Category / Lab Infrastructure

by brian.wuchner

My completed (for now) Home Office improvements

I’ve recently made several improvements to my home office / desk setup. Several people have asked for details on the parts/pieces I used to complete this, so I wanted to take a moment and document them here.

I started with an Autonomous SmartDesk 2 – Home Office motorized sit/stand desk. There is a premium version of this desk that appears to have more range (can go lower/higher) than the home version, but for my needs the home office version seemed to have very similar specs and was slightly less expensive.

I already had a very good desk chair (the Autonomous ErgoChair 2), but also added a Topo Comfort Mat for when I’m standing. This was a touch more than I planned to spend, but came highly recommended and initial impressions are very good.

I’m using two different monitor arms, one from my previous setup and a new ErGear Adjustable Gas Spring mount which was very inexpensive (only $25) and supported the weight required by my monitor (the specs for the monitor arm show it supports up to 26.5 pounds).

Lighting was the toughest problem to solve. I wanted to have a primary light source that was centered in front of me, to reduce shade cast from one side of my face for video calls, but also desired more light than most round / camera lights provide. I also preferred an indirect light source that would bounce of the ceiling first, but not be blocked by my monitor when in a standing position. My first thought was a very tall floor lamp, but I didn’t really want a base that I would be kicking right in front of my feet, and couldn’t find anything tall enough anyway. I found some desk mounted lamps that looked like they might work, but I couldn’t find any with the right height to be able to reach over my monitor. What I settled on was a fairly custom solution. I purchased a Twinkle Star Floor lamp with Remote Control, but disassembled / rewired part of it and mounted it to an unused monitor arm I had laying around using some bolts and rubber wire clamps. The end result is a desk mounted lamp that’s the perfect height (and adjustable), but also has a remote control that can adjust light temperature and brightness.

I hope you find this info useful!

by brian.wuchner

Skyline Health Diagnostics custom SSL certificates

I recently read about the new Skyline Health Diagnostics tool. Here is a short quote that captures what this tool is all about.

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics for vSphere is a self-service tool to detect issues using log bundles and suggest the KB remediate the issue. vSphere administrators can use this tool for troubleshooting issues before contacting the VMware Support. The tool is available to you free of cost.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/09/introducing-vmware-skyline-health-diagnostic-tool.html

Installation was very straight forward and captured in the official documentation here. I deviated slightly, and opted to use the Photon 3.0 OVA instead of installing Photon from the ISO image. If you go down this route, you may want to grow your root filesystem beyond the 16GB from the initial OVA, if you need help with that check out this blog post.

After setting up the appliance, I decided to replace the SSL certificates for the web site. This is described in the documentation as well, but I made a couple of changes that I’ll outline below.

The first change I made was to the SSL conf file. The official documentation has you edit the entries in the [req_distinguished_name] section so that the entries for commonName and DNS.1 are correct. In addition to doing this, I added a DNS.2 and DNS.3 option to capture the short name of the server as well as a friendly / alias name.

After applying the certificate, I was able to access the interface with the FQDN of the server, but not with the alias information or IP address. After doing a bit of research I found that adding a server_name entry to the nginx configuration would allow me to specify additional names/alias information. I also noticed that there wasn’t an automatic redirect from http to https, which I wanted to add. To do this I edited the nginx configuration with vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and added the following information:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        server_name _;
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    }

This above section tells nginx to listen on port 80, accept any wildcard server names that come in, then do a http 301 redirect to the https port, using the original host name and URL that were provided.

I then edited the existing sever 8443/ssl section and added the following below the listen 8443 ssl; line: server_name servername.lab.enterpriseadmins.org servername 192.168.10.100 skylinehealth.example.com;

The above line instructs nginx to listen for incoming requests for my FQDN, short servername, IP address, or friendly alias. I could have used the wildcard symbol as shown in the http example, but I wanted to limit SSL requests to only values which were included in the SAN certificate to prevent possible certificate warnings.

The above screenshot shows the relevant section of the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. The green lines to the left denote the entries which were added.

