The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘*nix-tools’ Category

Using a Mac for prepping the SD-card for an ODROID-C1+

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/12

Some notes based on The woods and trees of OpenSuSE on single-board computers – image abbreviations – and getting it installed using OS X « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.

I needed to get Ubuntu on an ODROID-C1+ (as it looks like nobody is maintaining a current OpenSuSE for it).

Installing the ODROID-C1+ image using OS X

Download image

Download either of these (note that “minimal” is different from “mate minimal”; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOYWx_YToh8) from de.eu.odroid.in/ubuntu_16.04lts:

Put image on SD card

I installed on a 8 gigabyte SD card that revealed itself as /dev/disk1 using this diskutil command (via osx – List all devices connected, lsblk for Mac OS X – Ask Different [WayBack])

diskutil list

So this wrote the image to SD card in a sudo su - prompt:

targetDevice="disk1"
unxz --keep ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img.xz; \
diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img; \
sync; \
diskutil list; \
diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

Boot and first time steps on Odroid

Use the default user and password that [WayBackODROID Forum • View topic – Ubuntu Minimal User / Password mentions:

odroid login: root
Password: odroid

From there, create a new user and add it to the sudo group (I used visudo to check the correct group for sudoers) :

adduser jeroenp
addgroup jeroenp sudo

And then hook it up to the network and get the IP address:

ifconfig

Now you can ssh into the odroid with user jeroenp and the password assigned to it. You can also perform a sudo su - to get to root level.

ssh and configure a few things

First of all, install etckeeper as it’s a life saver:

apt-get install etckeeper

This will install some other packages, but that’s OK; it will end suggesting you to enter email address, name and perform an initial commit:

Initialized empty Git repository in /etc/.git/

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got 'root@odroid.(none)')
etckeeper commit failed; run it by hand

Do that:

cd /etc
git config --global user.email "example@example.org"
git config --global user.name "Example User"
git commit -m "initial commit"

Now perform these steps:

  1. Change the root password
  2. Disable etckeeper daily autocommits
  3. Change the hostname
  4. Update/Upgrade/Distribution-upgrade
  5. Fix the cursor in console mode

Change root password:

# sudo su -
# passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

Disable etckeeper daily autocommits involves one line in /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf:

-#AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1
+AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1

Change the hostname; assuming your new host name is newHostName.

  1. edit /etc/hosts and replace the old hostname with newHostName
  2. Perform these commands:
    hostnamectl set-hostname newHostName
    exec bash
    hostname -f

Both the command prompt and the hostname output should show newHostName.

Update/Upgrade:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Fix the cursor in console mode:

Somehow the Odroid C1+ does not support a blinking hardware text cursor.

 

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, etckeeper, Hardware Development, Linux, Odroid, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed, Ubuntu | Leave a Comment »

openSUSE – Review of the week 2018/03 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*) – be sure to review your openssh config!

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/20

Before upgrading Tumbleweed this week, you need to review your openssh config.

This is not mentioned in Review of the week 2018/03 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*), but very important.

So be sure to read these before upgrading:

If you forget to review /etc/ssh/sshd_config, you get this in journalctl if you have specified your own MACs for instance when hardening according to [WayBack including rimemd160] Secure Secure Shell:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

mtr does ping and traceroute in one go – bold/red lines are for non-responding hosts

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/19

I learned about mtr via [WayBackBufferbloat Demystified – Andrew Clunis which I found via  [WayBack] Älterer Artikel, der Bufferbload und https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel erklärt. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

mtr is cool:

mtr combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

Running it, I saw occasional bold lines that were not mentioned in the README, but after a search in the repo I found it to be in documented NEWS:

Draw names in red (GTK) or bold (Curses) if host doesn’t respond.

Some times from here across to California back when I still had ADSL:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Using hardware security tokens cross-platform is only slightly more complicat…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/17

Thanks for the excellent comment explaining how to use hardware tokens as a comment to [WayBack] Using hardware security tokens cross-platform is only slightly more complicated than piloting a Space Shuttle. ##sarcasm – Jan Wildeboer – Google+

Jan Wildeboer:

+Jeroen Wiert Pluimers OK. Let’s look a bit at how this works. There are several competing standards/ways to use a security token. Typically you’ll decide between the two most used ones. As a CCID device AKA SmartCard with OpenSC or using gpg-agent. And that’s an either/or question. Some of the security tokens can only work with gpg-agent, some can do both (but not at the same time) and some are only useful as CCID style (e.g. the Nitrokey HSM).

