Contributing to Free Software using Open Source methodics may look like intimidating deep expert work. But it doesn’t have to be that. Most Free Software communities are friendly to newcomers, and welcome all kind of contributions

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Contributing to Free Software using Open Source methodics may look like intimidating deep expert work. But it doesn’t have to be that. Most Free Software communities are friendly to newcomers, and welcome all kind of contributions.

Reporting bugs

Hitting a bug is an opportunity, not a nasty problem. When you hit a bug, it should be reported, and with a bit of luck, it may even be fixed. Reporting the bug in an open forum also makes other users find the bug, give attention to it, and they may in turn be able to help out working around or fixing it. Reporting bugs is the most basic, but still of the most valuable contributions you may do. Finding bugs are finding real problems. Reporting bugs are helping fixing them, for you, and for other users. You may not complain to your coworker on a bug unless it is reported upstream.

While reporting bugs, remember to collect as much information as possible on the issue, including logs, runtime envionment, hardware, operating system version, etc. While collecting this information, make sure you don’t send any traceable private information that may be used by rouge parties, like ip adresses, hostnames, passwords, customer details, database names, etc.

Bugs in operating system packages

Bugs in components delivered by a Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE, etc), should be reported through their bug reporting interface. Remember to search for the bug before posting yet another duplicate bug. Perhaps a workaround already exists.

So the next time something strange happens to your haproxy, nginx, varnish, or your firefox browser crashes or has unexpected behaviour, collect data from your logs, and open a bug report.

Red Hat / EPEL / Fedora users should report bugs through https://bugzilla.redhat.com/

Similarly, OpenSuSE users may search for and report bugs at https://bugzilla.opensuse.org

Ubuntu users may have luck looking at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

As Ubuntu’s upstream is Debian, you may search for bugs, fixes and workarounds using their tools at https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

These tools have detailed guidelines on the details on how to search, report, and follow up the bugs.

For an example of an end user bug report with an impressive follow up from a dedicated package maintainer, have a look at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1914917

Reporting upstream bugs

Using software directly from the upstream project is growing more usual, specially as container technology has matured, enabling developers to use software components without interfering with the underlying operating system. Reporting and follow up bugs becomes even more important, as such components may not be filtered and quality assured by operating system security teams.

Find your component’s upstream home page or project development page, usually on Github, Savannah, Gitlab, or similar code repo service. These services have specialised issue trackers made for reporting and following up bugs and other issues. Some projects only has good old mailing lists. They may require you to subscribe to the list before you are allowed to report anything.

Following up the report, you may be asked for test cases and debugging. You will learn a lot in the process. Do not be shy to ask for help, or admitting that you don’t understand or need guidance. Everybody started somewhere. Even you may learn to use the GNU debugger (gdb) in time.

Non code commits

Similarly to reporting bugs, non code commits may be low-hanging fruit to you, but may be crucial to a project’s success. If you can write technical documentation, howtos, or do translations to your native language, such contributions to Free Software are extremely welcome. Even trivial stuff like fixing typos in a translated piece of software should be reported. No fix is too small. I once did a single word commit to GPG: A single word typo fix in their Norwegian translation. Also, write blog posts. Don’t have a blog yet? Get one. Free blog platforms are thirteen to a dozen.

Use source code tools

Admit it: You already use git in your day job. Using it for documentation or translation should be trivial. If you have not done so already, learn how to clone a project on github (just google it), grep through the source for what you like to fix or add, make a branch with your contribution, and ask for a pull request (again, just google it). If you changes are not merged at once, be patient, ask for the maintainer’s advice, and listen to their guidelines. Be proud of your contribution, but humble in your request.

Feature requests

Usage of a piece of software is not given from the start. Perhaps you have ideas to how a piece of code may be used in some other way, or there is some piece missing that is obvious to you, though not reported in the project’s future roadmap. Don’t be shy to ask. Report a feature request. Usually this is done the same way as reporting a bug. The worst you can get is that they are not interested, or a request for you to produce the missing code. Which you may do.

Join a project

If your work require it, and/or your interests and free time to spend allows for it, join a Free Software project.

Distribution work

Upstream distributions like Fedora, Debian, and OpenSuse (not to mention Arch and Gentoo) are always looking for volunteers, and have sub projects for packagers, documentation, translation, and even marketing. As long time players in the field, they have great documentation for getting started. Remember to be patient, ask for advice, follow guidelines. Be proud of your contributions, but humble in your requests.

Upstream projects

If you want to join a project, show your interest. Join the project’s social and technical forums. Subscribe to their development email lists. Join their IRC channels. Lurk for a while, absorbing the project’s social codes. Some projects are technoraties, and may seem hostile to newbie suggestions without code to back them up. Others are welcoming and supportive. Do some small work showing what you are capable of. Fix things in their wiki documentation. Create pull requests for simple fixes. Join in their discussion. Grow your fame. Stay humble. Listen the long time players.

