How many times have you seen an instruction in a setup script which says “Now add source <(somescript completion bash) to your ~/.bashrc file” or “Add export SOMEVAR=abc123 to your .bashrc file”?
This is great when it’s one or two lines, but for a big chunk of them? Whew!
Instead, I created this block in mine:
if [ -d ~/.bash_extensions.d ]; then
for extension in ~/.bash_extensions.d/[a-zA-Z0-9]*
do
. "$extension"
done
fi
This dynamically loads all the files in ~/.bash_extensions.d/ which start with a letter or a digit, so it means I can manage when things get loaded in, or removed from my bash shell.
For example, I recently installed the pre-release of Atuin, so my ~/.bash_extensions.d/atuin file looks like this:
I’ve had a couple of issues with brown-outs recently which have interrupted my Proxmox server, and stopped my connected disks from coming back up cleanly (yes, I’m working on that separately!) but it’s left me in a state where several of my containers and virtual machines on the cluster are down.
It’s possible to point-and-click your way around this, but far easier to script it!
A failed state may look like this:
root@proxmox1:~# ha-manager status
quorum OK
master proxmox2 (active, Fri Mar 22 10:40:49 2024)
lrm proxmox1 (active, Fri Mar 22 10:40:52 2024)
lrm proxmox2 (active, Fri Mar 22 10:40:54 2024)
service ct:101 (proxmox1, error)
service ct:102 (proxmox2, error)
service ct:103 (proxmox2, error)
service ct:104 (proxmox1, error)
service ct:105 (proxmox1, error)
service ct:106 (proxmox2, error)
service ct:107 (proxmox2, error)
service ct:108 (proxmox1, error)
service ct:109 (proxmox2, error)
service vm:100 (proxmox2, error)
Once you’ve fixed your issue, you can do this on each node:
for worker in $(ha-manager status | grep "($(hostnamectl hostname), error)" | cut -d\ -f2)
do
echo "Disabling $worker"
ha-manager set $worker --state disabled
until ha-manager status | grep "$worker" | grep -q disabled ; do sleep 1 ; done
echo "Restarting $worker"
ha-manager set $worker --state started
until ha-manager status | grep "$worker" | grep -q started ; do sleep 1 ; done
done
Note that this hasn’t been tested, but a scan over it with those nodes working suggests it should. I guess I’ll be updating this the next time I get a brown-out!
I wrote this post in January 2023, and it’s been languishing in my Drafts folder since then. I’ve had a look through it, and I can’t see any glaring reasons why I didn’t publish it so… it’s published… Enjoy 😁
If you’ve ever built a private subnet in AWS, you know it can be a bit tricky to get updates from the Internet – you end up having a NAT gateway or a self-managed proxy, and you can never be 100% certain that the egress traffic isn’t going somewhere you don’t want it to.
In this case, I wanted to ensure that outbound HTTPS traffic was being blocked if the SNI didn’t explicitly show the DNS name I wanted to permit through, and also, I only wanted specific DNS names to resolve. To do this, I used AWS Network Firewall and Route 53 DNS Firewall.
I’ve written this blog post, and followed along with this, I’ve created a set of terraform files to represent the steps I’ve taken.
The Setup
Let’s start this story from a simple VPC with three private subnets for my compute resources, and three private subnets for the VPC Endpoints for Systems Manager (SSM).
Here’s our network diagram, with the three subnets containing the VPC Endpoints at the top, and the three instances at the bottom.
At this point, none of those instances can reach anything outside the network, with the exception of the SSM environment. So, we can’t install any packages, we can’t get data from outside the network or anything similar.
Getting Protected Internet Access
In order to get internet access, we need to add 4 things;
An internet gateway
A NAT gateway in each AZ
Which needs three new subnets
And three Elastic IP addresses
Route tables in all the subnets
To clarify, a NAT gateway acts like a DSL router. It hides the source IP address of outbound traffic behind a single, public IP address (using an Elastic IP from AWS), and routes any return traffic back to wherever that traffic came from. To reduce inter-AZ data transfer rates, I’m putting one in each AZ, but if there’s not a lot of outbound traffic or the outbound traffic isn’t critical enough to require resiliency, this could all be centralised to a single NAT gateway. To put a NAT gateway in each AZ, you need a subnet in each AZ, and to get out to the internet (by whatever means you have), you need an internet gateway and route tables for how to reach the NAT and internet gateways.
We also should probably add, at this point, four additional things.
The Network Firewall
Subnets for the Firewall interfaces
Stateless Policy
Stateful Policy
The Network Firewall acts like a single appliance, and uses a Gateway Load Balancer to present an interface into each of the availability zones. It has a stateless policy (which is very fast, but needs to address both inbound and outbound traffic flows) to do IP and Port based filtering (referred to as “Layer 3” filtering) and then specific traffic can be passed into a stateful policy (which is slower) to do packet and flow inspection.
In this case, I only want outbound HTTPS traffic to be passed, so my stateless rule group is quite simple;
VPC range on any port → Internet on TCP/443; pass to Stateful rule groups
Internet on TCP/443 → VPC range on any port; pass to Stateful rule groups
I have two stateful rule groups, one is defined to just allow access out to example.com and any relevant subdomains, using the “Domain List” stateful policy item. The other allows access to example.org and any relevant subdomains, using a Suricata stateful policy item, to show the more flexible alternative route. (Suricata has lots more filters than just the SNI value, you can check for specific SSH versions, Kerberos CNAMEs, SNMP versions, etc. You can also add per-rule logging this way, which you can’t with the Domain List route).
These are added to the firewall policy, which also defines that if a rule doesn’t match a stateless rule group, or an established flow doesn’t match a stateful rule group, then it should be dropped.
New network diagram with more subnets and objects, but essentially, as described in the paragraphs above. Traffic flows from the instances either down towards the internet, or up towards the VPCe.
