Category: Computers

The OggCamp '19 grid on Saturday

#OggCamp ’19 – A review and Talk Summary

JonTheNiceGuy 2 Comments

Firstly, an apology! It’s more than a week after OggCamp. I’m quite aware that this is very very late for me!

About OggCamp for those who weren’t there!

OggCamp is an annual semi-scheduled Unconference. An Unconference (sometimes known as a “BarCamp”) is where when you arrive on the first day, the schedule (also known as the “Grid”) is blank, with a stack of post-it notes next to the grid. You’re encouraged to put talks on the grid, and keep checking the grid to see what’s up next.

OggCamp is a conference which encourages people to talk about Free Culture (Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware, Creative Commons Content) and other permissively licensed works. It’s also a “Geeky” conference, so games will often appear, they encourage hardware makers to attend, and this year the event also contained “FlawCon”, a security conference, so the event also had a higher-than-usual proportion of Infosec people there!

OggCamp was started by podcasters in 2009, and so there’s usually at least one or two podcasts being recorded. This year, there was a panel session, Linux Outlaws “rode for one last time”, Hacker Public Radio (HPR) were out and about to talk to people at the event, and the podcast I co-host, The Admin Admin Podcast, found a quiet spot to record a show too. Sadly, with the exception of my own podcast recording, I didn’t make it to any of the other recordings I mentioned, as I was attending talks by other people at those times.

Differences, for me, from previous years

Since OggCamp ’10, I was either not at the event (on the years each of my children were born), was running the Talk Scheduling Software; CampFireManager, crewing, or organising the event. This was the first year I managed to get to see talks all day since the very first OggCamp, so that was a big change for me.

This year, Lorna organised the grid, from right in front of it. Except for the welcome and closing talks, I don’t think she left the grid for the entire day both days. In previous years, when we weren’t using CampFireManager, the grid was left unattended, with an occasional drive-by crew member transferring the grid to Joind.In. Talking of which, here’s the Joind.In view of Saturday…

Saturday

A screen shot of the grid from Saturday. Talks marked with a * are talks I attended.

I went to the “Opening Talk” first. This is your usual “Here’s how to get on the Wi-fi, here’s how to participate, here’s the sort of things we want from you” talk, and was run by Dan and Lorna.

Next up, I saw Terrence and Elizabeth Eden talking about OpenBenches.org.

OpenBenches is a project that records what is on the plaques on benches that people arrange for their relatives, sometimes when they die. I’ve been aware of this project for some time, but never contributed. Until now I thought you had to manually type in what was on each plaque (and I think, at the beginning you had to), but NO, they’re now doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to copy the text out of the photos.

The talk discussed the statistics of the project, the technology stack and why the project was started. It was just lovely and really well delivered.

Next I went to see Jeroen talking about Self Publishing.

Jeroen first attended OggCamp last year, giving a talk about Mainframes. This year he was back, talking about running a project with a very small community. Before he got to that though, he wanted to talk about self publishing. He endorsed Lulu for paper printing, AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor to produce the content (PanDoc to convert between formats, if you started with something that isn’t AsciiDoc(tor)) and then Inkscape to create the cover. I asked him if he would suggest anything for eBooks, but he doesn’t create eBooks so couldn’t make any suggestions.

We got a demo of publishing a finished book on Lulu, with a running translation from Jeroen’s native language :) It was a great talk, and very well delivered in 25 minutes!

The front cover of the book Analogue Network Security by Winn Schwartau
The book which inspired my first talk

After that, I gave a late-pitched talk on Time Based Security (TBS). I made a few mistakes here – not least of which was failing to charge my laptop having used it while I was travelling in – so my laptop wouldn’t actually boot… I couldn’t even put up a single slide with my details! Trying to explain the maths around TBS without something to show it is hard, and involves walking around and waving your hands about. I had about 20 people in the room and I felt woefully underprepared.

Because I ended up running much shorter than I expected, I also started to bring in other material from the Analogue Network Security book (pictured above, with post-it-note reference markers for my review) that I’m currently writing a review on. This was my next mistake. So, I mentioned about feedback loops (which about 1/3 of the book is about) and that in the later sections of the book it’s mentioned that this can improve workflow where you need sign-off to complete changes. I mixed up a few terms and it sounded like I was endorsing having changes made without approvals. I tried to pull it back, but not having brought the book with me or having enough experience in vocalising the material… yehr, it was never going to go well. Oh well, I’m hoping to get the review nailed down and then start writing proper presentations on the matter, so I can try and deliver it better next year!

Then… Lunch. Phil, my father-in-law, plus Kian and Cat went to a Chinese Bakery for lunch.

Neil’s talk was my next talk to see; an ad-hoc review of web pages about Repair Day

After I gave my talk, I headed to see Neil give an ad-hoc talk about Repair Day. Neil had a collection of pages he wanted to show off. Neil works with The Restart Project to help people fix their own broken things, not just computers (which is Neil’s area of interest) but also white goods, radios, home electronics, clothes and furniture.

In the audience was Stuart Ward (featured later) who also mentioned about running Repair Cafes. After the talk was complete, Stuart posted a collection of links to the Joind.In page for people to find out more for themselves later.

This was my stand-out talk for Day 1. Anna had come to OggCamp last year, and thought there wasn’t sufficient content for people new to Linux, so she proposed, wrote and delivered a blinder!

