Category: System Administration

List Extensions Within Folder

It didn’t occur to me that Apache serves everything under a folder and the .git folder may well be under a folder (you can have your project up a level so there’s a single folder at the root of the project & that folder is DocumentRoot for the web site). Without knowing specific file names, you cannot get anything since directory browsing is disabled. But git has a well-known structure so browsing to /.git/index or really scary for someone who stuffs their password in the repo URL /.git/config is there and Apache happily serves it unless you’ve provided instructions otherwise.

A coworker brought up the intriguing idea of, instead of blocking the .git folder so things subordinate to .git are never served, having a specific list of known good extensions the web server was willing to serve. Which … ironically was one of the things I really didn’t like about IIS. Kind of like the extra frustration of driving behind someone who is going the speed limit. Frustrating because I want to go faster, extra frustrating because they aren’t actually wrong.

But configuring a list of good-to-serve extensions means you’ve got to get a handle on what extensions are on your server in the first place. This command provides a list of extensions and a count per extension (so you can easily identify one-offs that may not be needed):

find /path/to/search/ -type f | perl -ne 'print $1 if m/\.([^.\/]+)$/' | sort | uniq -c

 

Tar Excluding Git Folders

You can, of course, use –exclude and avoid adding the .git folders to your tar archive, but I discovered a really cool option that excludes the folders created by a whole host of version control systems:

--exclude-vcs

Which, as of version 1.32, means excluding CVS, RCS, SCCS, git, SVN, Arch, Bazaar, Mercurial, and Darcs as follows:

  • CVS/ — recursive
  • RCS/ — recursive
  • SCCS/ — recursive
  • .git/ — recursive
  • .gitignore
  • .gitmodules
  • .gitattributes
  • .cvsignore
  • .svn/ — recursive
  • .arch-ids/ — recursive
  • {arch}/ — recursive
  • =RELEASE-ID
  • =meta-update
  • =update
  • .bzr
  • .bzrignore
  • .bzrtags
  • .hg
  • .hgignore
  • .hgrags
  • _darcs

Cyberark — Error Listing Accounts

I was getting an odd error from my attempt to list accounts in Cyberark — “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. Searching the Internet yielded a lot of issues that weren’t my problem (ampersands in account names in an older version, issues with SSL {and, seriously, someone says disable SSL on the connection they use to retrieve passwords!?! And not just random someone, but RAND?!?}). My issue turned out to be that I was copy/pasting code and used requests.post instead of requests.get — attempting to POST to a GET URL generates this error too.

DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTPS connection (1): cyberark.example.com:443
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:https://cyberark.example.com:443 “POST /PasswordVault/API/auth/Cyberark/Logon HTTP/1.1” 200 182
Before request, header is {‘Content-Type’: ‘application/json’, ‘Authorization’: ‘5TQz5WVjYm5tMjBh5C00M5YyLT50MjYt5Tc2Y5I2ZDI5…AwMDA5MDA7’}
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTPS connection (1): cyberark.example.com:443
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:https://cyberark.example.com:443 “POST /PasswordVault/api/Accounts?search=sample_account&searchType=contains HTTP/1.1” 500 97
{“ErrorCode”:”CAWS00001E”,”ErrorMessage”:”Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”} 500 Internal Server Error

PrivateTmp Strangeness — apachectl v/s systemctl

This is a very strange problem — we had a web server upgraded recently. We use “sudo apachectl start” to bring up the server since the server is maintained by a dedicated Unix support team, and the site worked fine. Until … Sunday morning after the log rotation. Then Box Spout was unable to access the XML data for an Excel file to compress it. Lots of errors:

 

[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137728 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: ZipArchive::close(): Zlib error: stream error in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 199, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137785 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fopen(/tmp/xlsx5f5f934699dcd9.17695276.zip): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 213, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137803 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: stream_copy_to_stream() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 214, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137814 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 215, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.138360 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Box\\Spout\\Common\\Exception\\IOException’ with message ‘Cannot perform I/O operation outside of the base folder: /tmp’ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php:130\nStack trace:\n#0 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(82): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->throwIfOperationNotInBaseFolder(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#1 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(369): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->deleteFile(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#2 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Internal/Workbook.php(134): Box\\Spout\\Writer\\XLSX\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->zipRootFolderAndCopyToStream(Resource id #26)\n#3 /path/to/site/ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php on line 130, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139468 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: ZipArchive::close(): Zlib error: stream error in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 199, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139504 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fopen(/tmp/xlsx5f5f934699dcd9.17695276.zip): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 213, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139515 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: stream_copy_to_stream() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 214, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139533 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 215, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139599 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Box\\Spout\\Common\\Exception\\IOException’ with message ‘Cannot perform I/O operation outside of the base folder: /tmp’ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php:130\nStack trace:\n#0 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(82): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->throwIfOperationNotInBaseFolder(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#1 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(369): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->deleteFile(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#2 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Internal/Workbook.php(134): Box\\Spout\\Writer\\XLSX\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->zipRootFolderAndCopyToStream(Resource id #26)\n#3 /path/to/site in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php on line 130, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php

 

The postupdate script is “systemctl reload httpd.service” — so not exactly the same thing we used to launch the service originally. But I’ve never seen differing behavior between apachectl and systemctl started HTTPD instances. Quick/dirty solution is to disable PrivateTmp, but I’m hoping to be able to isolate why exactly the postupdate script appears to break the service’s access to the private tmp space.

30 November 2020 addendum — In discussing the issue with RedHat, they suggested using either

/sbin/killall -HUP httpd

or

/bin/systemctl restart httpd.service > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true

Doing this has allowed continual access to the Private Tmp space after log rotation. Woohoo! Not sure why the default configuration that came from the Apache httpd package didn’t work (i.e. it’s not like we built some funky weird log rotation script). But success is good enough for me.