So far, so good… but why let our users even try to resolve the DNS name of a host they’re not permitted to reach. Let’s turn on DNS Firewalling too.
Turning on Route 53 DNS Firewall
You’ll notice that in the AWS Network Firewall, I didn’t let DNS out of the network. This is because, by default, AWS enables Route 53 as it’s local resolver. This lives on the “.2” address of the VPC, so in my example environment, this would be 198.18.0.2. Because it’s a local resolver, it won’t cross the Firewall exiting to the internet. You can also make Route 53 use your own DNS servers for specific DNS resolution (for example, if you’re running an Active Directory service inside your network).
Any Network Security Response team members you have working with you would appreciate it if you’d turn on DNS Logging at this point, so I’ll do it too!
In March 2021, AWS announced “Route 53 DNS Firewall”, which allow this DNS resolver to rewrite responses, or even to completely deny the existence of a DNS record. With this in mind, I’m going to add some custom DNS rules.
The first thing I want to do is to only permit traffic to my specific list of DNS names – example.org, example.com and their subdomains. DNS quite likes to terminate DNS names with a dot, signifying it shouldn’t try to resolve any higher up the chain, so I’m going to make a “permitted domains” DNS list;
And then build a DNS Firewall Policy which allows access to the “permitted domains”, “VPCe” lists, but blocks resolution of any “default deny” entries.
So there we have it. While the network is not “secure” (there’s still a few gaps here) it’s certainly MUCH more secure than it was, and it certainly would take a lot more work for anyone with malicious intent to get your content out.
Feel free to have a poke around, and leave comments below if this has helped or is of interest!
I keep trundling back to a collection of WordPress plugins that I really love. And sometimes I want to contribute patches to the plugin.
I don’t want to develop against this server (that would be crazy… huh… right… no one does that… *cough*) but instead, I want a nice, fresh and new WordPress instance to just check that it works the way I was expecting.
So, I created a little Vagrant environment, just for testing WordPress plugins. I clone the repository for the plugin, and create a “TestingEnvironment” directory in there.
I then create the following Vagrantfile.
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = "ubuntu/jammy64"
# This will create an IP address in the range 192.168.64.0/24 (usually)
config.vm.network "private_network", type: "dhcp"
# This loads the git repo for the plugin into /tmp/git_repo
config.vm.synced_folder "../", "/tmp/git_repo"
# If you've got vagrant-cachier, this will speed up apt update/install operations
if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-cachier")
config.cache.scope = :box
end
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
# Install Dependencies
apt-get update
apt-get install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-fcgid php-fpm mysql-server php-mysql git
# Set up Apache
a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif
a2enconf "$(basename "$(ls /etc/apache2/conf-available/php*)" .conf)"
systemctl restart apache2
rm -f /var/www/html/index.html
# Set up WordPress
bash /vagrant/root_install_wordpress.sh
SHELL
end
Next, let’s create that root_install_wordpress.sh file.
#! /bin/bash
# Allow us to run commands as www-data
chsh -s /bin/bash www-data
# Let www-data access files in the web-root.
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
# Install wp-cli system-wide
curl -s -S -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wp
# Slightly based on
# https://www.a2hosting.co.uk/kb/developer-corner/mysql/managing-mysql-databases-and-users-from-the-command-line
echo "CREATE DATABASE wp;" | mysql -u root
echo "CREATE USER 'wp'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'wp';" | mysql -u root
echo "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wp.* TO 'wp'@'localhost';" | mysql -u root
echo "FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" | mysql -u root
# Execute the generic install script
su - www-data -c bash -c /vagrant/user_install_wordpress.sh
# Install any plugins with this script
su - www-data -c bash -c /vagrant/customise_wordpress.sh
# Log the path to access
echo "URL: http://$(sh /vagrant/get_ip.sh) User: admin Password: password"
Now we have our dependencies installed and our database created, let’s get WordPress installed with user_install_wordpress.sh.
#! /bin/bash
# Largely based on https://d9.hosting/blog/wp-cli-install-wordpress-from-the-command-line/
cd /var/www/html
# Install the latest WP into this directory
wp core download --locale=en_GB
# Configure the database with the credentials set up in root_install_wordpress.sh
wp config create --dbname=wp --dbuser=wp --dbpass=wp --locale=en_GB
# Skip the first-run-wizard
wp core install --url="http://$(sh /vagrant/get_ip.sh)" --title=Test --admin_user=admin --admin_password=password --admin_email=example@example.com --skip-email
# Setup basic permalinks
wp option update permalink_structure ""
# Flush the rewrite schema based on the permalink structure
wp rewrite structure ""
Excellent. This gives us a working WordPress environment. Now we need to add our customisation – the plugin we’re deploying. In this case, I’ve been tweaking the “presenter” plugin so here’s the customise_wordpress.sh code:
Actually, that /tmp/git_repo path is a call-back to this line in the Vagrantfile: config.vm.synced_folder "../", "/tmp/git_repo".
And there you have it; a vanilla WordPress install, with the plugin installed and ready to test. It only took 4 years to write up a blog post for it!
As an alternative, you could instead put the plugin you’re working with in a subdirectory of the Vagrantfile and supporting files, then you’d just need to change that git clone /tmp/git_repo line to git clone /vagrant/MyPlugin – but then you can’t offer this to the plugin repo as a PR, can you? 😀
Tale as old as time, the compute instance type you want to use in AWS is highly contested (or worse yet, not as available in every availability zone in your region)! You plead with your TAM or AM “Please let us have more of that instance type” only to be told “well, we can put in a request, but… haven’t you thought about using a range of instance types”?
And yes, I’ve been on both sides of that conversation, sadly.
