Simulating Syslog Data

After creating a syslog pipeline, it is convenient to be able to test that data is being received and parsed as expected. You can use the logger utility (from the util-linux package) using “-n” to specify the target server, -P to specify the target port, either -d for udp or -T for tcp, -i with the process name, -p with the log priority, and the message content in quotes.

As an example, this command sends a sample log record to the logstash server. If the pipeline is working properly, the document will appear in ElasticSearch.

logger -n logstash.example.com -P 5101 -d -i ljrtest -p user.notice '<date=2022-06-22 time=09:09:28 devname="fcd01" \
      devid="AB123DEF45601874" eventtime=1655914168555429048 tz="-0700" logid="0001000014" type="traffic" subtype="local" \ 
      level="notice" vd="EXAMPLE-CORP" srcip=10.4.5.10 srcport=56317 srcintf="VLAN1" srcintfrole="wan" dstip=10.2.3.212 \ 
      dstport=61234 dstintf="EXAMPLE-CORP" dstintfrole="undefined" srccountry="United States" dstcountry="United States" sessionid=3322792 \ 
      proto=6 action="deny" policyid=0 policytype="local-in-policy" service="tcp/61234" trandisp="noop" app="tcp/61234" duration=0 \ 
      sentbyte=0 rcvdbyte=0 sentpkt=0 rcvdpkt=0'

Quick Docker Test

I’m building a quick image to test permissions to a folder structure for a friend … so I’m making a quick note about how I’m building this test image so I don’t have to keep re-typing it all.

FROM python:3.7-slim

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl --no-install-recommends

RUN mkdir -p /srv/ljr/test

# Create service account
RUN useradd --comment "my service account" -u 30001 -g 30001 --shell /sbin/nologin --no-create-home webuser
# Copy a bunch of stuff various places under /srv
# Set ownership on /srv folder tree
RUN chown -R 30001:30001 /srv

USER 30001:30001
ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash", "/entrypoint.sh"]

build the image

docker build -t “ljr:latest” .

Run a transient container that is deleted on exit

docker run –rm -it –entrypoint “/bin/bash” ljr

ElasticSearch – Deleting Documents by Criterion

We have an index that was created without a lifecycle policy — and it’s taking up about 300GB of our 1.5T on the dev server. I don’t want to delete it — mostly because I don’t know why it’s there. But cleaning up old data seemed like a

POST /metricbeat_kafka-/_delete_by_query
{
  "query": {
    "range" : {
        "@timestamp" : {
            "lte" : "2021-02-04T01:47:44.880Z"
        }
    }
  }
}

ElasticSearch Search API – Script Fields

I’ve been playing around with script fields to manipulate data returned by ElasticSearch queries. As an example, data where there are a few nested objects with values that need to be multiplied together:

{
	"order": {
		"item1": {
			"cost": 31.55,
			"count": 111
		},
		"item2": {
			"cost": 62.55,
			"count": 222
		},
		"item3": {
			"cost": 93.55,
			"count": 333
		}
	}
}

And to retrieve records and multiply cost by count:

{
  "query"  : { "match_all" : {} },
	"_source": ["order.item*.item", "order.item*.count", "order.item*.cost"],
  "script_fields" : {
    "total_cost_1" : {
      "script" : 
      {
        "lang": "painless",
        "source": "return doc['order.item1.cost'].value * doc['order.item1.count'].value;"
      }
    },
    "total_cost_2" : {
      "script" : 
      {
        "lang": "painless",
        "source": "return doc['order.item2.cost'].value * doc['order.item2.count'].value;"
      }
    },
    "total_cost_3" : {
      "script" : 
      {
        "lang": "painless",
        "source": "return doc['order.item3.cost'].value * doc['order.item3.count'].value;"
      }
    }    
  }
}

Unfortunately, I cannot find any way to iterate across an arbitrary number of item# objects nested in the order object. So, for now, I think the data manipulation will be done in the program using the API to retrieve data. Still, it was good to learn how to address values in the doc record.

Barr, Trump, and Defense Strategy

Watching the recordings of Barr’s testimony to the January 6th Select Committee I couldn’t help but think “Barr is an attorney” — I’d encountered him as the General Counsel of the company when I worked at GTE. I knew him as our attorney that led an effort to deregulate the telephone industry — but a bit of research let me to understand he was also an attorney who has been involved in a major political deal-e-o before (the Iran-Contras affair).

So when I hear Barr saying Trump was ‘detached from reality’ and that his election conspiracy theory was “silly” and “nonsense” … I hear someone setting up a defense strategy for Trump: the Tucker Carlson defense — no reasonable person would have believed these statements to be true. “I didn’t know  wasn’t true” is not considered a valid defense when you’ve been told by dozens of well-informed people — willful ignorance doesn’t remove culpability. Now, I don’t know that Trump will open the door Barr constructed. Detached from reality isn’t a good slogan for campaigning. And going the Carlson route would mean admitting not only that he lost in a completely fair election but also that he continued to bilk his supporters for millions of dollars by promoting his claim to the contrary.

