The FreeBSD Developer Summit Day One was live streamed yesterday and the video is up on YouTube at May 2024 Developer Summit Day 1.
I will be watching Day Two live as well, and I love how FreeBSD brings us all together.
The FreeBSD Developer Summit Day One was live streamed yesterday and the video is up on YouTube at May 2024 Developer Summit Day 1.
I will be watching Day Two live as well, and I love how FreeBSD brings us all together.
A while back I asked Daniel Jalkut for a feature. Today, I saw this
MarsEdit 5.2: Search, Microposting, and Preview Improvements –:
Micropost Panel
New defaults are available under Settings -> Blogs -> Publishing to specify which Categories, Tags, and Post Kind should be used when publishing with the Micropost panel.
This made me so happy, as I’ve been loving MarsEdit for the last year or so. I know, I’m late to the party, but I can assure you, it’s still rockin’.
I might actually blog more now, but let’s not keep promises that we can’t keep, shall we?
The title is pretty self explanatory, so let’s get to it, shall we?
I was configuring a server for a customer today, and one of the things I noticed is that FreeBSD was not available for bare-metal.
This got me a bit worried, because we use a lot of FreeBSD on Vultr… Well that’s a lie. We only use FreeBSD on Vultr.
I logged into our company account and noticed that our bare-metals does have FreeBSD as an icon for the image.
So I decided to check the docs and found this:
What operating system templates do you offer?
We offer many Linux and Windows options. We do not offer OpenBSD or FreeBSD images for Vultr Bare Metal. Use our iPXE boot feature if you need to install a custom operating system.
Well, that’s sad, but on the other hand, iPXE will be very useful. We can boot a memdisk such as mfsBSD and install FreeBSD from there.
To start, we need a VM that can host the mfsBSD img/ISO file. I have spun up a VM on Vultr running FreeBSD (altho it can run anything else, it wouldn’t matter), installed nginx on it, downloaded the file so we can boot from it. Here’s the copy-pasta
pkg install -y nginx
service nginx enable && service nginx start
fetch -o /usr/local/www/ \
https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/files/images/14/amd64/mfsbsd-se-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.img
This should be enough to get started. Oh, if you’re not on FreeBSD then the path might be different, like /var/www/nginx
, or something alike. Check your nginx configuration for the details.
Now we need to write an iPXE script and add it into our Vultr iPXE scripts. Here’s what it looks like
#!ipxe echo Starting MFSBSD sanboot http://your.server.ip.address/mfsbsd-se-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.img boot
Finally, we can create a bare-metal that uses our script for iPXE boot.
Don’t forget to choose the right location and plan.
After the machine is provisioned, you need to access the console and you will see the boot process.
The default root password is mfsroot
.
To install FreeBSD, you can run bsdinstall
. The rest will be familiar for you. Yes, you can use Root-on-ZFS. No, it can’t be in UEFI, you must use GPT (BIOS)
.
Good luck, and special thanks to Vultr for giving us the chance to use our favorite tools on the public cloud.
That’s all folks…
We have moved the Vishap Oberon Compiler GitHub organization to vishapoberon, this is part of our new rebranding. The new domain will be vishap.oberon.am
and we will finally have some ecosystem up and running, such as OberonByExample
, official guide, docs, and compiler internals.
As a cautious hacker, I also created another organization that uses the old org name, since GitHub still allows org/repo hijacking.
Also, we have a new library coming soon, I think the scientific community will love it, as it computes 150x faster than the most common alternative.
This AI thing has been going on for a while, specially the LLM part of it. I understand why there is hype for it, specially from VCs, and mostly from people who *checks notes* are not in the high-techs.
My students are using a lot of ChatGPT (and the others too) and I keep telling them to not use it, not because I don’t want them to use LLMs at all, but because LLMs suck. They are just an interface to a computer, and if you’ve ever done computer programming, you know that a computer does what you tell, not what you mean.
As a beginner (in Software Engineering, System Administration, etc) you still don’t know what you want a computer to do, that’s why you tell a program what you mean, instead of what it should do. We can see this problem everywhere. Here’s a real-life example from today.
I’m using the nginx web server, I’d like to allow only the domain example.com, reject everything else
What my student meant, is that, if you access the nginx web server via an IP address, then it should show nothing, if it’s a specific domain, such as example.com, then it should show the web page.
What ChatGPT understood is about access control and suggested the following
location / { root /usr/local/www/nginx/; index index.html index.htm; allow example.com; deny all; }
As a beginner, my student thought “well, that was easy!”, and then he kept wondering why he can’t access his web server, for 2 days.
And that is why you should not use ChatGPT (or any kind of an LLM) as a beginner.