The commented terraform
# This is your legacy instance_type variable. Ideally we'd have
# a warning we could raise at this point, telling you not to use
# this variable, but... it's not ready yet.
variable "instance_type" {
description = "The legacy single-instance size, e.g. t3.nano. Please migrate to instance_types ASAP. If you specify instance_types, this value will be ignored."
type = string
default = null
}
# This is your new instance_types value. If you don't already have
# some sort of legacy use of the instance_type variable, then don't
# bother with that variable or the locals block below!
variable "instance_types" {
description = "A list of instance sizes, e.g. [t2.nano, t3.nano] and so on."
type = list(string)
default = null
}
# Use only this locals block (and the value further down) if you
# have some legacy autoscaling groups which might use individual
# instance_type sizes.
locals {
# This means if var.instance_types is not defined, then use it,
# otherwise create a new list with the single instance_type
# value in it!
instance_types = var.instance_types != null ? var.instance_types : [ var.instance_type ]
}
resource "aws_launch_template" "this" {
# The prefix for the launch template name
# default "my_autoscaling_group"
name_prefix = var.name
# The AMI to use. Calculated outside this process.
image_id = data.aws_ami.this.id
# This block ensures that any new instances are created
# before deleting old ones.
lifecycle {
create_before_destroy = true
}
# This block defines the disk size of the root disk in GB
block_device_mappings {
device_name = data.aws_ami.centos.root_device_name
ebs {
volume_size = var.disksize # default "10"
volume_type = var.disktype # default "gp2"
}
}
# Security Groups to assign to the instance. Alternatively
# create a network_interfaces{} block with your
# security_groups = [ var.security_group ] in it.
vpc_security_group_ids = [ var.security_group ]
# Any on-boot customizations to make.
user_data = var.userdata
}
resource "aws_autoscaling_group" "this" {
# The name of the Autoscaling Group in the Web UI
# default "my_autoscaling_group"
name = var.name
# The list of subnets into which the ASG should be deployed.
vpc_zone_identifier = var.private_subnets
# The smallest and largest number of instances the ASG should scale between
min_size = var.min_rep
max_size = var.max_rep
mixed_instances_policy {
launch_template {
# Use this template to launch all the instances
launch_template_specification {
launch_template_id = aws_launch_template.this.id
version = "$Latest"
}
# This loop can either use the calculated value "local.instance_types"
# or, if you have no legacy use of this module, remove the locals{}
# and the variable "instance_type" {} block above, and replace the
# for_each and instance_type values (defined as "local.instance_types")
# with "var.instance_types".
#
# Loop through the whole list of instance types and create a
# set of "override" values (the values are defined in the content{}
# block).
dynamic "override" {
for_each = local.instance_types
content {
instance_type = local.instance_types[override.key]
}
}
}
instances_distribution {
# If we "enable spot", then make it 100% spot.
on_demand_percentage_above_base_capacity = var.enable_spot ? 0 : 100
spot_allocation_strategy = var.spot_allocation_strategy
spot_max_price = "" # Empty string is "on-demand price"
}
}
}
So what is all this then?
This is two Terraform resources; an aws_launch_template and an aws_autoscaling_group. These two resources define what should be launched by the autoscaling group, and then the settings for the autoscaling group.
You will need to work out what instance types you want to use (e.g. “must have 16 cores and 32 GB RAM, have an x86_64 architecture and allow up to 15 Gigabit/second throughput”)
When might you use this pattern?
If you have been seeing messages like “There is no Spot capacity available that matches your request.” or “We currently do not have sufficient <size> capacity in the Availability Zone you requested.” then you need to consider diversifying the fleet that you’re requesting for your autoscaling group. To do that, you need to specify more instance types. To achieve this, I’d use the above code to replace (something like) one of the code samples below.
Then this new method is a much better idea :) Even more so if you had two launch templates to support spot and non-spot instance types!
Hat-tip to former colleague Paul Moran who opened my eyes to defining your fleet of variable instance types, as well as to my former customer (deliberately unnamed) and my current employer who both stumbled into the same documentation issue. Without Paul’s advice with my prior customer’s issue I’d never have known what I was looking for this time around!
I have a small server running Docker for services at home. There are several services which will want to use HTTP, but I can’t have them all sharing the same port without a reverse proxy to manage how to route the traffic to the containers!
This is my guide to how I got Traefik set up to serve HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
The existing setup for one service
Currently, I have phpIPAM which has the following docker-compose.yml file:
The moment I want to bind another service to TCP/80, I get an error because we’ve already used TCP/80 for phpIPAM. Enter Traefik. Let’s stop the docker container with docker compose down and build our Traefik setup.
Traefik Setup
I always store my docker compose files in /opt/docker/<servicename>, so let’s create a directory for traefik; sudo mkdir -p /opt/docker/traefik
The (“dynamic”) configuration file
Next we need to create a configuration file called traefik.yaml
# Ensure all logs are sent to stdout for `docker compose logs`
accessLog: {}
log: {}
# Enable docker provider but don't switch it on by default
providers:
docker:
exposedByDefault: false
# Select this as the docker network to connect from traefik to containers
# This is defined in the docker-compose.yaml file
network: web
# Enable the API and Dashboard on TCP/8080
api:
dashboard: true
insecure: true
debug: true
# Listen on both HTTP and HTTPS
entryPoints:
http:
address: ":80"
http: {}
https:
address: ":443"
http:
tls: {}
With the configuration file like this, we’ll serve HTTPS traffic with a self-signed TLS certificate on TCP/443 and plain HTTP on TCP/80. We have a dashboard on TCP/8080 served over HTTP, so make sure you don’t expose *that* to the public internet!
The Docker-Compose File
Next we need the docker-compose file for Traefik, so let’s create docker-compose.yaml
There are a few parts here which aren’t spelled out on the Traefik quickstart! Firstly, if you don’t define a network, it’ll create one using the docker-compose file path, so probably traefik_traefik or traefik_default, which is not what we want! So, we’ll create one called “web” (but you can call it whatever you want. On other deployments, I’ve used the name “traefik” but I found it tedious to remember how to spell that each time). This network needs to be “attachable” so that other containers can use it later.