Additionally, I had to update firewall rules to allow incoming HTTP requests. I used sample entries described here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/iptables-essentials-common-firewall-rules-and-commands to make this happen, specifically running the following two commands:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 80 -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

With these minor changes I’m able to access Skyline Health Diagnostics using FQDN, IP Address, and Alias using HTTPS. If I forget and accidentally try to connect over HTTP, nginx will help me out and do the necessary redirect.

by brian.wuchner

Setting up Pi-hole DNS

At home I attempt to maintain two networks — a reliable home network with WiFi and internet access and a separate home lab where services may not be as reliable. These networks overlap at times (for example, the home lab still needs internet access) but I don’t want to end up in a situation where the lab needs to be working for watching something on Netflix.

One place where these two requirements sometimes conflict is around name resolution. I would like everything on my home network to be able to resolve my lab resources, but I don’t wan to point everything at my lab DNS server.

The best solution I’ve found for this has been Pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net/). This is a service that can run on a variety of platforms and provide network-wide ad blocking — and more.

I have two instances of this running in my lab — one runs on a Raspberry Pi (to be separate from my lab infrastructure) and another backup instance runs in an Ubuntu 20.04 VM.

Deploying Pi-hole in a VM

This couldn’t be easier. I started with an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM (using the template from here & the deploy process from here). I then ran the easy installer method by piping the install script to bash using:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

I followed the wizard and accepted the defaults. At the end of the process I changed the autogenerated admin password to something easier to remember. You can do this with the command:

pihole -a -p

Once this is complete, you can update DHCP scopes to use your Pi-hole IP addresses as the DNS server(s) for your network.

Customizing to resolve Lab domain names

Once clients are using Pi-hole to resolve DNS names, we can enable conditional forwarding to handle lab specific domains. In the Pi-hole web interface there is an option to enable this (under Settings > DNS > Advanced DNS settings), but it only supports a single domain name and target DNS server. For my lab, I have a couple additional names that need to be resolved, but this is still possible using configuration files.

From an SSH session to the Pi-hole DNS server, we can create a file using a command/path such as:

nano /etc/dnsmasq.d/05-custom.conf

In this file we will add server entries for any domain name we want to forward. Multiple entries should provide redundancy in the event one of our lab DNS servers is unavailable. 

server=/lab.enterpriseadmins.org/192.168.10.10
server=/lab.enterpriseadmins.org/192.168.99.10
server=/example.com/192.168.10.10
server=/example.com/192.168.99.10
server=/168.192.in-addr.arpa/192.168.10.10
server=/168.192.in-addr.arpa/192.168.99.10

NTP while we are at it?

One other service that I run on this Pi-hole VM (and Raspberry Pi) is NTP. While not the main purpose of this post, I’ll list the commands below to enable an NTP Server on Ubuntu 20.04.

apt install chrony

Once chrony is installed, we can configure it by editing the configuration file:

nano /etc/chrony/chrony.conf

We can review which upstream DNS servers are used, but more importantly we need to define which systems can use this host as an NTP server. We do that my adding the following lines to the end of the configuration file:

# Define the subnets that can use this host as an NTP server
allow 192.168.0.0/16

Which will allow any device in the 192.168.0.0/16 network to be able to query us for NTP. You can list additional ‘allow’ lines as needed.

Once the configuration file is updated, we can restart the service to apply changes using:

systemctl restart chrony.service

We can now query the NTP server using a variety of tools. On Windows I prefer ntptool.exe (https://www.ntp-time-server.com/ntp-server-tool.html). This should show the output that we were successfully able to query the new time server.

From the NTP server we can list recently checked in clients using the command:

sudo chronyc clients

Conclusion

Now we have an appliance that can provide DNS and NTP for our home network, and will forward any lab specific DNS queries to lab DNS servers. If those lab DNS servers are unavailable it doesn’t impact our home network.

by brian.wuchner

Creating a Two Factor Authentication Server

This post will cover building a two factor authentication provider using RADIUS and Google Authenticator. This is an update to a post from over three years ago. The basic configuration is roughly the same, there are just a few minor updates to account for the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04.