I went to Anna’s talk next. I went in, amongst other reasons, because thought I would be going in to support someone “new to Ubuntu”, and came out stunned at how well the talk was delivered!

Someone wise* wrote on twitter a few months ago something like “The point when someone new joins your team is when you get to challenge implied knowledge. If they ask ‘Why’ and you have to say ‘I don’t know’ it means you need to justify why you do something, and perhaps stop doing it.”

* Someone in this case means I can’t find the tweet!

In this case, I wanted to know what being “New” to Ubuntu (my preferred desktop Linux distribution right now) meant to people. Anna’s talk was fantastic, and got right to the heart of what someone new to Linux would feel like. She mentions downloading “things” from the Internet, setting them to be executable by everyone, and then running them. She also mentions running everything under “sudo” or as root, and then went into where she found she should put things. This was sprinkled with a lot of appropriate emojis. It was a really great talk.

As an event organiser, I’m always interested in what other groups are doing!

After Anna’s talk, I went to a round-table session about meetup and event organisers. This was inspired by something new that Lorna had organised this year for the unconference schedule. Next to the board, showing what talks were going to be given, was another board asking for talks to be given. Someone had asked for a talk about organising meet-ups, and so several of the attendees who are organisers of local groups came together to give their views on how to start a group, how to motivate attendees to come to your groups, and how to keep the momentum going.

I’m sorry to say that this was one of the weaker sessions I went to over the weekend. Because no-one had really planned anything in this slot, and none of the people running the session were really comfortable in what they were delivering, it was hard to get any points out of the speakers, and there was very little interaction with the audience. This could have been run as a Q&A session from experienced group organisers, or even a round-table… but never mind!

Towards the end of the session, I stood up and asked about whether any groups like TechNW.UK existed in their regions, and asked people who organised groups like this to put pull requests to get their groups added to that website. I hope to see something come out of that!

After I left this session, I went to look at the exhibition hall and the Kids Track room.

In the exhibition hall was the Merch Stand, the grid, two stands that were apparently about musical things – one of which basically had a guitar and amp constantly being used by a very good musician. After that was Matrix.org, The FSFE, Hacker Public Radio. Along the other wall was a lock picking stand from FlawCon, Manchester Grey Hats and InfoSec Hoppers, a telepresence bot and more!

In the kids room were computers, micro:bits and willing instructors! It looked like a lot of fun for kids, but there wasn’t much room! I had a bit of a chat with a few friends I met along the way, before I went to see my co-host, Al, talking about Wireguard.

Al hadn’t expected to be giving this talk today!

Al has been talking about Wireguard a few times over the past year-or-so, and wanted to give a talk about it. He’d planned to propose it for Sunday, but was encouraged by Lorna to talk about it on Saturday. As a result, he hadn’t had a chance to run though the demo he’d planned to give, and it tripped him up at the end of his demo, when the notes he was following mixed up private and public keys at each end… Aside from that, it was a great talk, and made me want to look at Wireguard again!

My final talk for the day was one I didn’t expect to be in!

Kian is a friend of mine from days of old, and when he walked into the room I’d just been in for Al’s talk… I decided to sit in whatever he was talking about. Kian spoke to a small audience about hardware builds he’d done over the years, and the mishaps that had occurred on them. A very entertaining talk, albeit one that I couldn’t really empathise with, as I’ve not done any hardware builds since I did my Radio Amateur Exam. Hearing the story of the halloween pumpkin with eyes that were supposed to look at you was very funny though, and the videos really completed the story!

After the talks were done, I went to get dinner with my co-hosts from the Admin Admin podcast, and a few of the other attendees. After we were done, I went back to the venue, but couldn’t settle as I’d had a headache coming on.

While I was gearing up to leave, I ended up having a good chat with Ben Grubert, who changed my view somewhat on how to deliver a talk. He said that people, particularly those who are very process focused, struggle to explain something that links back to the goal, for example, explaining how to win at a board game. It made me completely re-think how my talk I wanted to give on Sunday would go, and I left soon after that conversation so I could re-write my talk. I’ve since gone on to share that advice with several other people!

Sunday

A screen shot of the Sunday Schedule. Again, starred talks are the ones I attended.
My hands-down favourite talk from the entire weekend!

At Barcamp Manchester 9, which I attended a few weeks before OggCamp, I missed a talk by Rachel. I saw a picture of one of her slides, and I think I might even have caught the last slide of it… Either way, I was desperately sad that I’d missed the talk, and so encouraged her to attend OggCamp to deliver it. Once I saw she was on the grid, I knew exactly where I was going!

Rachel’s talk did not fail to deliver. I’ve heard from lots and lots of people that they were moved by this talk. Rachel was talking about her life, mostly undiagnosed with Autism, ADHD and depression. She enriched the talk with fun comments, including asking someone to play the part of Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, and then asking him, without having seen the book, why he didn’t know his lines. It sounds quite brutal, but actually, it sets the scene quite well on her life. There’s a fantastic photo of the spectrum of issues related to autism that just keeps having more and more artefacts being added to it.

I’ve heard that she wants to take this talk to more people, businesses and conferences, so I won’t spoil any more of the surprises, but it’s a really powerful talk and I’d strongly encourage anyone to bring Rachel into their environment to hear her talk.

While sitting in Kian’s talk the day before, I missed a session on Ansible Security. I’d made the point, in the morning, of finding Michael from the Matrix Project who gave the talk, and they said that they’d planned to host a “Birds of A Feather” (BOF) session on the Sunday following the feedback from the talk.