You then attach that network to the traefik service, and expose the ports we need (80, 443 and 8080).
And then start the container with docker compose up -d
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/traefik# docker compose up -d
[+] Running 2/2
✔ Network web Created 0.2s
✔ Container traefik-traefik-1 Started 1.7s
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/traefik#
Adding Traefik to phpIPAM
Going back to phpIPAM, So that Traefik can reach the containers, and so that the container can reach it’s database, we need two network statements now; the first is the “external” network for the traefik connection which we called “web“. The second is the inter-container network so that the “web” service can reach the “db” service, and so that the “cron” service can reach the “db” service. So we need to add that to the start of /opt/docker/phpipam/docker-compose.yaml, like this;
We then need to add both networks that to the “web” container, like this:
services:
web:
image: phpipam/phpipam-www:latest
networks:
- ipam
- web
# ...... and the rest of the config
Remove the “ports” block and replace it with an expose block like this:
services:
web:
# ...... The rest of the config for this service
## Don't bind to port 80 - we use traefik now
# ports:
# - "80:80"
## Do expose port 80 for Traefik to use
expose:
- 80
# ...... and the rest of the config
And just the inter-container network to the “cron” and “db” containers, like this:
cron:
image: phpipam/phpipam-cron:latest
networks:
- ipam
# ...... and the rest of the config
db:
image: mariadb:latest
networks:
- ipam
# ...... and the rest of the config
There’s one other set of changes we need to make in the “web” service, which are to enable Traefik to know that this is a container to look at, and to work out what traffic to send to it, and that’s to add labels, like this:
services:
web:
# ...... The rest of the config for this service
labels:
- traefik.enable=true
- traefik.http.routers.phpipam.rule=Host(`phpipam.homenet`)
# ...... and the rest of the config
Right, now we run docker compose up -d
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/phpipam# docker compose up -d
[+] Running 4/4
✔ Network ipam Created 0.4s
✔ Container phpipam-db-1 Started 1.4s
✔ Container phpipam-cron-1 Started 2.1s
✔ Container phpipam-web-1 Started 2.6s
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/phpipam#
If you notice, this doesn’t show to the web network being created (because it was already created by Traefik) but does bring up the container.
Checking to make sure it’s working
If we head to the Traefik dashboard (http://your-docker-server:8080) you’ll see the phpipam service identified there… yey!
Better TLS with Lets Encrypt
So, at home I actually have a DNS suffix that is a real DNS name. For the sake of the rest of this documentation, assume it’s homenet.sprig.gs (but it isn’t 😁).
This DNS space is hosted by Digital Ocean, so I can use a DNS Challenge with Lets Encrypt to provide hostnames which are not publically accessible. If you’re hosting with someone else, then that’s probably also available – check the Traefik documentation for your specific variables. The table on that page (as of 2023-12-30) shows the environment variables you need to pass to Traefik to get LetsEncrypt working.
As you can see here, I just need to add the value DO_AUTH_TOKEN, which is an API key. I went to the Digital Ocean console, and navigated to the API panel, and added a new “Personal Access Token”, like this:
Notice that the API key needed to provide both “Read” and “Write” capabilities, and has been given a name so I can clearly see it’s purpose.
Changing the traefik docker-compose.yaml file
In /opt/docker/traefik/docker-compose.yaml we need to add that new environment variable; DO_AUTH_TOKEN, like this:
services:
traefik:
# ...... The rest of the config for this service
environment:
DO_AUTH_TOKEN: dop_v1_decafbad1234567890abcdef....1234567890
# ...... and the rest of the config
Changing the traefik.yaml file
In /opt/docker/traefik/traefik.yaml we need to tell it to use Let’s Encrypt. Add this block to the end of the file:
Obviously change the email address to a valid one for you! I hit a few issues with the value specified in the documentation for delayBeforeCheck, as their value of “0” wasn’t long enough for the DNS value to be propogated around the network – 1 minute is enough though!
I also had to add the resolvers, as my local network has a caching DNS server, so I’d never have seen the updates! You may be able to remove both those values from your files.
Now you’ve made all the changes to the Traefik service, restart it with docker compose down ; docker compose up -d
Changing the services to use Lets Encrypt
We need to add one final label to the /opt/docker/phpipam/docker-compose.yaml file, which is this one:
services:
web:
# ...... The rest of the config for this service
labels:
- traefik.http.routers.phpipam.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt
# ...... and the rest of the config
Also, update your .rule=Host(`hostname`) to use the actual DNS name you want to be able to use, then restart the docker container.
phpIPAM doesn’t like trusting proxies, unless explicitly told to, so I also had add an environment variable IPAM_TRUST_X_FORWARDED=true to the /opt/docker/phpipam/docker-compose.yaml file too, because phpIPAM tried to write the HTTP scheme for any links which came up, based on what protocol it thought it was running – not what the proxy was telling it it was being accessed as!
Debugging any issues
If you have it all setup as per the above, and it isn’t working, go into /opt/docker/traefik/traefik.yaml and change the stanza which says log: {} to:
log:
level: DEBUG
Be aware though, this adds a LOT to your logs! (But you won’t see why your ACME requests have failed without it). Change it back to log: {} once you have it working again.
Adding your next service
I now want to add that second service to my home network – WordPress. Here’s /opt/docker/wordpress/docker-compose.yaml for that service;
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/wordpress# docker compose up -d
[+] Running 3/3
✔ Network wordpress Created 0.2s
✔ Container wordpress-mariadb-1 Started 3.0s
✔ Container wordpress-php-1 Started 3.8s
alpine-docker:/opt/docker/wordpress#
Tada!
One final comment – I never did work out how to make connections forceably upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS, so instead, I shut down port 80 in Traefik, and instead run this container.
