuters or road warriors connect to OpenVPN from the road and have access to the corporate network. Again, the possibilities are overwhelming.

I'll have to do a post on getting Snort going, that would be really fun. As usual, post questions and or problems, thanks for stopping by!

Using the Mighty IPTables to Prevent an HTTP(s) DoS Attack

Using this procedure, the kernel netfilter will deny (and log to /var/log/messages) packets to ports 80,443 from hosts that exceed 20 requests in 5 seconds. IPTables will then DROP packets for 5 seconds, then allow them back to. This has the benefit of not blocking legitimate traffic, only slowing it to a reasonable amount.
So, let's get started, install iptables:

yum -y install iptables

IPTables, by default only timestamps and tracks up to 20 connections. Which isn't very many. This means that by default if you use --hitcount 21 you'll error out. You can control the limit by updating /etc/modprob.d/modprobe.conf:

options ipt_recent ip_pkt_list_tot=50

Then, reload the ipt_recent kernel module:

rmmod ipt_recent
modprobe ipt_recent

Next, create the script that will add the rules (vi /tmp/limit.sh):

# Create a LOGDROP chain to log and drop packets
iptables -N LOGDROP
iptables -A LOGDROP -j LOG
iptables -A LOGDROP -j DROP

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name "limit-http" --rsource
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 5 --hitcount 20 --name "limit-http" --rsource -j LOGDROP
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name "limit-https" --rsource
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 5 --hitcount 20 --name "limit-https" --rsource -j LOGDROP
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

Execute that script:

sh /tmp/limit.sh

Now, we want these rules to be applied on each reboot, so only do this if you have nothing in /etc/sysconfig/iptables - which most ec2 clients don't even have. If you have stuff in there, just bake the above in. so do (on CentOS/RHEL derivatives):

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

To check, do:

service iptables stop
service iptables start
service iptables status

Helpful NOTES:

You can see what the packet filter is doing, in real time, like this:

watch iptables -nvx -L

Also, you can use apache's benchmarking program, ab to trip the filter for testing purposes, like this:

ab -n 1000 -c 5 http://IP/index.html

Where 1000 is the total number of requests and 5 is the number of concurrent requests.


So, to test it out, point that at your webserver and tail /var/log/messages, and you'll find that you start dropping packets from the client running apache bench.


You're welcome! :)

Running OpenVAS Security Scanner: Ubuntu 10.10

The nessus project is now a for-pay company. I think you can get a free home license but if you want to scan your infrastructure at work, they no likey. A project called OpenVAS is a fork of the Nessus project that's all open source and free.

I want to continually scan some systems and generate reports I can diff to see if any jokers have added services or change rules that expose network services I don't want exposed. So, I'm installing OpenVAS on a VM instance that I'm going to use to scan my infrastructure. I'm not going to use the GUI client because I want this to be scripted. The way OpenVAS works is, you have an OpenVAS server, which you connect to with clients and tell it what to do. So, you could install the software on a system in a data center or EC2 or whatever, then run the client from your desktop and have it do you're bidding.

In this case, my client - is the command line client which is going to run on the same system as the server.

To install on Ubuntu 10.10, simply do:

# Update your distro
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

# Install openvas server and client software + security plugins
apt-get install openvas-server openvas-client \
   openvas-plugins-base openvas-plugins-dfsg

# Update the vuln. database
openvas-nvt-sync

Add a user that you're going to use from the client, to login:

openvas-adduser

Here, you'll add a user/pass combination.

When prompted to add a 'rule' - I allow my user to do everything. The rules allow/disallow scanning of hosts. If you want you can let bob scan 192.168.0.0/24 or whatever. I want my user to scan all, so when prompted, simply enter

default accept

Now, fire up the server. Note that the first time you run, it loads all those checks into memory so it takes a LONG time for the server to actually start.