I managed to make it to this session, but unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos.

Having been to the meet-up session the day before, I was partially dreading this session, as Ansible is something I’m still very keen on. I needn’t have worried, as Michael managed to control several very chatty people (myself very much included). He managed to engage people but then stop them from going on too much. I wish there was somewhere the people who attended this talk to join to catch up and share knowledge, but… oh well.

Next I went to a talk on the Java Open Street Map editor, JOSM. It was very much a show-and-tell “This is how I use the tool”, but I struggled to follow it, and, sadly left early.

LATE EDIT 2019-11-04: Stuart contacted my on Twitter to apologise for making his talk hard to follow. I wanted to add some extra notes. The problem I had was not with Stuart’s talk per-sey, but more that I couldn’t focus on the subject, and wasn’t sure if I wasn’t in the right head-space for the talk or perhaps I was just hungry. I wanted to become more involved in Open Street Map, and thought I could get a better idea on how to contribute from this talk, but as I said, I wasn’t tracking the content. I walked out more to clear my head than because I didn’t enjoy the talk.

I realised I was getting hungry, so went to Subway for my lunch, and came back refreshed in time to give my second talk.

A screen shot from the talk “Here’s how you win: Secure Scuttlebutt”

This talk was on Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), a decentralised social media platform. There were about 20 people in the audience, and I had some very sensible questions about the project. At the end of the talk, I’d encouraged three people to give it a try, two of whom fell at the first hurdle, and the third persisted in the bar at the end of the day, and has since connected with me on there. Woohoo!

The talk was a stark contrast to the talk I felt I’d not done justice to the day before, and I felt like I’d really nailed this talk. I’m still exceptionally grateful to Ben who’d pointed me in the right direction for the talk layout the night before.

At the end of my talk, I wandered around a bit – I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to see next, so instead I caught up with friends who also weren’t in talks. I bumped into Rachel, and recorded a quick promo for her speaking career and then saw some friends start a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game up in the exhibition area!

The first talk at OggCamp about a technology I’d not seen the likes of before.

I made my way to Roger’s talk about Stream Sheets, an Internet Of Things (IoT) connected tool like Google Sheets. It can read content from MQTT, REST APIs and other similar data sources, tweak and convert them, and then publish them back again. All very interesting, although I’m unlikely to use it somewhere any time soon! I was glad though to popularise it with colleagues when I got back to work on Monday!

My last talk attended of the day – Jamie Tanner

Jamie had talked at OggCamp ’18, and I was very glad to see him back at OggCamp this year – particularly on the main stage!

His talk was about self hosting and the Indie Web movement. He talked about why he self hosts, and what sort of content he “owns” when he can (spoiler: all of it!) He not only stores bookmarks in a public blog, but his Google Fit step counter results, his RSVPs to events and … yes, even blog posts. He talked about why he felt that you too should be part of the Indie Web.

After Jamie’s talk, was the annual rafflecast. A laptop was given away, but not to me (boo!) And then I went to record the Admin Admin Podcast.

From left to right, Jerry, Gary, Al, and then Me (with my red hat from Red Hat). Out of shot is Mr Joe Ressington, who let us use his recording gear. Because he’s lovely.

On the way to Joe’s hotel (where we did this recording), I got us a bit lost, and ended up walking us clear across to the Northern Quarter of Manchester. We then had to walk back to just near Piccadilly station, where his hotel was! Oops. The show has since been released, if you want to hear us talking about OggCamp, and guest host Gary.

We went to the Lass O’Gowry pub for a drink before I had to catch my rail replacement bus home, and catch up on some sleep!

And that was OggCamp ’19. The featured image is of the OggCamp Grid on Saturday.

OggCamp are looking for someone to take over the organising in 2020 (supported by past organisers, like me!) so if you’re interested, please get in touch!

A screen shot of the LHS Podcast Website at 2019-10-16

#Podcast Summary – “LHS Episode 307: #Ansible Deep Dive”

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Recently, I was a guest of the Linux In The Ham Shack Podcast (LHS), talking about Ansible.

The episode I recorded was: LHS Episode #307: Ansible Deep Dive

About a year ago, Bill (NE4RD) and Russ (K5TUX) were talking about Ansible, and I spotted a couple of… maybe misunderstandings, maybe mistakes, or perhaps just where they misspoke about it? Whatever it was at the time, I offered to talk about Ansible, and then scheduling became a major issue. We tried to meet up online a few times over the year and this was the first opportunity I had to actually talk to them.

In this conversation, I talk about what Ansible is and how it works. I go into quite a bit of depth on how you would install packages, make file changes, and then explain how to use, obtain and create Ansible Roles. I also go into Handlers, local and remote Inventories, Ansible Tower and AWX.

When I was talking about Ansible playbooks and tasks, particularly towards the beginning of the podcast, I was looking at the code samples I put together for the Admin Admin Podcast Deep Dive into Ansible. The custom OpenStack modules I referenced in the show were written by my friend and colleague, Nick Cross.

I get a bit of stick for my pronunciation of Inventories, which is … fun :) As usual, I “Um” and “Ah” quite a bit. It becomes exceptional apparent how much work Dave Lee does for me in my usual Admin Admin Podcast!

nobodys perfect nbc GIF by The Good Place from Giphy

Talk Summary – FDE Conference “Automation in an Infrastructure as Code World”

JonTheNiceGuy 1 Comment

Format: Theatre Style room. ~70 attendees.