At work last week, I finally solved an issue by writing some code, and I wanted to explain why I wrote it.
At it’s core, Kubernetes is an orchestrator which runs “Container Images”, which are structured filesystem snapshots, taken after running individual commands against a base system. These container images are stored in a container registry, and the most well known of these is the Docker registry, known as Docker Hub.
A registry can be public, meaning you don’t need credentials to get any images from it, or private. Some also offer a mixed-mode where you can make a certain number of requests without requiring authentication, but if you need more than that amount of requests, you need to provide credentials.
During the build-out of a new cluster, I discovered that the ECR (Elastic Container Registry) from AWS requires a new type of authentication – the Kubelet Credential Provider, which required the following changes:
In /etc/sysconfig/kubelet you provide these two switches; --image-credential-provider-bin-dir /usr/local/bin/image-credential-provider and --image-credential-provider-config /etc/kubernetes/image-credential-provider-config.json.
In /etc/kubernetes/image-credential-provider-config.json you provide a list of registries and the credential provider to use, which looks like this:
I will confess I made heavy use of ChatGPT to get a steer on certain aspects of how to write the code, but all the code is generic and there’s nothing proprietary in this code.
Using the Generic Credential Provider
Follow the steps above – change your Kubernetes environment to ensure you have the kubelet configuration changes and the JSON credential provider configuration put in the relevant parts of your tree. Set the “matchImages” values to include the registry in question – for dockerhub, I’d probably use ["docker.io", "*.docker.io"]
Download the generic-credential-provider script from Github, put it in the right path in your worker node’s filesystem (if you followed my notes above it’ll be in /usr/local/bin/image-credential-provider/generic-credential-provider but this is *your* system we’re talking about, not mine! You know your build better than I do!)
Create the /etc/kubernetes/registries directory – this can be changed by editing the script to use a new path, and for testing purposes there is a flag --credroot /some/new/path but that doesn’t work for the kubelet configuration file.
Create a credential file, for example, /etc/kubernetes/registries/example.org.json which contains this string: {"username":"token_username","password":"token_password"}. [Yes, it’s a plaintext credential. Make sure it’s scoped for only image downloads. No, this still isn’t very good. But how else would you do this?! (Pull requests are welcomed!)] You can add a duration value into that JSON dictionary, to change the default timeout from 5 minutes. Technically, the default is actually set in /etc/kubernetes/image-credential-provider-config.json but I wanted to have my own per-credential, and as these values are coming from the filesystem, and therefore has very little performance liability, I didn’t want to have a large delay in the cache.
You should also see an entry in your syslog service showing a line that says “Credential request fulfilled for your.registry.example.com” and if you pass it a check that it fails, it should say “Failed to fulfill credential request for failure.example.org“.
If this helped you, please consider buying me a drink to say thanks!
In my current role we are using Packer to build images on a Xen Orchestrator environment, use a CI/CD system to install that image into both a Xen Template and an AWS AMI, and then we use Terraform to use that image across our estate. The images we build with Packer have this stanza in it:
But, because Xen doesn’t track when a template is created, instead I needed to do something different. Enter get_xoa_template.sh.
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[ -z "$TEMPLATE_IS" ] && fail "Could not match this template" 4
if [ -n "$DEBUG" ]
then
echo "{\"is\": ${TEMPLATE_IS}}" | tee -a "$DEBUG"
else
echo "{\"is\": ${TEMPLATE_IS}}"
fi
}
[ -n "$(command -v xo-cli)" ] || fail "xo-cli is missing, and is a required dependency for this script. Please install it; \`sudo npm -g install xo-cli\`" 5
This script is invoked from your terraform like this:
variable "template_name" {
default = "SomeLinux-version.iso-"
description = "A regex, partial or full string to match in the template name"
}
variable "poolname" {
default = "MyPool"
}
data "external" "get_xoa_template" {
program = [
"/bin/bash", "${path.module}/get_xoa_template.sh",
"--template", var.template_name,
"--pool", var.poolname
]
}
data "xenorchestra_pool" "pool" {
name_label = var.poolname
}
data "xenorchestra_template" "template" {
name_label = data.external.get_xoa_template.result.is
pool_id = data.xenorchestra_pool.pool.id
}
And that’s how you do it. Oh, and if you need to pin to a specific version? Change the template_name value from the partial or regex version to the full version, like this:
variable "template_name" {
# This assumes your image was minted at midnight on 1970-01-01
default = "SomeLinux-version.iso-19700101000000"
}
In my current project I am often working with Infrastructure as Code (IoC) in the form of Terraform and Terragrunt files. Before I joined the team a decision was made to use SOPS from Mozilla, and this is encrypted with an AWS KMS key. You can only access specific roles using the SAML2AWS credentials, and I won’t be explaining how to set that part up, as that is highly dependant on your SAML provider.
While much of our environment uses AWS, we do have a small presence hosted on-prem, using a hypervisor service. I’ll demonstrate this with Proxmox, as this is something that I also use personally :)
Firstly, make sure you have all of the above tools installed! For one stage, you’ll also require yq to be installed. Ensure you’ve got your shell hook setup for direnv as we’ll need this later too.
Late edit 2023-07-03: There was a bug in v0.22.0 of the terraform which didn’t recognise the environment variables prefixed PROXMOX_VE_ – a workaround by using TF_VAR_PROXMOX_VE and a variable "PROXMOX_VE_" {} block in the Terraform code was put in place for the inital publication of this post. The bug was fixed in 0.23.0 which this post now uses instead, and so as a result the use of TF_VAR_ prefixed variables was removed too.
Set up AWS Vault
AWS KMS
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a service which generates and makes available encryption keys, backed by the AWS service. There are *lots* of ways to cut that particular cake, but let’s do this a quick and easy way… terraform
So far, so good… but wait, you’ve authenticated to your SAML access to AWS. Let’s close that shell, and go back in again
$ cd /path/to/demo
direnv: loading /path/to/demo/.envrc
direnv: using sops
$
Ah, now we don’t have our values exported. That’s what we wanted!