/etc/init.d/openvas-server start

Now, you can start scanning. Create a file with IP's and/or hostnames that your client will feed to the server to scan. Something like this:

192.168.1.5
www.mydomain.com
dns.mydomain.com
10.1.19.0/24

etc.


The server listens on port: 9390 by default so you'll want to tell your client to connect there. Once you have the file created, you can kick off your scan like this:

OpenVAS-Client -q 127.0.0.1 9390 admin scanme.txt -T html \
     ~/Desktop/openvas-output-`date`.html 

You'll be prompted to accept the SSL certificate, go ahead, it's automagically created by the pkg when it's installed. Then, open that file in a browser when it's done and start going through it. Be warned, scanning is very hostile so you should really only scan your own systems.. and those of your enemies.

Deploying a Set of HAProxy Servers as EC2 Instances

If you want high availability in EC2, one option is to deploy a couple of load balancers in front of a bunch of application servers, all in the same security group. I really like HAProxy. It's fast, and very configurable. I remember we got a couple of F5's back in the day and I wanna say that was like 60k for two. Which is a lot if you're a startup. Not that you can deploy them in EC2 but it's just kinda cool how all this stuff trickles on down to the cloud.

I think it makes complete sense. Anyway, here's how I did it recently. Since you can't get a floater IP in EC2, or more than one IP per instance, I setup DNS round robin for the proxy addresses. So, in this case we have two dedicated ec2 instances, running CentOS. Each one will have haproxy installed and configured. So, once you get them spun up, you'll want to get an elastic IP for each, then configure DNS to point to both.

www.domain.com { 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5 }

Each IP is the public address of each of your HAProxy servers. To test, you can just setup a dummy hostname, like test.domain.com pointing to those IP's and do the cut over when you're sure you're happy with the setup.

So, next, login to each instance and run:

yum -y install haproxy

HAProxy supports two modes, tcp and http. You can't do SSL in http mode so, this deployment was in tcp mode. HTTP mode has some really cool and interesting features with HAProxy's recent acl additions. Google around for HAProxy and ACL. You can get super granular on which app server handles what kind of traffic to include or where to direct certain kinds of request.. for example: go here for SSL, here for dynamic content and here for static HTML and images. It's really pretty cool and new in 1.3, I think. Maybe I'll try all that out someday.

Next, edit /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg and enter the following:

# HA Proxy Configuration
defaults
balance roundrobin

global
    chroot      /var/lib/haproxy
    pidfile     /var/run/haproxy.pid
    maxconn     20000
    user        haproxy
    group       haproxy
    daemon

defaults
    mode        tcp
    log         127.0.0.1       local0
    log         127.0.0.1       local1 notice
    option      dontlognull
    option      redispatch
    timeout connect 2000 # default 2 second time out if a backend is not found
    timeout client 300000
    timeout server 300000
    maxconn     60000
    retries     3

# This is what we're listening on.
frontend haproxy *:443
   mode tcp
   maxconn 20480
   default_backend app_servers

# This is who we send requests to
backend app_servers
   mode tcp
   server app1 10.19.127.30:443
   server app2 10.19.127.49:443
   server app3 10.19.127.21:443
   server app4 10.19.127.19:443

So, in this example we have 4 app servers. I feel like it's so simple and self explanatory that you can just get in there and edit and test it out. Both HAProxy instances have the exact same configuration file - assuming you've deployed everything to the same security group.

The only other thing i did was to add a snippit to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf to log all HAProxy's messages via syslog. That's here /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf:

source s_udp {
       udp(ip(127.0.0.1) port(514));
};
destination d_haproxy { file("/var/log/haproxy"); };
filter f_local0 { facility(local0); };
log { source(s_udp); filter(f_local0); destination(d_haproxy); };

Now, just fire it all up:

service haproxy start
chkconfig haproxy on
service syslog-ng restart

HAProxy has a stats interface which I haven't enabled here. If I do, I'll edit the above with the stat's info config.