Julia hat 2017 ihre Ausbildung zum Office Manager bei NETWAYS absolviert und währenddessen das Events&Marketing Team kennen und lieben gelernt. Besondere Freude bereiten ihr bei NETWAYS die tolle Teamarbeit und vielseitige Herausforderungen. Privat nutzt Julia ihre freie Zeit, um so oft wie möglich über's Handballfeld zu flitzen und sich auszutoben. In ihrer neuen Rolle als Marketing Managerin freut sie sich auf spannende Aufgaben und hofft, dass ihr die Ideen für kreative Texte nicht so schnell ausgehen.
Most system administrators know how to use key-based authentication with SSH. Some of the more obvious benefits include agent forwarding (i.e. being able to use your SSH key on a remote system) and not having to remember passwords. There are, however, a few issues with having your SSH key on a general-purpose computer: Malware can obtain an unencrypted copy of your private SSH key fairly easily. Also, while migrating your key to another system is fairly easy it’s virtually impossible to securely use your SSH key on another untrusted system (e.g. at a customer).
This is where smart cards come in. A smart card stores certificates (such as your SSH key) and provides functionality for operating on those certificates (e.g. using their private key to sign or decrypt data). Smart cards come in various form factors: credit cards, SIM cards, etc. – which commonly require a separate card reader in order to be usable. However, there are also USB devices which implement all the usual smart card features in addition to other security features (e.g. requiring the user to press a key on the device before an authentication request is signed).
One such device is the Yubikey 4 which I’m personally using for SSH authentication.
The first step towards using a new Yubikey for SSH authentication is enabling the OpenPGP applet on it:
$ ykpersonalize -m82
I already had a PGP key, however in order to use it for authentication I had to create an additional subkey for the key usage type “authentication”. Here’s how that can be done:
$ gpg --edit-key --expert info@example.org
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.23; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
sec rsa2048/42330DF1CA650A40
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa2048/56D8D1BBE7E720DB
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: E
[ultimate] (1). NETWAYS Blog <info@example.org>
gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 8
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt
(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished
Your selection? s
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Encrypt
(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished
Your selection? e
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions:
(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished
Your selection? a
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Authenticate
(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished
Your selection? q
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048)
Requested keysize is 2048 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0)
Key does not expire at all
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
sec rsa2048/42330DF1CA650A40
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa2048/56D8D1BBE7E720DB
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: E
ssb rsa2048/5F43E49ED794BDEF
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: A
[ultimate] (1). NETWAYS Blog <info@example.org>
gpg> save
Now that we’ve created a new subkey we can move its private key part to the smart card:
$ gpg --edit-key --expert info@example.org
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.23; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
sec rsa2048/42330DF1CA650A40
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa2048/56D8D1BBE7E720DB
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: E
ssb rsa2048/5F43E49ED794BDEF
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: A
[ultimate] (1). NETWAYS Blog <info@example.org>
gpg> toggle
sec rsa2048/42330DF1CA650A40
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa2048/56D8D1BBE7E720DB
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: E
ssb rsa2048/5F43E49ED794BDEF
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: A
[ultimate] (1). NETWAYS Blog <info@example.org>
gpg> key 2
sec rsa2048/42330DF1CA650A40
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa2048/56D8D1BBE7E720DB
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: E
ssb* rsa2048/5F43E49ED794BDEF
created: 2017-08-24 expires: never usage: A
[ultimate] (1). NETWAYS Blog <info@example.org>
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3
gpg> quit
Save changes? (y/N) y
The Yubikey 4 has three key slots which can be used for storing RSA keys with up to 4096 bits each. This might be an excellent opportunity to also move your signing and encryption key to your smart card – assuming you have an encrypted backup somewhere in case you lose access to your Yubikey.
The last step involves replacing ssh-agent with gpg-agent. This allows your SSH client to use your PGP certificates (including the authentication subkey we just created). In addition to that gpg-agent also supports regular SSH keys which might be useful if you have more than one SSH key and only plan to migrate one of them to your Yubikey:
I had to add the following snippet to my .profile file to start gpg-agent instead of ssh-agent:
[ -f ~/.gpg-agent-info ] && source ~/.gpg-agent-info
if [ -S "${GPG_AGENT_INFO%%:*}" ]; then
export GPG_AGENT_INFO
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
export SSH_AGENT_PID
else
eval $(gpg-agent --daemon --write-env-file ~/.gpg-agent-info)
fi
And here’s OpenSSH prompting me for my smart card and PIN:
And that’s how you can literally put your PGP key on your keychain. 🙂
Vor seinem Eintritt bei NETWAYS arbeitete Gunnar bei einem großen deutschen Hostingprovider, wo er bereits viel Erfahrung in der Softwareentwicklung für das Servermanagement sammeln konnte. Bei uns kümmert er sich vor allem um verschiedene Kundenprojekte, aber auch eigene Tools wie inGraph oder Icinga2.