  1. Create Ubuntu 20.04 VM
  2. Modify Ubuntu to only allow login by specific Two Factor Users
  3. Install and configure required packages
  4. Enroll 2FA Users
  5. Migrate existing google_authenticator config files to a new server
  6. Testing with radtest

Modify Ubuntu to only allow login by Specific Two Factor Users

The default Ubuntu template we created has a configuration that will grant all members of the Domain Users group the ability to login. While this is generally ‘good enough’ for a lab, in this specific case we want to limit the users who have the ability to login using Two Factor Authentication (2FA), as we will be using the 2FA solution to provide remote access to the network and want to ensure that only trusted users are permitted.

The specific setting we previously defined in joinad.sh was RequireMembershipOf. We can use the following command to see which groups have the ability to login:

/opt/pbis/bin/config --show RequireMembershipOf

Running this command shows four rows — multistring, lab\domain^users, blank, and local policy. This is because of our ./joinad.sh script that previously set the default group to Domain Users.  If I run the ./config RequireMembershipOf command again, it replaces domain users with the new group.  For my purposes I want two groups — the Linux Sudoers group (which is defined in the sudoers group, which contains my Linux Admin users) and the 2FA Users group.  We can do that by passing both group names in one command, like this:

/opt/pbis/bin/config RequireMembershipOf "lab\\lab^linux^sudoers" "lab\\lab^2fa^users"

This will replace the Domain Users row with the two groups specified above. When searching to see if there was an easier way to append, I found the following blog post which contains a script that uses regex to find the existing group and then add the group that is needed: https://techblog.jeppson.org/2017/01/append-users-groups-powerbroker-open-requiremembershipof/

Install and configure required packages

The first command we will run is identical to the previous instructions — we’ll install the pluggable authentication module (PAM) for Google Authenticator and FreeRadius. With Ubuntu 18.04 this will install FreeRadius 3.0, which will lead to a few of the changes from the initial article (mainly paths and one extra command).

apt-get install libpam-google-authenticator freeradius -y

By default, FreeRadius 3.0 does not enable the PAM module. We will manually do that by creating a link in the available mods directory using this command: ln -s /etc/freeradius/3.0/mods-available/pam /etc/freeradius/3.0/mods-enabled/pam

We will be storing our per-user Google Authenticator files in each users home directory. This will prevent users from finding/using other users 2FA secret. Because of this configuration, we need the FreeRadius service to be able to run as root (so it can read all users Google Authenticator configuration files). To do this we will edit the radiusd.conf using a text editor:

nano /etc/freeradius/3.0/radiusd.conf

We will find the rows that state user = freerad and group = freerad and replace them with:

user = root
group = root

Next we will append the users file to set PAM as the default authentication type.

echo "DEFAULT Auth-Type := PAM" >> /etc/freeradius/3.0/users

Next we need to update a file to enable PAM pluggable authentication modules in FreeRadius. Note: to find text using nano, you can use CTRL+W.

nano /etc/freeradius/3.0/sites-enabled/default

When we find the text for #PAM, remove the pound sign (which will remove the example/comment and enable PAM).

We will now configure the PAM Radius service to use Google Authenticator.

nano /etc/pam.d/radiusd

Comment out the @include lines in the file, then add the following text:

auth requisite pam_google_authenticator.so forward_pass
account required pam_unix.so use_first_pass

Now we need to define which clients can use our RADIUS server, and what their ‘secret’ will be. It is common to restrict this so only specific hosts can access RADIUS, and each server can have a unique secret. However, for my lab, I’m going to allow all servers to connect to RADIUS using the same secret. Password/secret re-use is a bad security practice. We do this by editing this file:

nano /etc/freeradius/3.0/clients.conf

And add a client entry like this one:

client 192.168.0.0/16 {
        secret          = s3cur3.rad
        shortname       = PrimaryLabSubnet
}

We can have multiple secrets, for example one per host, which would be more secure. Note: the secret should only contain alphanumeric and _-+.  (underscore hyphen plus period) characters.

Now that we have all of the configuration files edited, we can restart the freeradius service:

service freeradius restart

Enroll 2FA Users

When an authorized user logs into the Radius server (over SSH) they can run google-authenticator to generate a configuration file. This interactive prompt will ask them a few questions and then generate a QR code that they can scan from a mobile phone with the Google Authenticator application. However, we can suppress some of these questions and ensure a consistent experience for our users.

