This is a quick post to remind me in the future… and is based on this official help page.
execute restore vmlicense tftp yourlicense.lic 192.0.2.1
This works around what you can do if you accidentally apply a license you’ve already applied somewhere else :)
CCHits was recently asked to move it’s media to another host, and while we were doing that we noticed that many of the Monthly shows were broken in one way or another…
Cue a massive rebuild attempt!
We already have a “ShowRunner” script, which we use with a simple Vagrant machine, and I knew you can use other hypervisor “providers”, and I used to use AWS to build the shows, so why not wrap the two parts together?
Firstly, I installed the vagrant-aws plugin:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws
Next I amended my Vagrantfile with the vagrant-aws values mentioned in the plugin readme:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
config.vm.box = "ShowMaker"
aws.tags = { 'Name' => 'ShowMaker' }
config.vm.box_url = "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box"
# AWS Credentials:
aws.access_key_id = "DECAFBADDECAFBADDECAF"
aws.secret_access_key = "DeadBeef1234567890+AbcdeFghijKlmnopqrstu"
aws.keypair_name = "TheNameOfYourSSHKeyInTheEC2ManagementPortal"
# AWS Location:
aws.region = "us-east-1"
aws.region_config "us-east-1", :ami => "ami-c29e1cb8" # If you pick another region, use the relevant AMI for that region
aws.instance_type = "t2.micro" # Scale accordingly
aws.security_groups = [ "sg-1234567" ] # Note this *MUST* be an SG ID not the name
aws.subnet_id = "subnet-decafbad" # Pick one subnet from https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home
# AWS Storage:
aws.block_device_mapping = [{
'DeviceName' => "/dev/sda1",
'Ebs.VolumeSize' => 8, # Size in GB
'Ebs.DeleteOnTermination' => true,
'Ebs.VolumeType' => "GP2", # General performance - you might want something faster
}]
# SSH:
override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
override.ssh.private_key_path = "/home/youruser/.ssh/id_rsa" # or the SSH key you've generated
# /vagrant directory - thanks to https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/5401
override.nfs.functional = false # It tries to use NFS - use RSYNC instead
end
config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
config.vm.provision "shell", path: "./run_setup.sh"
config.vm.provision "shell", run: "always", path: "./run_showmaker.sh"
end
Of course, if you try to put this into your Github repo, it’s going to get pillaged and you’ll be spending lots of money on monero mining very quickly… so instead, I spotted this which you can do to separate out your credentials:
At the top of the Vagrantfile, add these two lines:
require_relative 'settings_aws.rb'
include SettingsAws
Then, replace the lines where you specify a “secret”, like this:
aws.access_key_id = AWS_ACCESS_KEY
aws.secret_access_key = AWS_SECRET_KEY
Lastly, create a file “settings_aws.rb” in the same path as your Vagrantfile, that looks like this:
module SettingsAws
AWS_ACCESS_KEY = "DECAFBADDECAFBADDECAF"
AWS_SECRET_KEY = "DeadBeef1234567890+AbcdeFghijKlmnopqrstu"
end
This file then can be omitted from your git repository using a .gitignore file.
A few months ago I was a guest on The Ubuntu Podcast, where I mentioned that I use Streisand to terminate my VPN connections. I waffled and blathered a bit about how I set it up, but in the end it comes down to this:
streisand.vm.network "public_network", bridge: "eth0", ip: "192.0.2.1", :use_dhcp_assigned_default_route => false
streisand.vm.provision "shell", run: "always", inline: "ip route add 0.0.0.0/1 via 192.0.2.254 ; ip route add 128.0.0.0/1 via 192.0.2.254"
I’ve previously made mention of my addiction to Google Play Music… but I was called out recently, and asked about the script I used at the time. I’m sorry to say that I have had some issues with it, and instead, have resorted to using X forwarding. Here’s how I do it.
I create a user account for that other person (note, GMM will only let you upload to 3 accounts using this method. For any more, you’ll need a virtual machine!).
I then create an SSH public/private key with no passphrase.
ssh-keygen -b 2048 -N “” -C “$(whoami)@localhost” -f ~/.ssh/gmm.id_rsa
I write the public key into that new user’s .ssh/authorized_keys, by running:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/gmm.id_rsa bloggsf@localhost
I will be prompted for the password of that account.
Finally, I create this script:
This is then added to the startup tasks of my headless-but-running-a-desktop machine.
Hello! Congratulations, you’ve been hacked! Oh, OK, that’s probably not how it feels, right?
You’ve probably just had a message from someone to say that your account has been messaging loads of people, or that there is stuff on your timeline that … well, you didn’t put there.
It’s OK. It happens to a LOT of people, because Facebook is a very clear target. Many many people spend large quantities of their life scrolling through the content on there, so it’s bound to be a target, and for some reason, they found your account.
So, first of all, let’s address how this probably happened.
It’s easier to do this from the Facebook website, but you can probably still do all this lot from a mobile device.
Let’s solve the first two. Go into the Facebook Security Settings page, where you should change your password and boot off any sessions that aren’t YOU right now (don’t worry if there’s LOADS there – if you’ve used your phone somewhere that’s not where you are now, Facebook stores it as a new session). You can always log back into those other sessions later if you need to.
The third one can be a bit time consuming: kicking off apps you don’t use (mine was like walking into a museum!). Head into the Facebook Apps Settings page, and start clicking the X buttons to remove the apps you don’t use. Every now and then you might get a message saying that there was an error removing one of those apps. It’s fine, just give it a second and then try again. If someone has got into your account because of one of the first two, it’s probably worth checking this part anyway just in case they did something else to your account than just sending spam…
You might also want to check out your timeline, and remove the messages you sent (if they were posted to your timeline) or contact people who have been messaged to let them know you lost control of your account.