Listing Modules In Dynamically Linked Shared Object Libraries

We had to rebuild a server over the weekend — it’s a lot harder to get Apache and PHP set up when you don’t have root access to just install things from the yum repository. And, unlike the servers where I built httpd and php from source … we basically relayed requests to the Unix admin to have packages installed. One of the confusions during the whole process was that we didn’t know what to use as the module name for PHP to load in the httpd.conf file. The line from our old server (LoadModule php5_module /etc/httpd/modules/libphp5.so) produced an error that there was no such thing to load.

When a library fails to load with some error, I know to use ldd … but I didn’t know there was a way to list out the modules in a library. Fortunately, one of my coworkers had already run nm and listed out the modules — nm -D –defined-only sharedLibraryFile | grep module — and we were able to identify that the libphp5.so that we had wasn’t anything like the one on the old server. By listing the modules for each of the shared object libraries installed by the php package, we got the proper module name for httpd.conf

Testing A New Web Server Without DNS Changes

When migrating to a new server, it’s good to validate site functionality before redirecting users to the new host. i.e. I have anya.rushworth.us set up in the httpd config on both server1 and server2. DNS currently points traffic to server1, but I need to test the site on server2.

Approach #1 – With administrative access to the host

Edit your hosts file – open an administrative command prompt

Edit %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add lines with the IP address WHITESPACE and the hostname(s). E.G.
127.0.0.1 lisatest lisatest.rushworth.us lisatest2 lisatest2.rushworth.us
10.1.2.3 otherhost otherhost.rushworth.us
10.2.3.4 anya anya.rushworth.us

Clear your DNS cache (ipconfig /flushdns) and navigate to the URL. You’ll be directed the IP address from your hosts file instead of the DNS registered address.

Approach #2 – No admin access

Install ModHeader in your Chrome browser and click the extension to modify the headers or install ModHeader in your Firefox browser. Click on the extension icon to set a header value.

Add a “Host” header with the value of the virtual host name you need to test

Navigate to the hostname of the new server – https://server2.rushworth.us – but the web server will receive the Host header you configured in ModHeader and serve the web site based on that host header.

 

Android Outlook Message Sending Failure

I’ve been getting a strange error when trying to send pictures within e-mail messages from my Android phone. I say a strange error because there’s literally one entry that comes back when you search for MessageDeliveryFailedException f5f0 — and no pointer at all as to what might have gone wrong. Just a non-delivery report popping into the Inbox on my phone:

     Technical details
     MessageDeliveryFailedException: Could not deliver the message [len=70, data=50005…C090005] sent at 8/25/2020 10:06:28 PM.Failure code: f5f0

I’ve got a reverse proxy with an application firewall and suspected that was the source of my problems. Mostly because errors caused within the Microsoft Exchange system are generally easy to find online. An oddball error is going to come from an oddball source. And I was right — my application proxy log shows an error each time I attempt to send one of the failed messages.

Edited /etc/httpd/conf.d/mod_security.conf and upped the SecRequestBodyNoFilesLimit. Once Apache HTTPD was restarted, I was able to send my messages without problem.

Discourse Censored Words List

It took an unexpectedly long time to find the censored word list in Discourse. I finally resorted to searching the PRs until I located one where the censored word list was replaced with ‘watched words’ … although there wasn’t any readily apparent watched word list in the configuration either. I was able to locate the meta post regarding the watched word implemented under that PR. It’s hiding under logs?! Under each action (block, censor, require approval, flag), there is a “show words” checkbox that displays the configured words.

Discourse in Docker on Fedora 32

I had to make a few tweaks in order to run the Discourse base Docker image. First, I got the following very clear error:

discourse docker this version of runc doesn't work on cgroups v2: unknown

I had to switch from cgroupv2 to cgroup

grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0"

At which point I was at least able to run through the configuration. This yielded an access denied error attempting to create /shared/postgres:

Configuration file at updated successfully!

Updates successful. Rebuilding in 5 seconds.
Building app
Ensuring launcher is up to date
Fetching origin
Launcher is up-to-date
cd /pups && git pull && /pups/bin/pups --stdin
Already up to date.
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.664400 #1] INFO -- : Loading --stdin
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.672609 #1] INFO -- : > locale-gen $LANG && update-locale
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.746912 #1] INFO -- : Generating locales (this might take a while)...
Generation complete.

I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.747838 #1] INFO -- : > mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/shared/postgres_run’: Permission denied
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.754890 #1] INFO -- :

FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 21 exit 1>
Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:112:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params "mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run"
d98ee8471413ad77ab27ed3506f12c5c94a2b6902622faf4d88d5dbb51a10f63
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.

Gut was that I encountered an SELinux problem. Turns out I was right. There’s a lot of reading you can do about SELinux and Docker — this, for one — but the quick and simple solution is to run the docker container in privileged mode (note: this may not be a good idea in your specific scenario. understand what privileged mode is and the risks it entails). To do so, edit the launcher script (/var/discourse/launcher in my case) and add  “–privileged” to user_args:

And finally (and this may well be a RTFM thing) — you’ve got to have your public DNS set up & whatever firewall rules to get traffic to the http:// website you are trying to build in order to use the LetsEncrypt SSL cert and configure HTTPS. It uses the file-based verification (i.e. create a file named xyz in /path/to/xyz.whatever on your web server, lets encrypt grabs the file and verifies it exists) which fails quite spectacularly when the Internet at large cannot access your about-to-be-a-discourse-server.