Slides: Available to view (Firefox/Chrome recommended – press “S” to see the required speaker notes), Code referenced in the slides also available to view.

Video: Not on the day, but I recorded a take of it at home after the event. The delivery on the day was better, but the content is there at least! :)

Slot: Slot 2 Wednesday 14:15-15:00

Notes: FDE is the abbreviation of “Fujitsu Distinguished Engineer”, an internal program at Fujitsu. Each year they hold a conference for all the FDEs to attend. This is my second year as an FDE, and the first where I’m presenting.

This slide deck was massively re-worked, following some excellent feedback at BCMcr9. I then, unusually for me, gave the deck two separate run through sessions with colleagues, and tweaked it following each run.

This deck includes Creative Commons licensed images (which is fairly common for my slide decks), but also, in a new and unusual step for me, includes meme gifs from Giphy. I’m not really sure about whether this is step forward or back for me, as I do prefer permissive licenses. That said, the memes seem to be more engaging – particularly as they’re animated. I’ve never had someone comment on the images in my slide deck until I did the first run through with the memes in with a colleague, and then again when I ran it a second time they particularly brought up the animated images… so the memes are staying for now.

I’m also slightly disappointed with myself that I couldn’t stick to the “One Bold Word” style of presentations (the format preferred by Jono Bacon), and found myself littering more and more content into the screen. I was, however, proud of myself for including the “Tweetable content” slide, as recommended, I think, by Lorna Mitchell (@LornaJane). I also included a “Your next steps” slide, as recommended by Andy Bounds (although I suspect he’d be disappointed with the “Questions?” slide at the end!)

This deck required quite a bit of research on my part. I’d never written CloudFormations (CF) before, and I’d only really copied-and-pasted Terraform (I refer to it as TF which probably isn’t right) before. I wrote a full stack of machines in CF, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for the native technologies, as well as the same stacks in both TF and Ansible for both Azure and AWS. I also looked into how to deploy the CF and ARM templates with both Terraform and Ansible, and finally how to use TF from Ansible. I already knew how to run Ansible from within userdata/customdata arguments in AWS and Azure, but I included it and tested it as part of the deck too.

I had some amazing feedback from the audience and some great questions asked of me. I loved the response from the audience to some of my GIFs (although one comment that was made was that I need to stop the animations after the first run!)

Following the session, as I’d hoped, it brought a few of the fellow attendees to the forefront to ask if we can talk further about the subject and I would encourage you, if you are someone who uses these tools to give me a shout – I want to do more and find out about your projects, processes and tools!

My intention is to start using this slide deck at meet-ups in the Greater Manchester area, hopefully without having to re-write it that much!

BarCamp Manchester Logo, from barcampmanchester.co.uk

My talk summaries from BarCamp Manchester 9

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

BarCamp Manchester 9 (#BcMcr9) is a BarCamp style Unconference. It was held in the offices of Auto Trader in the centre of Manchester. It was a two day event, however, I was unable to attend the Saturday. Sundays are usually quieter days, and apparently the numbers were approximately half of the peak of Saturday on the Sunday.

Lunch was provided by Auto Trader. The day was split into 7 slots, or sessions, running for 25 minutes each, with 5 minutes between slots to change rooms. There were three theatre layout rooms, each with a projector, and one room with soft chairs around the edges.

There and Back Again/How The Internet Works

Format: Presentation with slides. 30ish attendees.

Slot: Slot 1 Sunday 11:00-11:25

Notes: This slide deck was reused from when I delivered it in 2012. Some stuff had changed (the prevalence of WiFi being one, CAT5e being referenced raised some giggles), but most had not.

There were some comments raised during the talk about the slides, but nothing significant (mostly by network engineers, commenting on things like routing a local network. Ugh.)

Following the talk, someone came up to suggest some changes (primarily that the slides need to link back to the graphics created). Someone else noted that there were too many acronyms that should probably have been explained. As such, this deck is likely to change and be published here at some point soon.

I sent a tweet, following this talk:

At #BCMCR9? See my talk on “How The Internet Works” and looking for the slides? See here: https://www.slideshare.net/JonTheNiceGuy/there-and-back-again-15506394 And feel free to message me if you’ve got any questions!

Jon Spriggs (@jontheniceguy) @ Sep 22 12:03pm

Automation in an Infrastructure as Code World

Format: Presentation with slides. 8 attendees, reduced to 4 half way through.

Slot: Slots 5 and 6 Sunday 14:00-14:55

Notes: This was a trial run of my talk for the Fujitsu FDE Conference I’m attending in a couple of weeks. The audience were notified as such. I took two slots on the “grid”, and half way through my session, half the audience walked out.

Following the talk, someone came and suggested some changes, which I’ll be implementing.

The slides for this talk are still being developed and will be shared after the FDE conference on this site.

Decentralised Social Media? – Secure Scuttlebutt

Format: Conversation with a desktop client application (Patchwork) loaded on the projector, and the Google Play entry for Manyverse on a browser tab. 3 attendees.

Slot: Slot 7 (last slot of the day) Sunday 15:00-15:25

Notes: This was an unplanned session, and probably should have been run earlier in the day. The audience members were very interactive, and asked lots of sensible questions.

