chameleon

chameleon, 9 months ago

Realistically, there is only a trivial pure security difference between logging in directly to root vs sudo set up to allow unrestricted NOPASS access to specific users: the attacker might not know the correct username when trying to brute force. That doesn't matter in the slightest unless you have password auth enabled with trivial passwords.

But there is a difference in the ability to audit what happened after the fact if you have any kind of service storing system logs remotely or in a tamper-proof way. If there's more than one admin user on a service, that is very very important. Knowing where the compromise happened is absolutely essential to make things safe.

If there's only ever going to be one administrative user (personal machine), logging in directly as root for manual administrative tasks is fine: you already know who the user is. If there's any chance there might be more administrative users later (small but growing business), you should consider doing it right from the start.

chameleon, 8 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Well, my recommendations for anything semi-automated would be Ansible and Fabric/Invoke. Fabric is also a Python tool (though it's only used on the controlling side, unlike Ansible), so if that's a no-go, I'm afraid I don't have much to offer.

chameleon, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

The RAID1 seems to be failing according to that screenshot. That breaks the "Local File Systems" task and since quite a lot of things tend to depend on that, many things usually end up failing in an annoying cascade failure. It's also failing with a timeout instead of a strict error, which is odd.

Either way, I'd try commenting that line for /mnt/raid in /etc/fstab for now and seeing if that makes the system boot. It's possible that journalctl -u dev-md0.service or systemctl status dev-md0.service might tell you more, but it's 50/50 if it'll be anything useful.

chameleon, 9 months ago

You're most likely booted, otherwise you might need a live USB. Hopefully, the system isn't in read-only mode. What I'd recommend doing is:

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup

To make a copy once. Then, nano /etc/fstab to run nano, a basic CLI editor. You can use the arrow keys to navigate and type freely in it. The hints like ^O shown on the bottom mean ctrl+o.

You'd use the arrow keys to go down to the line that probably says /dev/md0 /mnt/raid morecrap, put a # in front of it, press ctrl+w then enter to save. If that worked, ctrl+x to exit and try a reboot again.

Obviously can't promise this is "the" error preventing the system from booting, but it's generally a good idea to disable broken stuff like this to get the system working again, then fix it from there. Hopefully, this does the trick. Your RAID setup will not be activated on reboot after you do this but it's not going to permanently delete data or anything.

chameleon, 9 months ago

No, it comes together with a CLA being required to contribute. In other words, Canonical (and only Canonical) is still allowed to sell exceptions to the AGPL.

Yes, the post says there is no copyright assignment. That's extremely carefully chosen wording to avoid mention of the CLA which was made required in the same commit as the license change. It's "just" a super extended license that lets them do whatever, not assignment.

chameleon, 10 months ago

A biggie you miss is the toolchain: the compiler/binutils/linux-headers/libc/libstdc++ combination. The libc and usually libstdc++ are key components of any install. The other parts usually don't make it to non-dev-desktops, but the distro couldn't be made without them, so they're virtually always available as packages.

Only exception is if the entire distro is cross-compiled or it's made exclusively for containers, but those kinds of special distros break every rule imaginable anyway. Some might not even ship a bootloader or a Linux kernel by themselves.

chameleon, 10 months ago

Don't bother "securing" directories like that. The meaningful permission bit is the write permission on the directory holding the file. cat ~/.bashrc > ~/.bashrc.new; put-malware-in ~/.bashrc.new; rm -f ~/.bashrc; mv ~/.bashrc.new ~/.bashrc or the like will still work if you have write permissions to /home/username at all. Marking the file immutable with chattr +i as root might be slightly more effective, but realistically still not enough in a lot of cases as the parent directory can still be renamed. Not to mention you've only found some of the low-hanging fruit; your text editor most likely also has a few ways to accomplish arbitrary code execution in its config/scripting/plugin files but it absolutely doesn't stop there.

Don't bother buying old systems because they can have free firmware. Ever since Spectre, CPU vulnerabilities have made old machines completely unsuitable for high-security purposes time and time again. Not all mitigations are equally effective and with mitigations on, performance takes a massive hit on those 10 year old machines. If you can get a reasonably new system with free firmware, that's good, though.

chameleon, 11 months ago

Memes used to be funny

chameleon, 1 year ago

RIF works if you're logged out. Logged in you get a 429 error.

chameleon, 1 year ago

I've been happy with Gandi but their future looks bleak. Gandi was bought by Total Webhosting Solutions/now your.online a couple of months back, which is pretty bad news. They've been purchasing Dutch companies and increasing prices while letting their services turn to shit for a while now. The raised prices came in a few weeks ago, we've yet to see the services turn to shit but I am extremely confident it will happen.

Gandi is just the first international purchase by TWS, so not many people know it, and there are few relevant references on the English-speaking web as most of this was localized to the Netherlands. You'd have to search on Dutch tech news sources like tweakers.net and use some translation tool to find anything meaningful.