If someone got into your email and started resetting passwords then you’ve got a much worse problem, and I can’t really go into it here, but, it’s probably best to say that if they were just after your Facebook account, you were REALLY lucky. Your email account typically has the ultimate reset code for *EVERY* account password, so it’s probably best to make sure that what I’m saying about Facebook is also true for your email provider!
If you’ve done the above, but you’ve picked a password you’ve used somewhere else before, then you’re kinda setting yourself up for this to happen to you again in the future.
You see, the way that most of these attacks happen is by someone getting hold of a password you’ve used on a less secure site, and then tried logging into your Facebook account with that password they’ve snaffled. Want to see how likely this is? Visit Have I Been Pwned and see if your details are in there (the chances are very very very high!) and you’ll see websites who have been breached in the past and had your details taken from there… and this is just “the ones we know about” – who knows how many other websites have been breached and we don’t know about!
You can prevent this by not using the same password everywhere. I know. It’s hard to think of a new password every time you come to a new website, and how will you remember that password the next time you get there? Well, fortunately, there’s a solution to this one – a password manager. It’s an application for your laptops, desktops and mobile devices that stores your password for you, and tells you about them when you go to login to a website.
What’s more, that password manager can create passwords for you, not like “BobIsMyBestFriend1988” but more like “za{UHCtqi3<6mC_j6TblSk3hwS” (which, unless you’re some kind of savant, you’ll never remember that)…. and then tell you about that in the future. So now, you only need to remember one password to get into the password manager, and it will tell you about everything else! So, that helps!
There are two ways to do this – run an add-on in your web browser and on your mobile devices which synchronises everything to the cloud for you, or run a separate app and synchronise those passwords yourself. Personally, as I’m a bit geeky, I’m happy doing the second, but most people reading this are probably going to want someone else to sort out the synchronising.
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.
To reduce the impact of something like this, we can force someone logging in to use a “second factor” – something you have, rather than something you know, sometimes referred to as “Two Factor” or “2FA”. You might already use something like this at work – either a card with a chip on it (called a “Smartcard”), a device you plug into the USB port on your computer, or a keyring style device with numbers on. Or… you might have an app on your phone.
If you want to set this up on Facebook, you’ll need to enable it. Take a look at their help page about this!
(And if you want to know about securing your email account, check out the “Docs” column on this site for instructions about many email providers)
In two weeks I have appeared in three podcasts, and this is the third!
I was asked to participate in The Ubuntu Podcast – S10E26 – Endurable Wiry Bird because of my organisational involvement in the most recent OggCamp. I also mention a VPN product I think is useful for protecting yourself on public WiFi, and I mention my struggles with “Bash on Ubuntu for Windows” (symlinks of directories and FUSE filesystems). My wonderful and constructive wife said that I wasn’t very good at being interviewed (I kept having to be dragged back to talking to “normal people” level), but that it sounded like a professional radio show.
I really enjoy being on all these podcasts… I just wish I was a better guest on them!
Weird technical note: I have recently taken to recording the feeds from two separate microphones and submitting them both to the podcast for mixing purposes. On this occasion that back-fired… The “better” microphone picked up the other people in the audio from the “more rubbish” communications headset I use at work, that we were using to have the conference call. Fortunately, I’d recorded the audio from that too, as that had removed (or, more likely, never picked up) the audio from the other parties on the call… So next time, I need to either use better in-ear headphones for that, it just stick with the comms headset, and hope for the best!
Less than two weeks after my last “Live” show with the podcast, I’m once again contributing to the show. This time, I’m covering for Jerry as a guest presenter on The Admin Admin Podcast – #58 The Correct Answer to the Microsoft Question? this time being a bit controversial for anyone who knows me… By defending Microsoft. I also mention using Ansible to automate server software deployments, and tried to work out how small IT firms work out when to get support contracts. I briefly mention kanban as a task tracking methodology and a specific implementation for MS Outlook.
The Admin Admin podcast is a really nice and broad ranged podcast by three guys who work in IT support at different levels of the support chain. I think, if you work in IT, it’s probably worth having a listen.
Do you use Outlook for your email? Do you sometimes wish you could use a Kanban board with Outlook? Well, look no further!!
Thanks to an internal post about improving workflows, someone mentioned this git repo called “Outlook-Taskboard”, that gives you the ability to create and manipulate your Outlook tasks in a Kanban fashion.
Because it’s “just” native Outlook tasks, you can still manage them using the sidebar or the mobile apps, but when you get back to Outlook, you get to see their status and manage your tasks appropriately.
I’m back again! I’m standing in (again) for Andy as a guest presenter on The Admin Admin Podcast episode #57- Live at OggCamp talking about getting Open Source products under support in a proprietary company. The “famous” Martin Wimpress stands in for Jerry.
As I said last time I was on there, the guys who host the Admin Admin podcast are a really nice, and cover a really great range of subjects about working as a server or network administrator. They have a chat room on Telegram, so if you’re interested in being an admin, it’s worth having a listen, and then maybe join the chat room!
I was very fortunate yesterday to spend some time with two Check Point engineering staff. Check Point make high-end firewall products that I’m using at work. During the conversation, I mentioned two issues I’ve had during automated builds of Checkpoint appliances…
mgmt_cli -r true add host name "New Host 1" ip-address "192.0.2.1"mgmt_cli -r true login domain "System Data" > id.txt
mgmt_cli -s id.txt set api-settings accepted-api-calls-from "all ip addresses that can be used for gui clients" automatic-start true
mgmt_cli -s id.txt publish
api restartMy sincere thanks to Javier and Uri for their guidance. For those wondering about those API calls – see these links: Using the -r flag and configuring the API for remote access.