I sent a tweet, following this talk:

Did you come to my talk at #BcMcr9 about #SecureScuttleButt? If you run a SSB client (patchwork, patchbay, patchfox or manyverse) and want to follow me, I’m @p3gu8eLHxXC0cuvZ0yXSC05ZROB4X7dpxGCEydIHZ0o=.ed25519 and @3SEA7qNZQPiYFCzY6K57f0LTc9l+Bk6cewQc6lbs/Ek=.ed25519

Jon Spriggs (@jontheniceguy) @ Sep 22 4:46pm

And if you want to know more about #SecureScuttlebutt, take a look at http://Scuttlebutt.nz! It’s fun!

Jon Spriggs (@jontheniceguy) @ Sep 22 4:49pm
Fujitsu AWS Game Day Attendees

AWS Game Day

JonTheNiceGuy 2 Comments

I was invited, through work, to participate in an AWS tradition – the AWS Game Day. This event was organised by my employer for our internal staff to experience a day in the life of a fully deployed AWS environment… and have some fun with it too. The AWS Game Day is a common scenario, and if you’re lucky enough to join one, you’ll probably be doing this one… As such, there will be… #NoSpoilers.

A Game Day (sometimes disambiguated as an “Adversarial Game Day”, because of sporting events) is a day where you either have a dummy environment, or, if you have the scale, a portion of your live network is removed from live service and used as a training ground. In this case, AWS provided a specific dummy environment “Unicorn.Rentals”, and all the attendees are the new recruits to the DevOps Team… Oh, and all the previous DevOps team members had just left the company… all at once.

Attendees were split into teams of four, and each team had a disparate background.

We’re given access to;

  • Our login panel. This gives us our score, our trending increase or decrease in score over the last “period” (I think it was 5 minutes), our access to the AWS console, and a panel to update the CNAME for the DNS records.
  • AWS Console. This is a mostly unrestricted account in AWS. There are some things we don’t get access to – for example, we didn’t get the CloudFormation Template for setting up the game day, and we couldn’t make changes to the IAM environment at all. Oh, and what was particularly frustrating was not being able to … Oh yes, I forgot, #NoSpoilers ;)
  • A central scoreboard of all the teams
  • A running tally of how we were scored
    • Each web request served under X seconds received one score
    • Each request served between X and Y seconds received another score,
    • Each request served over Y seconds received a third score.
    • Failing to respond to a request received a negative score.
    • Infrastructure costs deducted points from the score (to stop you just putting stuff at ALL THE SERVERS, ALL THE TIME).
  • The outgoing DevOps team’s “runbook”. Not too dissimilar to the sort of documentation you write before you go on leave. “If this thing break, run this or just reboot the box”, “You might see this fail with something like this message if the server can’t keep up with the load”. Enough to give you a pointer on where to look, not quite enough to give you the answer :)

The environment we were working on was, well, relatively simple. An auto-scaling web service, running a simple binary on an EC2 instance behind a load balancer. We extended the reach of services we could use (#NoSpoilers!) to give us greater up-time, improved responsiveness and broader scope of access. We were also able to monitor … um, things :) and change the way we viewed the application.

I don’t want to give too many details, because it will spoil the surprises, but I will say that we learned a lot about the services in AWS we had access to, which wasn’t the full product set (just “basic” AWS IaaS tooling).

When the event finished, everyone I spoke to agreed that having a game day is a really good idea! One person said “You only really learn something when you fix it! This is like being called out, without the actual impact to a customer” and another said “I’ve done more with AWS in this day than I have the past couple of months since I’ve been looking at it.”

And, as you can probably tell, I agree! I’d love to see more games days like this! I can see how running something like this, on technology you use in your customer estate, can be unbelievably powerful – especially if you’ve got a mildly nefarious GM running some background processes to break things (#NoSpoilers). If you can make it time-sensitive too (“you’ve got one day to restore service”, or like in this case, “every minute we’re not selling product, we’re losing points”), then that makes it feel like you’ve been called out, but without the stress of feeling like you’re actually going to lose your job at the end of the day (not that I’ve ever actually felt like that when I’ve been called out!!)

Anyway, massive kudos to our AWS SE team for delivering the training, and a huge cheer of support to Sara for getting the event organised. I look forward to getting invited to a new scenario sometime soon! ;)

Here are some pictures from the event!

The teams get to know each other, and we find out about the day ahead! Picture by @Fujitsu_FDE.
Our team, becoming a team by changing the table layout! It made a difference, we went to the top of the leader board for at least 5 minutes! Picture by @Fujitsu_FDE.
The final scores. Picture by @Fujitsu_FDE
Our lucky attendees got to win some of these items! Picture by @Fujitsu_FDE
“Well Done” (ha, yehr, right!) to the winning team (“FIX!”) “UnicornsRUs”. Picture by @Fujitsu_FDE.

The featured image is “AWS Game Day Attendees” by @Fujitsu_FDE.

“Swatch Water Store, Grand Central Station, NYC, 9/2016, pics by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube #Swatch #Watch” by “Mike Mozart” on Flickr

Time Based Security

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I came across the concept of “Time Based Security” (TBS) in the Sysadministrivia podcast, S4E13.

I’m still digging into the details of it, but in essence, the “Armadillo” (Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside) protection model is broken (sometimes known as the “Fortress Model”). You assume that your impenetrable network boundary will prevent attackers from getting to your sensitive data. While this may stop them for a while, what you’re actually seeing here is one part of a complex protection system, however many organisations miss the fact that this is just one part.

The examples used in the only online content I’ve found about this refer to a burglary.