What now?!
Configuring the details of the proxmox cluster
We have our .envrc file which provides our credentials (let’s pretend we’re using a shared set of credentials across all the boxes), but now we need to setup access to each of the boxes.
Let’s make our two cluster directories;
mkdir cluster_01
mkdir cluster_02
And in each of these clusters, we need to put an .envrc file with the right IP address in. This needs to check up the tree for any credentials we may have already loaded:
source_env "$(find_up ../.envrc)"
export PROXMOX_VE_ENDPOINT="https://192.0.2.1:8006" # Documentation IP address for the first cluster - change for the second cluster.
The first line works up the tree, looking for a parent .envrc file to inject, and then, with the second line, adds the Proxmox API endpoint to the end of that chain. When we run direnv allow (having logged back into our saml2aws session), we get this:
Then in the cluster_01 directory, create a directory for the code you want to run (e.g. create a VLAN might be called “VLANs/30/“) and put in it this terragrunt.hcl
This assumes you have a terraform directory called terraform-module-network/vlan in a particular place in your tree or even better, a module in your git repo, which uses the input values you’ve provided.
That double slash in the source line isn’t a typo either – this is the point in that tree that Terragrunt will copy into the directory to run terraform from too.
A quick note about includes and provider blocks
The other key thing is that the “include” block loads the values from the first matching terragrunt.hcl file in the parent directories, which in this case is the one which defined the providers block. You can’t include multiple different parent files, and you can’t have multiple generate blocks either.
Running it all together!
Now we have all our depending files, let’s run it!
user@host:~$ cd test
direnv: loading ~/test/.envrc
direnv: using sops
user@host:~/test$ saml2aws login --skip-prompt --quiet ; saml2aws exec -- bash
direnv: loading ~/test/.envrc
direnv: using sops
direnv: export +PROXMOX_VE_USERNAME +PROXMOX_VE_PASSWORD
user@host:~/test$ cd cluster_01/VLANs/30
direnv: loading ~/test/cluster_01/.envrc
direnv: loading ~/test/.envrc
direnv: using sops
direnv: export +PROXMOX_VE_ENDPOINT +PROXMOX_VE_USERNAME +PROXMOX_VE_PASSWORD
user@host:~/test/cluster_01/VLANs/30$ terragrunt apply
data.proxmox_virtual_environment_nodes.available_nodes: Reading...
data.proxmox_virtual_environment_nodes.available_nodes: Read complete after 0s [id=nodes]
Terraform used the selected providers to generate the following execution
plan. Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
+ create
Terraform will perform the following actions:
# proxmox_virtual_environment_network_linux_bridge.this[0] will be created
+ resource "proxmox_virtual_environment_network_linux_bridge" "this" {
+ autostart = true
+ comment = "VLAN30"
+ id = (known after apply)
+ mtu = (known after apply)
+ name = "vmbr30"
+ node_name = "proxmox01"
+ ports = [
+ "enp3s0.30",
]
+ vlan_aware = (known after apply)
}
Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
Do you want to perform these actions?
Terraform will perform the actions described above.
Only 'yes' will be accepted to approve.
Enter a value: yes
proxmox_virtual_environment_network_linux_bridge.this[0]: Creating...
proxmox_virtual_environment_network_linux_bridge.this[0]: Creation complete after 2s [id=proxmox01:vmbr30]
user@host:~/test/cluster_01/VLANs/30$
Last week I created a post talking about the new project I’ve started on Github called “Terminate-Notice” (which in hindsight isn’t very accurate – at best it’s ‘spot-instance-responses’ and at worst it’s ‘instance-rebalance-and-actions-responder’ but neither work well)… Anyway, I mentioned how I was creating RPM and DEB packages for my bash scripts and that I hadn’t put it into a repo yet.
Well, now I have, so let’s wander through how I made this work.
I have a the following files in my shell script, which are:
/usr/sbin/terminate-notice (the actual script which will run)
/usr/lib/systemd/system/terminate-notice.service (the SystemD Unit file to start and stop the script)
/usr/share/doc/terminate-notice/LICENSE (the license under which the code is released)
/etc/terminate-notice.conf.d/service.conf (the file which tells the script how to run)
These live in the root directory of my repository.
I also have the .github directory (where the things that make this script work will live), a LICENSE file (so Github knows what license it’s released under) and a README.md file (so people visiting the repo can find out about it).
A bit about Github Actions
Github Actions is a CI/CD pipeline built into Github. It responds to triggers – in our case, pushes (or uploads, in old fashioned terms) to the repository, and then runs commands or actions. The actions which will run are stored in a simple YAML formatted file, referred to as a workflow which contains some setup fields and then the “jobs” (collections of actions) themselves. The structure is as follows:
# The pretty name rendered by Actions to refer to this workflow
name: Workflow Name
# Only run this workflow when the push is an annotated tag starting v
on:
push:
tags:
- 'v*'
# The workflow contains a collection of jobs, each of which has
# some actions (or "steps") to run
jobs:
# This is used to identify the output in other jobs
Unique_Name_For_This_Job:
# This is the pretty name rendered in the Github UI for this job
name: Job Name
# This is the OS that the job will run on - typically
# one of: ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest
runs-on: runner-os
# The actual actions to perform
steps:
# This is a YAML list, so note where the hyphens (-) are
# The pretty name of this step
- name: Checkout Code
# The name of the public collection of actions to perform
uses: actions/checkout@v3
# Any variables to pass into this action module
with:
path: "REPO"
# This action will run a shell command
- name: Run a command
run: echo "Hello World"
Build a DEB package
At the simplest point, creating a DEB package is;
Create the directory structure (as above) that will unpack from your package file and put the files in the right places.