NGINX Auth Proxy

This example uses Kerberos for SSO authentication using Docker-ized NGINX. To instantiate the sandbox container, I am mapping the conf.d folder into the container and publishing ports 80 and 443

docker run -dit --name authproxy -v /usr/nginx/conf.d:/etc/nginx/conf.d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -d centos:latest

Shell into the container, install Kerberos, and configure it to use your domain (in this example, it is my home domain.

docker exec -it authproxy bash

# Fix the repos – this is a docker thing, evidently …
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*
sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*
# And update everything just because
dnf update
# Install required stuff
dnf install vim wget git gcc make pcre-devel zlib-devel krb5-devel

Install NGINX from source and include the spnego-http-auth-nginx-module module

wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.21.6.tar.gz
gunzip nginx-1.21.6.tar.gz
tar vxf nginx-1.21.6.tar
cd nginx-1.21.6/
git clone https://github.com/stnoonan/spnego-http-auth-nginx-module.git
dnf install gcc make pcre-devel zlib-devel krb5-devel
./configure --add-module=spnego-http-auth-nginx-module
make
make install

Configure Kerberos on the server to use your domain:

root@aadac0aa21d5:/# cat /etc/krb5.conf
includedir /etc/krb5.conf.d/
[logging]
default = FILE:/var/log/krb5libs.log
kdc = FILE:/var/log/krb5kdc.log
admin_server = FILE:/var/log/kadmind.log
[libdefaults]
dns_lookup_realm = false
ticket_lifetime = 24h
renew_lifetime = 7d
forwardable = true
rdns = false
default_realm = EXAMPLE.COM
# allow_weak_crypto = true
# default_tgs_enctypes = arcfour-hmac-md5 des-cbc-crc des-cbc-md5
# default_tkt_enctypes = arcfour-hmac-md5 des-cbc-crc des-cbc-md5
default_ccache_name = KEYRING:persistent:%{uid}
[realms]
EXAMPLE.COM= {
   kdc = DC01.EXAMPLE.COM
   admin_server = DC01.EXAMPLE.COM
}

Create a service account in AD & obtain a keytab file:

ktpass /out nginx.keytab /princ HTTP/docker.example.com@example.com -SetUPN /mapuser nginx /crypto AES256-SHA1 /ptype KRB5_NT_PRINCIPAL /pass Th2s1sth3Pa=s -SetPass /target dc01.example.com

Transfer the keytab file to the NGINX server. Add the following to the server{} section or location{} section to require authentication:

auth_gss on;
auth_gss_keytab /path/to/nginx/conf/nginx.keytab;
auth_gss_delegate_credentials on;

You will also need to insert header information into the nginx config:

proxy_pass http://www.example.com/authtest/;
proxy_set_header Host "www.example.com"; # I need this to match the host header on my server, usually can use data from $host
proxy_set_header X-Original-URI $request_uri; # Forward along request URI
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; # pass on real client's IP
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For "LJRAuthPrxyTest";
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Authorization $http_authorization;
proxy_pass_header Authorization;
proxy_set_header X-WEBAUTH-USER $remote_user;
proxy_read_timeout 900;

Run NGINX: /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

In and of itself, this is the equivalent of requiring authentication – any user – to access a site. The trick with an auth proxy is that the server must trust the header data you inserted – in this case, I have custom PHP code that looks for X-ForwardedFor to be “LJRAuthPrxyTest” and, if it sees that string, reads X-WEBAUTH-USER for the user’s logon name.

In my example, the Apache site is configured to only accept connections from my NGINX instance:

<RequireAll>
     Require ip 10.1.3.5
</RequireAll>

This prevents someone from playing around with header insertion and spoofing authentication.

Some applications allow auth proxying, and the server documentation will provide guidance on what header values need to be used.

 

Making Statistics Work for You

The local newspaper had a poll (in a heavily Republican area) asking if readers support gun control — now they didn’t define “gun control”, so it’s possible some individuals said “no” because they envisioned something unreasonably restrictive or some said “yes” because they think ‘gun control’ includes arming teachers in classrooms or something. Based on the way they elected to bucket the data, there’s no clear “winner”.

But looking at it as just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ — almost 80% of the readers said “yes”

They could break it out by party affiliation and show that only 10% of self-identified Democrats said they don’t support gun control where 28% of self-identified independents and 24% of self-identified Republicans don’t support gun control.

But any of these charts clearly show that a significant majority supports some type of gun control.

Upgrading Logstash

The process to upgrade minor releases of LogStash is quite simple — stop service, drop the binaries in place, and start service. In this case, my upgrade process is slightly complicated by the fact our binaries aren’t installed to the “normal” location from the RPM. I am upgrading from 7.7.0 => 7.17.4

The first step is, obviously, to download the LogStash release you want – in this case, it is 7.17.4 as upgrading across major releases is not supported.

 

cd /tmp
mkdir logstash
mv logstash-7.17.4-x86_64.rpm ./logstash

cd /tmp/logstash
rpm2cpio logstash-7.17.4-x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

systemctl stop logstash
mv /opt/elk/logstash /opt/elk/logstash-7.7.0
mv /tmp/logstash/usr/share/logstash /opt/elk/
mkdir /var/log/logstash
mkdir /var/lib/logstash

mv /tmp/logstash/etc/logstash /etc/logstash
cd /etc/logstash
mkdir rpmnew
mv jvm.options ./rpmnew/
mv log* ./rpmnew/
mv pipelines.yml ./rpmnew/
mv startup.options ./rpmnew/
cp -r /opt/elk/logstash-7.7.0/config/* ./

ln -s /opt/elk/logstash /usr/share/logstash
ln -s /etc/logstash /opt/elk/logstash/config

chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /opt/elk/logstash
chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/log/logstash
chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/lib/logstash
chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /etc/logstash

systemctl start logstash
systemctl status logstash
/opt/elk/logstash/bin/logstash --version