OK. So now we look at platforms. CCID using OpenSC mostly works everywhere, but you might need to install some additional software depending on your OS. Older versions of MacOS X were notoriously bad, since (High) Sierra it has become better.

On Linux it again really depends. The gnome-keyring-agent that is active in a Gnome session really messes everything up, so better deactivate that. Which is not really trivial. But you have to have a socket for ssh-agent to pick up the key, so some stuff goes to your .bash.rc and you have to make some changes to Gnome config.

If you want to use a Yubikey for 2FA, note that it cannot do TOTP (Time based One Time Password) which Amazon wants for AWS auth. So you need another helper app on your computer.

Here’s some articles that explain it in detail:

The middle two links are actually part of the series [WayBack] Yubikey All The Things | EngineerBetter | More than Cloud Foundry specialists which has a third post [WayBack] Yubikeys for Static Secrets | EngineerBetter | More than Cloud Foundry specialists

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

du -h -c -s *  — shows human readable total sizes of all subdirectories and a overall total

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/15

Inspired by [WayBacklinux command line: du — how to make it show only total for each directories – Stack Overflow

du -h -s -c *

This displays the human readable (-h) total (-s) with a grand total (-c) of all subdirectories (*).

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User | Leave a Comment »

htop – an interactive process viewer for Unix

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/25

Great tool: [WayBackhtop – an interactive process viewer for Unix because it’s both interactive and supports a wide range of OSes: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X.

Thanks to Warren Postma who suggested it in his comment at [WayBack18 Useful Commands to Get Hardware Information on Linux – Linuxslaves.

Note that on OS X you get this warning after brew install htop :

htop requires root privileges to correctly display all running processes,
so you will need to run `sudo htop`.
You should be certain that you trust any software you grant root privileges.

On Linux you don’t get this message as there you have the /proc file system providing enough information as explained at [WayBackosx – Why does htop on Mac OS X require root privileges to see data for all processes, but on Linux it runs without root – Super User.

A workaround (involving the setuid bit) is at [WayBackRunning htop on Mac OS X needs root. Why?! | Blog | JoeNyland.me or by running visudo ensuring you don’t need a password for it at [WayBackosx – htop isn’t returning CPU or memory usage!? – Super User

–jeroen

 

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 10.12 Sierra, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Fixing Invalid HELO’s – major.io

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/08

for postfix and sendmail: [WayBackFixing Invalid HELO’s – major.io

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, postfix, Power User, sendmail | Leave a Comment »

iptables debugging « \1

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/28

Using the TRACE target: [WayBackiptables debugging « \1 via [WayBack] iptables Debugging using the TRACE chain – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

Docs:

TRACE
This target marks packes so that the kernel will log every rule which match the packets as those traverse the tables, chains,
rules. (The ipt_LOG or ip6t_LOG module is required for the logging.) The packets are logged with the string prefix: “TRACE:
tablename:chainname:type:rulenum ” where type can be “rule” for plain rule, “return” for implicit rule at the end of a user
defined chain and “policy” for the policy of the built in chains.
It can only be used in the raw table.

Way more details in the linked article.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Firewall, Infrastructure, iptables, Power User | Leave a Comment »

TLS tests for your mail server

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/09

Need to do some more research on this to ensure I didn’t goof up:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, postfix, Power User, Security, sendmail, SMTP | Leave a Comment »

MX Backup – Postfix Email Server | samhobbs.co.uk

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/09

Interesting as it has steps for both OpenSuSE and Debian each well suited for running on a Raspberry Pi.

[WayBackMX Backup – Postfix Email Server | samhobbs.co.uk

It seems postfix is a lot easier to configure than sendmail so I already like it.

First I need to read a bit more in Postfix greylisting.

I’ll need to catch up on Sam’s other parts with the postfix tag as well:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Debian, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Raspbian, sendmail, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | Leave a Comment »