Create a DEBIAN/control file which provides enough details for your package manager to handle it.
Run dpkg-deb --build ${PATH_TO_SOURCE} ${OUTPUT_FILENAME}
Assuming the DEBIAN/control file was static and also lived in the repo, and I were just releasing the DEB file, then I could make the above work with the following steps:
name: Create the DEB
permissions:
contents: write
on:
push:
tags:
- 'v*'
jobs:
Create_Packages:
name: Create Package
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
path: "REPO"
- name: Copy script files around to stop .github from being added to the package then build the package
run: |
mkdir PKG_SOURCE
cp -Rf REPO/usr REPO/etc REPO/DEBIAN PKG_SOURCE
dpkg-deb --build PKG_SOURCE package.deb
- name: Release the Package
uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
with:
files: package.deb
But no, I had to get complicated and ALSO build an RPM file… and put some dynamic stuff in there.
Build an RPM file
RPMs are a little more complex, but not by much. RPM takes a spec file, which starts off looking like the DEBIAN/control file, and adds some “install” instructions. Let’s take a look at that spec file:
The “Name”, “Version”, “Release” and “BuildArch” values in the top of that file define what the resulting filename is (NAME_VERSION-RELEASE.BUILDARCH.rpm).
Notice that there are some “macros” which replace /etc with %{_sysconfdir}, /usr/sbin with %{_sbindir} and so on, which means that, theoretically, this RPM could be installed in an esoteric tree… but most people won’t bother.
The one quirk with this is that %{name} bit there – RPM files need to have all these sources in a directory named after the package name, which in turn is stored in a directory called SOURCES (so SOURCES/my-package for example), and then it copies the files to wherever they need to go. I’ve listed etc/config/file and usr/sbin/script but these could just have easily been file and script for all that the spec file cares.
Once you have the spec file, you run sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb file.spec to build the RPM.
So, again, how would that work from a workflow YAML file perspective, assuming a static spec and source tree as described above?
name: Create the DEB
permissions:
contents: write
on:
push:
tags:
- 'v*'
jobs:
Create_Packages:
name: Create Package
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
path: "REPO"
- name: Copy script files around to stop .github from being added to the package then build the package
run: |
mkdir -p SOURCES/my-package-name
cp -Rf REPO/usr REPO/etc SOURCES/my-package-name
sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb my-package-name.spec
- name: Release the Package
uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
with:
files: RPMS/my-package-name_0.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
But again, I want to be fancy (and I want to make resulting packages as simple to repeat as possible)!
So, this is my release.yml as of today:
name: Run the Release
permissions:
contents: write
on:
push:
tags:
- 'v*'
jobs:
Create_Packages:
name: Create Packages
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
path: "REPO"
- name: Calculate some variables
run: |
(
echo "GITHUB_REPO_NAME=$(echo "${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}" | cut -d/ -f2)"
echo "VERSION=$(echo "${GITHUB_REF_NAME}" | sed -e 's/^v//')"
echo "DESCRIPTION=A script which polls the AWS Metadata Service looking for an 'instance action', and triggers scripts in response to the termination notice."
echo "DEB_ARCHITECTURE=${ARCHITECTURE:-all}"
echo "RPM_ARCHITECTURE=${ARCHITECTURE:-noarch}"
echo "RELEASE=1"
cd REPO
echo "FIRST_YEAR=$(git log $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD) --date="format:%Y" --format="format:%ad")"
echo "THIS_COMMIT_YEAR=$(git log HEAD -n1 --date="format:%Y" --format="format:%ad")"
echo "THIS_COMMIT_DATE=$(git log HEAD -n1 --format="format:%as")"
if [ "$FIRST_YEAR" = "$THIS_COMMIT_YEAR" ]
then
echo "YEAR_RANGE=$FIRST_YEAR"
else
echo "YEAR_RANGE=${FIRST_YEAR}-${THIS_COMMIT_YEAR}"
fi
cd ..
) >> $GITHUB_ENV
- name: Make Directory Structure
run: mkdir -p "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}" SPECS release
- name: Copy script files into SOURCES
run: |
cp -Rf REPO/[a-z]* "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}"
cp REPO/LICENSE REPO/README.md "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/usr/share/doc/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/"
if grep -lr '#TAG#' SOURCES
then
sed -i -e "s/#TAG#/${VERSION}/" $(grep -lr '#TAG#' SOURCES)
fi
if grep -lr '#TAG_DATE#' SOURCES
then
sed -i -e "s/#TAG_DATE#/${THIS_COMMIT_YEAR}/" $(grep -lr '#TAG_DATE#' SOURCES)
fi
if grep -lr '#DATE_RANGE#' SOURCES
then
sed -i -e "s/#DATE_RANGE#/${YEAR_RANGE}/" $(grep -lr '#DATE_RANGE#' SOURCES)
fi
if grep -lr '#MAINTAINER#' SOURCES
then
sed -i -e "s/#MAINTAINER#/${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}/" $(grep -lr '#MAINTAINER#' SOURCES)
fi
- name: Create Control File
# Fields from https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#binary-package-control-files-debian-control
run: |
mkdir -p SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN
(
echo "Package: ${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}"
echo "Version: ${VERSION}"
echo "Section: ${SECTION:-misc}"
echo "Priority: ${PRIORITY:-optional}"
echo "Architecture: ${DEB_ARCHITECTURE}"
if [ -n "${DEPENDS}" ]
then
echo "Depends: ${DEPENDS}"
fi
echo "Maintainer: ${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}"
echo "Description: ${DESCRIPTION}"
if [ -n "${HOMEPAGE}" ]
then
echo "Homepage: ${HOMEPAGE}"
fi
) | tee SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN/control
(
echo "Files:"
echo " *"
echo "Copyright: ${YEAR_RANGE} ${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}"
echo "License: MIT"
echo ""
echo "License: MIT"
sed 's/^/ /' "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/usr/share/doc/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/LICENSE"
) | tee SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN/copyright
- name: Create Spec File
run: PATH="REPO/.github/scripts:${PATH}" create_spec_file.sh
- name: Build DEB Package
run: dpkg-deb --build SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME} "${{ env.GITHUB_REPO_NAME }}_${{ env.VERSION }}_${{ env.DEB_ARCHITECTURE }}.deb"
- name: Build RPM Package
run: sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb SPECS/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}.spec
- name: Confirm builds complete
run: sudo install -m 644 -o runner -g runner $(find . -type f -name *.deb && find . -type f -name *.rpm) release/
- name: Release
uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
with:
files: release/*
So this means I can, within reason, drop this workflow (plus a couple of other scripts to generate the slightly more complex RPM file – see the other files in that directory structure) into another package to release it.