In this context, your “Protection” (P) is measured in time. Perhaps you have hardened glass that takes 20 seconds to break.

Next, we evaluate “Detection” (D) which is also, surprisingly enough, measured in time. As the glass is hit, it triggers an alarm to a security facility. That takes 20 seconds to respond and goes to a dispatch centre, another 20 seconds for that to be answered and a police officer dispatched.

The police officer being dispatched is the “Response” (R). The police take (optimistically) 2 minutes to arrive (it was written in the 90’s so the police forces weren’t decimated then).

So, in the TBS system, we say that Detection (D) of 40 seconds plus Response (R) of 120 seconds = 160 seconds. This is greater than Protection (P) of 20 seconds, so we have an Exposure (E) time of 140 seconds E = P – (D + R). The question that is posed is, how much damage can be done in E?

So, compare this to your average pre-automation SOC. Your firewall, SIEM (Security Incident Event Management system), IDS (Intrusion Detection System) or WAF (Web Application Firewall) triggers an alarm. Someone is trying to do something (e.g. Denial Of Service attack, password spraying or port scanning for vulnerable services) a system you’re responsible for. While D might be in the tiny fractions of a minute (perhaps let’s say 1 minute, for maths sake), R is likely to be minutes or even hours, depending on the refresh rate of the ticket management system or alarm system (again, for maths sake, let’s say 60 minutes). So, D+R is now 61 minutes. How long is P really going to hold? Could it be less than 30 minutes against a determined attacker? (Let’s assume P is 30 minutes for maths sake).

Let’s do the calculation for a pre-automation SOC (Security Operations Centre). P-(D+R)=E. E here is 31 minutes. How much damage can an attacker do in 31 minutes? Could they put a backdoor into your system? Can they download sensitive data to a remote system? Could they pivot to your monitoring system, and remove the logs that said they were in there?

If you consider how much smaller the D and R numbers become with an event driven SOAR (Security Orchestration and Automation Response) system – does that improve your P and E numbers? Consider that if you can get E to 0, this could be considered to be “A Secure Environment”.

Also, consider the fact that many of the tools we implement for security reduce D and R, but if you’re not monitoring the outputs of the Detection components, then your response time grows significantly. If your Detection component is misconfigured in that it’s producing too many False Positives (for example, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf“), so you don’t see the real incident, then your Response might only be when a security service notifies you that your data, your service or your money has been exposed and lost. And that wouldn’t be good now… Time to look into automation 😁

Featured image is “Swatch Water Store, Grand Central Station, NYC, 9/2016, pics by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube #Swatch #Watch” by “Mike Mozart” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

Building a simple CA for testing purposes

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I recently needed to create a Certificate Authority with an Intermediate Certificate to test some TLS inspection stuff at work. This script (based on a document I found at jamielinux.com) builds a Certificate Authority and creates an Intermediate Certificate Authority using the root.

I’ve also done something similar with Ansible before, but I’ve not got that to hand :)

Late edit, 2019-08-21: Found it! Needs some tweaks to add the sub-CA or child certs, but so-far it would work :)

“code crunching” by “Ruben Molina” on Flickr

Getting Started with Terraform on AWS

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I recently wrote a blog post about Getting Started with Terraform on Azure. You might have read it (I know I did!).

Having got a VM stood up in Azure, I wanted to build a VM in AWS, after all, it’s more-or-less the same steps. Note, this is a work-in-progress, and shouldn’t be considered “Final” – this is just something to use as *your* starting block.

What do you need?

You need an AWS account for this. If you’ve not got one, signing up for one is easy, but bear in mind that while there are free resource on AWS (only for the first year!), it’s also quite easy to suddenly enable a load of features that cost you money.

Best practice suggests (or rather, INSISTS) you shouldn’t use your “root” account for AWS. It’s literally just there to let you define the rest of your admin accounts. Turn on MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) on that account, give it an exceedingly complex password, write that on a sheet of paper, and lock it in a box. You should NEVER use it!

Create your admin account, log in to that account. Turn on MFA on *that* account too. Then, create an “Access Token” for your account. This is in IAM (Identity and Access Management). These are what we’ll use to let Terraform perform actions in AWS, without you needing to actually “log in”.

On my machine, I’ve put the credentials for this in /home/<MYUSER>/.aws/credentials and it looks like this:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = ABC123DEF456
aws_secret_access_key = AaBbCcDd1234EeFf56

This file should be chmod 600 and make sure it’s only your account that can access this file. With this token, Terraform can perform *ANY ACTION* as you, including anything that charges you money, or creating servers that can mine a “cryptocurrency” for someone malicious.

I’m using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I’m using the Ubuntu 18.04 distribution obtained from the Store. This post won’t explain how to get *that*. Also, you might want to run Terraform on Mac, in Windows or on Linux natively… so, yehr.

Next, we need to actually install Terraform. Excuse the long, unwrapped code block, but it gets what you need quickly (assuming the terraform webpage doesn’t change any time soon!)

mkdir -p ~/bin
cd ~/bin
sudo apt update && sudo apt install unzip
curl -sLO $(curl https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html | grep "linux_amd64.zip" | cut -d\" -f 2) && unzip terraform*.zip && rm terraform*.zip && chmod 755 terraform

Starting coding your infrastructure

Before you can build your first virtual machine on AWS, you need to stand up the supporting infrastructure. These are:

  • An SSH Keypair (no password logins here!)
  • A VPC (“Virtual Private Cloud”, roughly the same as a VNet on Azure, or somewhat like a L3 switch in the Physical Realm).
  • An Internet Gateway (if your VPC isn’t classed as “the default one”)
  • A Subnet.
  • A Security Group.

