cloudXabide | to the Cloud

Ugh... Comcast.  This sucked particularly much as this was my first attempt to configure a VPN back to my HomeLab and therefore was not sure what options I should have *known* would work.  Anywho... Sophos SSL VPN uses 8443 by default.  I spent a few hours trying to get through the config on the Sophos and my Linux client.  Nothing was working. For giggles I changed the Sophos to use 443, and then updated my client on my Linux workstation.  And suddenly it all works.  Fowk.  Tried 8443 again.  No love. I don't want to utilize port 443 as I intend to actually host some web apps for testing.  So, I have finalized on an "alternate" port which had to be configured on both the Sophos and the Linux client. I'l be doing a better write-up about this later.  I still need to figure out how to configure all this via the Gnome Network-Manager GUI.

It had been about 10 months since I had done any "hardcore" Linux stuff and I need to get ramped up on a bunch of Red Hat technologies again - namely OCP and Satellite.  So, I decided I would use my laptop to spin-up a bunch of VMs.  I build my own "kickstart" environment using ISOs on my "KVM Host" to build the KVM Guests.  They are NAT'd using 192.168.122.0/24 address space and virbr0. I had everything setup and when I would monitor the console of the VM I was building, I would see "connection refused" when it would go to pull any content (i.e. my kickstart configuration). Initially I thought I simply had to update the "public" firewall zone. Then, I assumed I had to add the "virbr0" or "virbr0-nic0" to the zone's interfaces. Nope... Then I ran "setenforce 0" to see if SELinux was hosing it up.  Nope. chcon -Rvv --type=httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html.  Nope (still a good measure though). ...

There is quite a bit of nuance in managing accounts in AWS.  One particular issue I see come up is with managing account lifecycles (i.e. if a person wants to have "temp" accounts to provide for people to "play" and learn).  This is simply not easily accomplished.  However, there are procedural ways to deal with this if folks need this type of functionality.  I have given it the following moniker: "account recycling" The idea is that you would have different account types: "core" accounts under the control of your master/payer account - and these do not get recycled. Long lived line of business accounts - hosting production, etc... long lived developer accounts - (still trying to work through how these would be managed) "burner" accounts - preset limits for usage, pre-determined length of time the account is available The idea of the burner account is that you would create a "pool" of accounts that could be provided ...

I put away my pitchforks for protesting Microsoft almost 2 decades ago.  At first I was in the Microsoft is the devil camp... then I started working on Solaris... and then AIX... and then Linux (SuSE) and finally Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  With each iteration along that timeline, I continued to care less and less about what was going on with Microsoft and Windows.  When Microsoft started to show up in the headlines regarding Linux compatibility, Red Hat collaboration, Open Source contributions, I was minimally apprehensive and was actually rather optimistic that times were changing and they saw the light. Today - I am about to install the Linux version of Visual Studio Code (relegating Atom IDE to be the failback). sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc sudo su -c 'echo -e "[code]\nname=Visual Studio Code\nbaseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsof...

It is unlikely that many folks will find themselves in this particular situation. I have several AWS master/payer accounts - and one of the accounts "owned" my domain (cloudxabide.com) and I wanted to manage and control that domain from a different master account. Account A - cloudxabide.com. Account B - example.com. myotherexample.com. Initiate the transfer of the domain by... (complete this later) Create Hosted Zone (cloudxabide.com) and retrieve the 4 NS entries. Then click on Registered Domains and the zone you wish to update. Under the Name servers section there should be a "Add or edit name servers" entry - click on that. Replace the existing server entries with the values you found above. Once you have completed this step, you will need to wait for an email indicating the update has occurred.  You may have to wait up to 2 days for the records to finishing traversing the Interwebs, as well. whois cloudxabide.com | grep ^Name dig +short NS clo...

As of the date that I am creating this, the (actual) details have not been released regarding the 2019 Recent breach involving a WAF exploitation and S3 exfiltration. A particular thread I had reviewed indicated that a 3rd-party WAF was exploited, which implies that it was likely to have been running on an EC2 instance.  This EC2 instance "metadata service" was then exploited by that WAF appliance software. I think there are several potential opportunities to improve the security posture.. IAM SCPs Security Groups S3 access policy defense in depth least privilege One thing that was a concern to me,;preventing access to the "metadata service" (from a host with Internet access), I would like to explore the impact of the following: iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner ! --uid-owner root -d 169.254.169.254 -j DROP I was initially surprised to learn that VPC Flow Logs do not capture the traffic destined for the instance metadata endpoint (but then realiz...

Yay! $ aws ec2 describe-subnets --region us-east-1 --query 'Subnets[*].[CidrBlock,Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value|[0]]' --output table ----------------------------------------- |            DescribeSubnets            | +-----------------+---------------------+ |  10.64.0.0/25   |  Public subnet 1    | |  10.64.2.128/25 |  Private subnet 3A  | |  10.64.1.128/25 |  Private subnet 1A  | |  10.64.1.0/25   |  Public subnet 3    | |  10.64.0.128/25 |  Public subnet 2    | |  10.64.2.0/25   |  Private subnet 2A  | +-----------------+---------------------+ WRONG WAY.... $ aws ec2 describe-subnets --region us-east-1 --query 'Subnets[*].[CidrBlock,Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value[]]' --output text ----------------------- |   DescribeSubnets   | +---------------------+ |  10...