Release your own

Made a cool script at work? A build recipe for some special case? An Ansible playbook automating som often-visited task? A puppet module? Ask your manager for permission to release it as Free Software. Put GPLv3 or some other OSS license on it, and put it on Github. Make a blog post about it. Tell about it in social media. Congratulations, you are now an open source project maintainer. Also, Google will find it, and so will other users.

There are many steps to take on the path to automation. Some are easier, some not so much.

One less popular step is documentation. Yes - the documentation you haven’t written. You know what I mean.

No matter how well written your code is, there usually is a gap between today’s YOU and the future YOU, who has to work with and pick up what you leave behind.

This is usually also the reason for writing the documentation last. Better ...

All our customers have an online presence. A subset of these have higher demands when it comes to latency and reliability than others. Sometimes this is purely because of high amount of real end-user traffic - and sometimes it’s more malicious; A DDOS-attack.

In most OpenStack-configurations, you have the concept of «port security». This is a firewall enforced on the network interface of the virtual instance. It is also there to prevent a malicious self-service user from spoofing their IP ...

Scenario: I had the need for a small tool that would parse logfiles of approximately 6 million lines. To each line apply two regexps to extract a few values, and using two separate dictionaries/hashmaps (choose your poison wrt terminology) calculate how many times each capture group int he regexp shows up.

All in all, this is not going to be a very performance critical run, as it will only parse about 4 times these 6 million lines per day, so even at worst case we're talking less than 100M regexp matches per day. Piece of cake for any language. And since it's a weekend and I don't have any time when I have to deliver this finished script, I set out to prove to myself that python is going to be fast enough for this.

In the beginning of 2019 Oracle stopped releasing free-of-charge updates to their JDK, except for personal use. At the same time Oracle started requiring a subscription for Oracle JDK use in production environments. In this blog post we will look into OpenJDK as an alternative to the Oracle provided JDK and how one would migrate to it.

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The Suricata IDS is an extremely nice piece of software with multiple deployment scenarios, including inline and with mirroring or taps. The process itself usually runs without any problems, but as with any setup with multiple moving parts there are things that can go wrong. Monitoring and making sure the Suricata processes itself is easy […]

I’ve recently revamped my home network security monitoring. Currently I’m capturing and streaming all network traffic on my MikroTik router’s outside interface to a remote sensor, namely a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM running Suricata IDS. Suricata’s log is read by Elastic’s Filebeat and shipped to an Elasticsearch instance, making the data available […]

Now we continue improving the VPC template from my previous blog entry “Starting with Cloudformation templates”

What we ended up with there was a VPC with one subnet connected to the Internet. Or what is know in AWS lingo as a “Public Subnet”.

The goal now is a VPC with presence in tree Availability Zones with a “Public Subnet” in each, and a “Private Subnet” in each as well.

Humble beginnings

Before we go all out on tree ...

I’ve recently revamped my home network security monitoring. Currently I’m capturing and streaming all network traffic on my MikroTik router’s outside interface to a remote sensor, namely a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM running Suricata IDS. Suricata’s log is read by Elastic’s Filebeat and shipped to an Elasticsearch instance, making the data available […]

I’ve recently revamped my home network security monitoring. Currently I’m capturing and streaming all network traffic on my MikroTik router’s outside interface to a remote sensor, namely a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM running Suricata IDS. Suricata’s log is read by Elastic’s Filebeat and shipped to an Elasticsearch instance, making the data available […]

The number of great webservers on our toolbelt is constantly growing. From the venerable Apache httpd over lighttpd to nginx - and for the reverse proxy space pound, varnish and also nginx - the number just keeps growing. Caddy is a newcomer in this field, yet its features are already impressive. Lets take a brief look.

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In a samba setup where users and groups are fetched from Active Directory to be used in a unix/linux environment, AD may prohibit the samba winbind tools like wbinfo to recurse into its group structure. You may get groups and users and their corresponding gids and uids, but you may not get the members of a group.

It is usually possible to do the opposite, that is, probing a user object and get the groups that user is member of. Here is a little script that collects all users, probing AD for the groups of each and every user, and sorting and putting it together. In perl of course.

https://github.com/ingvarha/groupmembers

The plan

One of Redpill Linpro’s customers - had parts of their web presence managed by another provider - “P”. The customer wanted to migrate the server operations to Redpill Linpro (“RL”), including moving their Elasticsearch cluster to Redpill Linpro’s Elasticsearch offering, preferrably without downtime. While exporting and importing by using snapshots was an option, the better option would be a live migration.

A really useful Elasticsearch feature is the capability ...

Working from home encourages home office optimization. During the COVID-19 period, with way more video conferences than usual, certain improvements were found necessary. I guess everyone that’s been in a video meeting where more than one participant used a regular mic and regular speakers has experienced the wonders of audio feedback. That prompted me to […]

As we saw in the introduction to ActiveMQ Artemis post, in ActiveMQ Artemis the implementation is separated from the configuration and data, requiring one to create a broker instance after installation of the implementation. One of the advantages of doing this, is that it makes upgrades much easier. Lets take a detailed look at that now.