Once we’ve got these, we can build our Virtual Machine on EC2 (“Elastic Cloud Compute”), and associate a “Public IP” to it.

To quote my previous post:

One quirk with Terraform, versus other tools like Ansible, is that when you run one of the terraform commands (like terraform init, terraform plan or terraform apply), it reads the entire content of any file suffixed “tf” in that directory, so if you don’t want a file to be loaded, you need to either move it out of the directory, comment it out, or rename it so it doesn’t end .tf. By convention, you normally have three “standard” files in a terraform directory – main.tf, variables.tf and output.tf, but logically speaking, you could have everything in a single file, or each instruction in it’s own file.

Getting Started with Terraform on Azure – Building the file structure

For the sake of editing and annotating the files for this post, these code blocks are all separated, but on my machine, they’re all currently one big file called “main.tf“.

In that file, I start by telling it that I’m working with the Terraform AWS provider, and that it should target my nearest region.

If you want to risk financial ruin, you can put things like your access tokens in here, but I really wouldn’t chance this!

Next, we create our network infrastructure – VPC, Internet Gateway and Subnet. We also change the routing table.

I suspect, if I’d created the VPC as “The Default” VPC, then I wouldn’t have needed to amend the routing table, nor added an Internet Gateway. To help us make the routing table change, there’s a “data” block in this section of code. A data block is an instruction to Terraform to go and ask a resource for *something*, in this case, we need AWS to tell Terraform what the routing table is that it created for the VPC. Once we have that we can ask for the routing table change.

AWS doesn’t actually give “proper” names to any of it’s assets. To provide something with a “real” name, you need to tag that thing with the “Name” tag. These can be practically anything, but I’ve given semi-sensible names to everything. You might want to name everything “main” (like I nearly did)!

We’re getting close to being able to create the VM now. First of all, we’ll create the Security Groups. I want to separate out my “Allow Egress Traffic” rule from my “Inbound SSH” rule. This means that I can clearly see what hosts allow inbound SSH access. Like with my Azure post, I’m using a “data provider” to get my public IP address, but in a normal “live” network, you’d specify a collection of valid source address ranges.

Last steps before we create the Virtual Machine. We need to upload our SSH key, and we need to find the “AMI” (AWS Machine ID) of the image we’ll be using. To create the key, in this directory, along side the .tf files, I’ve put my SSH public key (called id_rsa.pub), and we load that key when we create the “my_key” resource. To find the AMI, we need to make another data call, this time asking the AMI index to find the VM with the name containing ubuntu-bionic-18.04 and some other stuff. AMIs are region specific, so the image I’m using in eu-west-2 will not be the same AMI in eu-west-1 or us-east-1 and so on. This filtering means that, as long as the image exists in that region, we can use “the right one”. So let’s take a look at this file.

So, now we have everything we need to create our VM. Let’s do that!

In here, we specify a “user_data” file to upload, in this case, the contents of a file – CloudDev.sh, but you can load anything you want in here. My CloudDev.sh is shown below, so you can see what I’m doing with this file :)

So, having created all this lot, you need to execute the terraform workload. Initially you do terraform init. This downloads all the provisioners and puts them into the same tree as these .tf files are stored in. It also resets the state of the terraform discovered or created datastore.

Next, you do terraform plan -out tfout. Technically, the tfout part can be any filename, but having something like tfout marks it as clearly part of Terraform. This creates the tfout file with the current state, and whatever needs to change in the Terraform state file on it’s next run. Typically, if you don’t use a tfout file within about 20 minutes, it’s probably worth removing it.

Finally, once you’ve run your plan stage, now you need to apply it. In this case you execute terraform apply tfout. This tfout is the same filename you specified in terraform plan. If you don’t include -out tfout on your plan (or even run a plan!) and tfout in your apply, then you can skip the terraform plan stage entirely.

Once you’re done with your environment, use terraform destroy to shut it all down… and enjoy :)

Featured image is “code crunching” by “Ruben Molina” on Flickr and is released under a CC-ND license.

"Confused" by "CollegeDegrees360" on Flickr

Using AWSCLI on Ubuntu/Ubuntu-in-WSL

JonTheNiceGuy 1 Comment

This is a brief note to myself (but might be useful to you)!

awscli (similar to the Azure az command) is packaged for Ubuntu, but the version which is in the Ubuntu 18.04 repositories is “out of date” and won’t work with AWS. You *actually* need to run the following:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3-pip -y && sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade awscli

If you’ve unfortunately already installed awscli from apt, do the following:

sudo apt remove awscli -y

Then, logout (for some reason, binary path caching is a thing now?) and log back in, and then run the above pip install line.

Solution found via this logged issue on the awscli git repo.

Featured image is “Confused” by “CollegeDegrees360” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

"Hacker" by "The Preiser Project" on Flickr

What to do when a website you’ve trusted gets hacked?

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Hello! Maybe you just got a sneeking suspicion that a website you trusted isn’t behaving right, perhaps someone told you that “unusual content” is being posted in your name somewhere, or, if you’re really lucky, you might have just had an email from a website like “HaveIBeenPwned.com” or “Firefox Monitor“. It might look something like this:

An example of an email from the service “Have I Been Pwned”

Of course, it doesn’t feel like you’re lucky! It’s OK. These things happen quite a lot of the time, and you’re not the only one in this boat!