As soon as you understand how a computer works, then go on, use whatever you want. Hell, even use JavaScript. But before using ChatGPT or JavaScript, please learn how a computer works first.
Well, Twitter is officially useless. All I get is engagement posts like “Do you use X or Y?” and the X or the Y are options such as Coke or Pepsi.
I know that they are different things, but the right answer here is water, or tea, or coffee.
And I keep changing from “For You” to “Following” but for some reason Twitter (currently known as X) keeps changing it back to “For You”.
I had to log out. Sorry Twitter, you were an important part of our life, but not anymore.
On the other hand, my Mastodon feed is really nice. There are some political things here and there that irritate me, but I care about what my friends have to say, even if I don’t agree with everything.
This is a live blogging of the installation process of DFIR-IRIS on FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE using Jails and Jailer.
The main requirements are:
I assume you already have nginx up and running, we will just be setting up a vhost under the domain name dfir.cert.am
. Don’t worry, this is INSIDE our infrastructure, you will not be able to connect to it 🙂
First we create a jail named iris0
, using Jailer:
jailer create iris0
Next we install the required software inside of the jail. Looks like everything is available in FreeBSD packages:
jailer console iris0
pkg install \ nginx \ python39 \ py39-pip \ gnupg \ 7-zip \ rsync \ postgresql12-client \ git-tiny \ libxslt \ rust \ acme.sh
Since we’re using FreeBSD, we’ll be doing things the right way instead of the Docker way, so we will be running IRIS as a user, not as root.
pw user add iris -m
Next we setup some directories and checkout the repo
root@iris0:~ # pw user add iris -m
root@iris0:~ # su - iris iris@iris0:~ $ git clone --branch v2.4.7 https://github.com/dfir-iris/iris-web.git iris-web
Finally, we install some python dependencies using pip.
iris@iris0:~ $ cd iris-web/source
iris@iris0:~/iris-web/source $ pip install -r requirements.txt
Now we have to configure the
file based on our needs, I will post my version of it, I hope it helps.
env
# -- DATABASE export POSTGRES_USER=postgres export POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres export POSTGRES_DB=iris_db export POSTGRES_ADMIN_USER=iris export POSTGRES_ADMIN_PASSWORD=longpassword export POSTGRES_SERVER=localhost export POSTGRES_PORT=5432 # -- IRIS export DOCKERIZED=0 export IRIS_SECRET_KEY=verylongsecret export IRIS_SECURITY_PASSWORD_SALT=verylongsalt export IRIS_UPSTREAM_SERVER=app # these are for docker, you can ignore export IRIS_UPSTREAM_PORT=8000 # -- WORKER export CELERY_BROKER=amqp://localhost # Set to your rabbitmq instance # Change these as you need them. # -- AUTH #IRIS_AUTHENTICATION_TYPE=local ## optional #IRIS_ADM_PASSWORD=MySuperAdminPassword! #IRIS_ADM_API_KEY=B8BA5D730210B50F41C06941582D7965D57319D5685440587F98DFDC45A01594 #IRIS_ADM_EMAIL=admin@localhost #IRIS_ADM_USERNAME=administrator # requests the just-in-time creation of users with ldap authentification (see https://github.com/dfir-iris/iris-web/issues/203) #IRIS_AUTHENTICATION_CREATE_USER_IF_NOT_EXIST=True # the group to which newly created users are initially added, default value is Analysts #IRIS_NEW_USERS_DEFAULT_GROUP= # -- LISTENING PORT #INTERFACE_HTTPS_PORT=443
We can use acme.sh to issue a TLS certificate from Lets Encrypt.
root@iris0:~ # acme.sh --set-default-ca --server letsencrypt root@iris0:~ # acme.sh --issue -d dfir.cert.am --standalone root@iris0:~ # acme.sh -i -d dfir.cert.am --fullchain-file /usr/local/etc/ssl/dfir.cert.am/fullchain.pem --key-file /usr/local/etc/ssl/dfir.cert.am/key.pem --reloadcmd 'service nginx reload'
DFIR-IRIS provides a nginx configuration template at nginx.conf, we will be using that, with a little bit of modifications.