OH WAIT, I DID! (for the terminate-notice-slack repo, for example!) All I actually needed to do there was to change the description line, and off it went!
So, this is all well and good, but how can I distribute these? Enter Repositories.
Making a Repository
Honestly, I took most of the work here from two fantastic blog posts for creating an RPM repo and a DEB repo.
First you need to create a GPG key.
To do this, I created the following pgp-key.batch file outside my repositories tree
%echo Generating an example PGP key
Key-Type: RSA
Key-Length: 4096
Name-Real: YOUR_ORG_NAME
Name-Email: your_org_name@users.noreply.github.com
Expire-Date: 0
%no-ask-passphrase
%no-protection
%commit
Store the public.asc file to one side (you’ll need it later) and keep the private.asc safe because we need to put that into Github.
Creating Github Pages
Create a new Git repository in your organisation called your-org.github.io. This marks the repository as being a Github Pages repository. Just to make that more explicit, in the settings for the repository, go to the pages section. (Note that yes, the text around this may differ, but are accurate as of 2023-03-28 in EN-GB localisation.)
Under “Source” select “GitHub Actions”.
Clone this repository to your local machine, and copy public.asc into the root of the tree with a sensible name, ending .asc.
In the Github settings, find “Secrets and variables” under “Security” and pick “Actions”.
Select “New repository secret” and call it “PRIVATE_KEY”.
Now you can use this to sign things (and you will sign *SO MUCH* stuff)
Building the HTML front to your repo (I’m using Jekyll)
I’ve elected to use Jekyll because I know it, and it’s quite easy, but you should pick what works for you. My workflow for deploying these repos into the website rely on Jekyll because Github built that integration, but you’ll likely find other tools for things like Eleventy or Hugo.
Put a file called _config.yml into the root directory, and fill it with relevant content:
title: your-org
email: email_address@example.org
description: >-
This project does stuff.
baseurl: ""
url: "https://your-org.github.io"
github_username: your-org
# Build settings
theme: minima
plugins:
- jekyll-feed
exclude:
- tools/
- doc/
Naturally, make “your-org” “email_address@example.org” and the descriptions more relevant to your environment.
Next, create an index.md file with whatever is relevant for your org, but it must start with something like:
---
layout: home
title: YOUR-ORG Website
---
Here is the content for the front page.
Building the repo behind your static content
We’re back to working with Github Actions workflow files, so let’s pop that open.
I’ve basically changed the “stock” Jekyll static site Github Actions file and added every step that starts [REPO] to make the repository stuff fit in around the steps that start [JEKYLL] which build and deploy the Jekyll based site.
The key part to all this though is the step Build DEB and RPM repos which calls a script that downloads all the RPM and DEB files from the various other repository build stages and does some actions to them. Now yes, I could have put all of this into the workflow.yml file, but I think it would have made it all a bit more confusing! So, let’s work through those steps!
Making an RPM Repo
To build a RPM repo you get and sign each of the RPM packages you want to offer. You do this with this command:
Then, once you have all your RPM files signed, you then run a command called createrepo_c (available in Debian archives – Github Actions doesn’t have a RedHat based distro available at this time, so I didn’t look for the RPM equivalent). This creates the repository metadata, and finally you sign that file, like this:
gpg --detach-sign --armor repodata/repomd.xml
Making a DEB Repo
To build a DEB repo you get each of the DEB packages you want to offer in a directory called pool/main (you can also call “main” something else – for example “contrib”, “extras” and so on).
Once you have all your files, you create another directory called dists/stable/main/binary-all into which we’ll run a command dpkg-scanpackages to create the list of the available packages. Yes, “main” could also be called “contrib”, “extras” and “stable” could be called “testing” or “preprod” or the name of your software release (like “jaunty”, “focal” or “warty”). The “all” after the word “binary” is the architecture in question.
dpkg-scanpackages creates an index of the packages in that directory including the version number, maintainer and the cryptographic hashes of the DEB files.
We zip (using gzip and bzip2) the Packages file it creates to improve the download speeds of these files, and then make a Release file. This in turn has the cryptographic hashes of each of the Packages and zipped Packages files, which in turn is then signed with GPG.
Ugh, that was MESSY
Making the repository available to your distributions
RPM repos have it quite easy here – there’s a simple file, that looks like this:
The distribution user simply downloads this file, puts it into /etc/yum.sources.d/org-name.repo and now all the packages are available for download. Woohoo!
DEB repos are a little harder.
First, download the public key – https://org-name.github.io/public.asc and put it in /etc/apt/keyrings/org-name.asc. Next, create file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/org-name.list with this line in:
deb [arch=all signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/org-name.asc] https://org-name.github.io/deb stable main
And now they can install whatever packages they want too!
Doing this the simple way
Of course, this is all well-and-good, but if you’ve got a simple script you want to package, please don’t hesitate to use the .github directory I’m using for terminate-notice, which is available in the -skeleton repo and then to make it into a repo, you can reuse the .github directory in the terminate-notice.github.io repo to start your adventure.