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Apache ActiveMQ is a modern, open source messaging platform. For years now, the community has been working on the successor to the venerable ActiveMQ - now sometimes referred to as ActiveMQ classic.

The new project is named ActiveMQ Artemis, at least until the time that it will be re-branded as ActiveMQ 6.0. Apparently that will happen once ActiveMQ Artemis has all features of ActiveMQ, but since no one knows if and when this feature parity is achieved lets take a look at ActiveMQ Artemis - the future of the ActiveMQ project.

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This is not the place to tell anyone why Infrastructure as Code is a good idea. For that I can point the potential readers to a blog by my colleague Yngve about that: Why code your infrastructure?

I a short series of blogs, I intend to demonstrate building infrastructure in AWS in steps, where I will be building upon previous entries. Basic knowledge of network and VPC is assumed.

Note that following these instructions can and will incur costs ...

I'm sure everybody is aware you can have PostgreSQL fetch data live across the internet (or locally of course) as part of your queries and use the data directly. In fact there are a large number of drivers available to access different kinds of data for download. But in the simplest case, we can also just use the file_fdw wrapper that's included in the standard PostgreSQL packages, together with everybody's http-swiss-army-knife, curl.

In attempting to adapt this post for the public, what more time-relevant dataset to work off in these pandemic-affected times than the open data provided by the ECDC, being both open data and very current. In particular for this example, they provide public datasets with COVID numbers from across the world (actual public data, requiring no registration to read, and actual data, not just a limited API).

So, let's see how we can access this data from PostgreSQL:

CREATE EXTENSION file_fdw;

CREATE SERVER curly FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER file_fdw;

CREATE FOREIGN TABLE _rawdata (
 daterep text not null,
 day int not null,
 month int not null,
 year int not null,
 cases int not null,
 deaths int not null,
 countries text not null,
 geoid text not null,
 countrycode text null,
 popdata int null,
 continent text not null,
 cumulative14days float null
)
SERVER curly
OPTIONS (
 PROGRAM 'curl -s https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv/',
 FORMAT 'csv',
 HEADER 'on'
);

And to use this we can simply query the foreign table, which will then trigger a http GET of the data:

covid=# SELECT count(*) FROM _rawdata;
 count 
-------
 41837
(1 row)

However, there is an unfortunate interaction with LIMIT. So if we for example try to get just the first 10 rows:

covid=# SELECT * FROM _rawdata LIMIT 10;
ERROR:  program "curl -s https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv/" failed
DETAIL:  child process exited with exit code 23

I’m sure everybody is aware you can have PostgreSQL fetch data live across the internet (or locally of course) as part of your queries and use the data directly. In fact there are a large number of drivers available to access different kinds of data for download. But in the simplest case, we can also just use the file_fdw wrapper that’s included in the standard PostgreSQL packages, together with everybody’s http-swiss-army-knife, curl.

In attempting to adapt this ...

So, you have a partitioned table. And you want to change your mind. Re-partitioning is "easy" if you can take downtime -- just create a new table with a new name and copy all the data over. But what if we want to try to do it without downtime? Logical replication enhancements in PostgreSQL 13 brings us some new options for this!

But first a disclaimer -- this is definitely not pretty! And does not take into consideration things like foreign keys and similar. But sometimes a quick hack can be the best hack.

So let's go!

As always, scammers and phishers use newsworthy events to their advantage. The coronavirus pandemic is no exception. All over the worlds, security researchers observe phishing and scam attempts. Samples for studying and for awareness training are collected at various sites, including https://coronavirusphishing.com/. A large number of security researchers have joined forces to establish a cyber […]

When we introduced the network configuration using Ansible and AWX at a customer, we gradually extended the configuration scope. Over time, more and more configuration got added into the configuration pool and this lead to longer and longer run-times for the playbooks.

While the job-execution got really simple by using AWX instead of the plain CLI method for Ansible, the time to finish drew heavily on that benefit.

A complete job-run over the network infrastructure took at least ...

We’ve been to FOSDEM in Belgium this year. A couple of Many of Redpill’s Agents (so called: Consultants) have made the trip to Belgium to join the annual conference taking place at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

This year the conference was held during the first weekend in February, at the 1st and 2nd.

For those who don’t know: FOSDEM is a free software developer conference where you can attend talks about various different tools, processes and ideas and ...

One of my honeypots runs INetSim which, among many other services, emulates an SMTP server. The honeypot is frequently used by spammers who think they’ve found a mail server with easily guessed usernames and passwords. Obviously I’m logging the intruders’ activities, so I’m shipping the logs to Elasticsearch using Filebeat. Shipping the regular INetSim activity […]