How bad is it, Doc?

First of all, don’t panic! Get some idea of the scale of problem this is by looking at a few key things.

  1. How recent was the breach? Give this a score between 1 (right now) and 10 (more than 1 month ago).
  2. How many websites and services do you use this account on? Give this a score between 1 (right now) and 10 (OMG, this is *my* password, and I use it everywhere).
  3. How many other services would use this account to authenticate to, or get a password reset from? Give this a score between 1 (nope, it’s just this website. We’re good) and 10 (It’s my email account, and everything I’ve ever signed up to uses this account as the login address… or it’s Facebook/Google and I use their authentication to login to everything else).
  4. How much does your reputation hang on this website or any other websites that someone reusing the credentials of this account would get access to? Give this a score between 1 (meh, I post cat pictures from an anonymous username) and 10 (I’m an INFLUENCER HERE dagnamit! I get money because I said stuff here and/or my job is on that website, or I am publicly connected to my employer by virtue of that profile).
  5. (Optional) If this is from a breach notification, does it say that it’s just email addresses (score 1), or that it includes passwords (score 5), unencrypted or plaintext passwords (score 8) or full credit card details (score 10)?

Once you’ve got an idea of scale (4 to 40 or 5 to 50, depending on whether you used that last question), you’ve got an idea of how potentially bad it is.

Take action!

Make a list of the websites you think that you need to change this password on.

  1. Start with email accounts (GMail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL and so on) – each email account that uses the same password needs to be changed, and this is because almost every website uses your email address to make a “password” change on it! (e.g. “Forgot your password, just type in your email address here, and we’ll send you a reset link“).
  2. Prominent social media profiles (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) come next, even if they’re not linked to your persona. This is where your potential reputation damage comes from!
  3. Next up is *this* website, the one you got the breach notification for. After all, you know this password is “wild” now!

Change some passwords

This is a bit of a bind, but I’d REALLY recommend making a fresh password for each of those sites. There are several options for doing this, but my preferred option is to use a password manager. If you’re not very tech savvy, consider using the service Lastpass. If you’re tech savvy, and understand how to keep files in sync across multiple devices, you might be interested in using KeePassXC (my personal preference) or BitWarden instead.

No really. A fresh password. Per site. Honest. And not just “MyComplexPassw0rd-Hotmail” because there are ways of spotting you’ve done something like that, and when they come to your facebook account, they’ll try “MyComplexPassw0rd-Facebook” just to see if it gets them in.

ℹ️ Using a password manager gives you a unique, per-account password. I just generated a fresh one (for a dummy website), and it was 2-K$F+j7#Zz8b$A^]qj. But, fortunately, I don’t have to remember it. I can just copy and paste it in to the form when I need to change it, or perhaps, if you have a browser add-on, that’ll fill it in for you.

Making a list, and checking it twice!

Fab, so you’ve now got a lovely list of unique passwords. A bit like Santa, it’s time to check your list again. Assume that your list of sites you just changed passwords for were all compromised, because someone knew that password… I know, it’s a scary thought! So, have a look at all those websites you just changed the password on and figure out what they have links to, then you’ll probably make your list of things you need to change a bit bigger.

Not sure what they have links to?

Well, perhaps you’re looking at an email account… have a look through the emails you’ve received in the last month, three months or year and see how many of those come from “something” unique. Perhaps you signed up to a shopping site with that email address? It’s probably worth getting a password reset for that site done.

Perhaps you’re looking at a social media site that lets you login to other services? Check through those other services and make sure that “someone” hasn’t allowed access to a website they control. After all, you did lose access to that website, and so you don’t know what it’s connected to.

Also, check all of these sites, and make sure there aren’t any unexpected “active sessions” (where someone else is logged into your account still). If you have got any, kick them out :)

OK, so the horse bolted, now close the gate!

Once you’ve sorted out all of these passwords, it’s probably worth looking at improving your security in general. To do this, we need to think about how people get access to your account. As I wrote in my “What to do when your Facebook account gets hacked?” post:

What if you accidentally gave your password to someone? Or if you went to a website that wasn’t actually the right page and put your password in there by mistake? Falling prey to this when it’s done on purpose is known as social engineering or phishing, and means that someone else has your password to get into your account.

A quote from the “Second Factor” part of “What to do when your Facebook account gets hacked?“

The easiest way of locking this down is to use a “Second Factor” (sometimes abbreviated to 2FA). You need to give your password (“something you know”) to log into the website. Now you also need something separate, that isn’t in the same store. If this were a physical token (like a SoloKey, Yubikey, or a RSA SecurID token), it’d be “something you have” (after all, you need to carry around that “token” with you), but normally these days it’s something on your phone.

Some places will send you a text message, others will pop up an “approve login” screen (and, I should note, if you get one and YOU AREN’T LOGGING IN, don’t press “approve”!), or you might have a separate app (perhaps called “Google Authenticator”, “Authy” or something like “Duo Security”) that has a number that keeps changing.

You should then finish your login with a code from that app, SMS or token or reacting to that screen or perhaps even pressing a button on a thing you plug into your computer. If you want to know how to set this up, take a look at “TwoFactorAuth.org“, a website providing access to the documentation on setting up 2FA on many of the websites you currently use… but especially do this with your email accounts.

Featured image is “Hacker” by “The Preiser Project” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.