We can do this by adding an alias to the bashrc file, which is executed at every interactive login.

nano /etc/skel/.bashrc

Now we scroll down to where the other aliases are and add one of our own:

alias google-auth='google-authenticator -tdf -l "$USER Home Lab" -r 3 -R 30 -w 17 -Q ANSI'

This will create an alias named google-auth that will pass in all the expected inputs. Users will now run google-auth instead of google-authenticator. If you have already logged in, the changes to the default bashrc file may not be available in your profile. You can fix this by copying the updated bashrc file (cp /etc/skel/.bashrc /home/yourusername/.bashrc).

Migrate existing google_authenticator config files to a new server

In each users home directory, there is a hidden .google_authenticator file. This file is only readable by the user and root (permissions = 400) and contains the information on the clients one time use key. In my scenario I have an existing FreeRadius server running on Ubuntu 16.04 that I want to replace with this new 18.04 server, and as such I have some existing files that I’d like to move over to the new server. This same process (coupled with cron) could be tweaked slightly to use as a backup solution for these .google_authenticator files. Here is what I did to get these moved over, starting with commands ran on the source server:

tar -czvf googleauth-backup.tar.gz /home/*/.google_authenticator
scp googleauth-backup.tar.gz bwuchner@new-radius-01.lab.enterpriseadmins.org:/tmp

Once the files are backed up and copied to the new server, we will run this command on the destination server:

sudo tar --same-owner -xzvf googleauth-backup.tar.gz -C /

This will extract the .google_authenticator files, retaining the previous owner for the files. If the user home directory did not exist, a new folder will be created. The problem is that this new folder structure is created & owned by root. This isn’t an issue for the operation of the 2FA solution, but could be a problem if the user needs to log back in to the Radius server at some point — as they won’t be able to save files in their profile. We can fix that by resetting the ownership of each home directory back to the specific user & Domain Users group. To do that we could run a command like this on the destination server:

cd /home
for i in *; do sudo chown $i:domain^users /home/$i; done

To confirm this worked, we can execute a ls -lha /home on destination server, to ensure that we see expected ownership on each directory.

Testing with radtest

When we installed FreeRadius we also received some handy command line tools that we can use to test our configuration. This syntax of rad test expects a username, one time passcode, RADIUS server iP address, port, and secret, like this:

radtest bwuchner '442287' 192.168.0.100 1812 s3cur3.rad

The response should show Access-Accept. If you get something else, like Access-Reject, then check /var/log/auth.log to see what went wrong. I find that it is easiest to have two SSH sessions opened — one running radtest and the other running

tail -f /var/log/auth.log

At this point you should be able to use the Radius server to provide Two Factor Authentication (2FA) to any necessary service. To see one example of doing this with a VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG) check out this video I recorded as part of the VMware TAM Lab program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ybl58x0CLg.

by brian.wuchner

Lab Updates: Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS Template

Earlier this year I posted a thread on creating an Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS Template for use in a lab. You can check that out here: https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/virtualization/lab-updates-ubuntu-18-04-template/

In late April of this year (2020) Canonical released a new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS edition. I recently followed the same steps from my previous 18.04 template to build a new template — but with 2 additional changes.

Guest OS Customization Fails

The first issue I noticed was that customization specs were not properly applying, resulting in a deployed VM that had the following symptoms:

  • No IP Address customization
  • No Hostname customization
  • Network Adapter disconnected

I found the following bug report that had a workaround related to a similar previous issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1793715. I also found a VMware KB article with more details related to 18.04 here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/54986. While I didn’t encounter this issue with 18.04, the workaround resolved my issue with 20.04. Specifically, I performed one action — removing cloud-init. I did this by running a single command:

sudo apt purge cloud-init

Install package for ifconfig

While we are modifying packages for this template, there is one command that I was missing — ifconfig. While I know I can find the IP other ways (like with the command ip address), I still like having ifconfig. We can include the package containing this command with another command:

sudo apt install net-tools

Conclusion

Removing one package and adding another are the only differences between my Ubuntu Server 20.04 template and the Ubuntu Server 18.04 template (previous post here).