The final nginx.conf will look like this:
#user nobody; worker_processes 1; # This default error log path is compiled-in to make sure configuration parsing # errors are logged somewhere, especially during unattended boot when stderr # isn't normally logged anywhere. This path will be touched on every nginx # start regardless of error log location configured here. See # https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/147 for more info. # #error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; # #pid logs/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; # Things needed/recommended by DFIR-IRIS map $request_uri $csp_header { default "default-src 'self' https://analytics.dfir-iris.org; script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://analytics.dfir-iris.org; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';"; } server_tokens off; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; types_hash_max_size 2048; types_hash_bucket_size 128; proxy_headers_hash_max_size 2048; proxy_headers_hash_bucket_size 128; proxy_buffering on; proxy_buffers 8 16k; proxy_buffer_size 4k; client_header_buffer_size 2k; large_client_header_buffers 8 64k; client_body_buffer_size 64k; client_max_body_size 100M; reset_timedout_connection on; keepalive_timeout 90s; client_body_timeout 90s; send_timeout 90s; client_header_timeout 90s; fastcgi_read_timeout 90s; # WORKING TIMEOUT FOR PROXY CONF proxy_read_timeout 90s; uwsgi_read_timeout 90s; gzip off; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\."; # FORWARD CLIENT IDENTITY TO SERVER proxy_set_header HOST $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; # FULLY DISABLE SERVER CACHE add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt; add_header 'Cache-Control' 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=0'; if_modified_since off; expires off; etag off; proxy_no_cache 1; proxy_cache_bypass 1; # SSL CONF, STRONG CIPHERS ONLY ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/ssl/dfir.cert.am/fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/etc/ssl/dfir.cert.am/key.pem; ssl_ecdh_curve secp521r1:secp384r1:prime256v1; ssl_buffer_size 4k; # DISABLE SSL SESSION CACHE ssl_session_tickets off; ssl_session_cache none; server { listen 443 ssl server_name dfir.cert.am; root /www/data; index index.html; error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; add_header Content-Security-Policy $csp_header; # SECURITY HEADERS add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"; add_header X-Frame-Options DENY; add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff; # max-age = 31536000s = 1 year add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000: includeSubDomains" always; add_header Front-End-Https on; location / { proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; location ~ ^/(manage/templates/add|manage/cases/upload_files) { keepalive_timeout 10m; client_body_timeout 10m; send_timeout 10m; proxy_read_timeout 10m; client_max_body_size 0M; proxy_request_buffering off; proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; } location ~ ^/(datastore/file/add|datastore/file/add-interactive) { keepalive_timeout 10m; client_body_timeout 10m; send_timeout 10m; proxy_read_timeout 10m; client_max_body_size 0M; proxy_request_buffering off; proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; } } location /socket.io { proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_buffering off; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"; proxy_pass http://localhost:8000/socket.io; } } }
I assume you know how to do this 🙂 You don’t need to configure a separate user, by the looks of it, IRIS likes to do that itself. Thanks to Jails I was able to run a separate PostgreSQL instance in the iris0
jail.
P.S. If you are running PostgreSQL inside a jail, make sure that the following variables are set in your jail configuration
sysvshm = new; sysvmsg = new;
Now that everything is up and running, we just need to run DFIR-IRIS and it will create the database, needed users, an administration account, etc.
su - iris cd ~/iris-web/source . ../.env ~/.local/bin/gunicorn app:app --worker-class eventlet --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 --timeout 180 --worker-connections 1000 --log-level=debug
Assuming everything is fine, now we can setup a rc.d
service script to make sure it runs at boot.
For that I wrote two files, the service itself and a helper start.sh
script
rc.d
script at /usr/local/etc/rc.d/iris
#!/bin/sh # PROVIDE: iris # REQUIRE: NETWORKING # KEYWORD: . /etc/rc.subr name="iris" rcvar="iris_enable" load_rc_config ${name} : ${iris_enable:=no} : ${iris_path:="/usr/local/iris"} : ${iris_gunicorn:="/usr/local/bin/gunicorn"} : ${iris_env="iris_gunicorn=${iris_gunicorn}"} logfile="${iris_path}/iris.log" pidfile="/var/run/${name}/iris.pid" iris_user="iris" iris_chdir="${iris_path}/source" iris_command="${iris_path}/start.sh" command="/usr/sbin/daemon" command_args="-P ${pidfile} -T ${name} -o ${logfile} ${iris_command}" run_rc_command "$1"
and the helper script at /home/iris/iris-web/start.sh
#!/bin/sh export HOME=$(getent passwd `whoami` | cut -d : -f 6) . ../.env ${iris_gunicorn} app:app --worker-class eventlet --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 --timeout 180 --worker-connections 128
now we set some variables in rc.conf
using sysrc
and we can start the service.
sysrc iris_enable="YES" sysrc iris_path="/home/iris/iris-web" sysrc iris_gunicorn="/home/iris/.local/bin/gunicorn"
Finally, we can start DFIR-IRIS as a service.
service iris start
Aaaaand we’re done 🙂
Thank you for reading!
There are some issues that I’d like to tackle, for example, service iris stop
doesn’t work, and it would be nice if we ported all of the dependencies into Ports, but for now, this seems to be working fine.
Special thanks to the DFIR-IRIS team for creating this cool platform!
That’s all folks…