Vim is pretty great, honestly. But since I started using vim after growing tired of nano, a lot in my .vimrc changed… To the point where colleagues who use vim on their machine rather use nano on mine before trying to wrap their head around my workflow. Every .vimrc is different and a lot of them exist out there, over twelve thousand repositories of shared vim configurations on GitHub alone and many more on private laptops and computers.
Generally creating a .vimrc works like creating a Makefile: Copy and paste from different sources with small changes until you have an approximation of the desired result and then need to decide whether you want to go the extra mile of dealing with your configurations’ and Vims’ quirks to get it working properly or you just leave it be. This is followed by years of incremental tweaking until you have a Vim environment which works perfectly but you don’t know why. At least that’s how I do it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I took a dive into my own to see what kind of madness lurks down there…
set nocompatible
set t_Co=16
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4
set autoindent
set smartindent
filetype plugin on
filetype indent on
So far, so good. Nothing special. Other than that indentation is set and overwritten three times, this has not lead to any problems (yet). The next lines are a bit more interesting:
call pathogen#infect()
call pathogen#helptags()
syntax on
set background=dark " dark | light "
colorscheme solarized
pathogen is a runtime manipulator which allows you to add additional plugins to Vim easier, in my case these are vim-solarized, a popular colourscheme, and vim-fugitive, a plugin that adds git commands within Vim. #infect() loads these plugins and #helptags() generates documentation. The following lines make use of solarized and add syntax highlighting.
set nu
set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,trail:.,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:_
set list
let &colorcolumn="121"
set splitbelow
set splitright
set viminfo='20,<1000
This controls numbering and control characters, colorcolumn adds a ugly line over the 121’st char to keep up with coding styles. split tells vim where to add new views when splitting (I rarely use these) and viminfo sets the copy buffer to up to 1000 lines.
Now we get to the really interesting bits, key remaps!
Artist rendition of the authors .vimrc
"See :help map-commands
"n = Normal only
"v = Visual only
"i = Insert only
" = Normal+Insert+Select only
" nore = disable recusiveness
" map = Recursive map
"split window switching
nnoremap <C-J> <C-W><C-J>
nnoremap <C-K> <C-W><C-K>
nnoremap <C-L> <C-W><C-L>
nnoremap <C-H> <C-W><C-H>
"Make Up and Down Arrows move half a screen
"instead of 1 line
noremap <Up> <C-U>
noremap <Down> <C-D>
"BUFFERS Used to be F6,F7. Now used by flake
set hidden
noremap :bprevious
noremap :bnext
"Because buffers change Flake to use F3 instead of F7
"autocmd FileType python map :call Flake8()
" DOES NOT WORK DAMN
"Smart Home key
noremap <expr> <Home> (col('.') == matchend(getline('.'), '^\s*')+1 ? '0' : '^')
imap <Home> <C-o><Home>
Switching windows can be hassle without the first four remaps, but again, I rarely use split windows. Mapping the up and down arrows to jump half a screen instead just one line I added to stop myself from using them instead of j and k, I have grown quite used to it, so it gets to stay ^_^
Buffer remaps are a must! Because I do use them a lot. There have been problems with Flake, a python lint tool, which I tried to avoid by remapping flakes key… Didn’t work out, so I got rid of Flake and call pylint when required instead.
The smart home key makes the <home>-key jump to the first non-whitespace char in a line instead of the begining of the line, quite handy!
"Access commandwindow with ctrl+f or :cedit
"For dorks
map q: :q
command Wsudo w !sudo tee % > /dev/null
"Jump to next line > 120 chars
command Warnl :/\%>120v./+
"For easy copy-paste
command Cpm :set nonu paste cc= nolist
"Catch regular caps failure
command WQ :wq
These are just a few quality of life improvements, I tend to mistype :q as q: and :wq as :WQ. The :Wsudo command lets me edit read-only files and :Cpm is for easy mouse copy and paste. :Warnl jumps to the next line with more than 120 chars, this again is to check for style problems.
Alright, that’s it. My current .vimrc. There were a few commented out lines I omitted because I have no clue what I was thinking at the time anymore, but I hope there were a few little bits someone else might find useful to feed their own beast of a .vimrc with.
Image sources:
Vim logo from vim.sexy
Shoggoth by twitter.com/nottsuo
Auch wenn man Anderes vermuten möchte: Jean ist nicht unser französischer Austauschazubi, sondern waschechter Bamberger. Die Uni war ihm zu langweilig, deshalb knöpft er sich nun im Development gleich die kniffligsten Aufgaben vor.
OSMC 2017 | The worldwide leading conference on open source monitoring solutions
November 21 to 24 | Nuremberg
In 10 parts of this series, we will give you some valuable information about the conference as well as some impressions of the last years.
What is the OSMC about?
The bilingual conference focuses on the latest trends and developments on open source monitoring solutions and offers a unique opportunity to meet the open source community
and to gain valuable expertise. The thematic focus is broadly diversified and equally suited for beginners and advanced users.
What makes the OSMC unique? The conference offers Interesting talks with a real benefit for the attendees, as well as hands-on workshops to expand your knowledge and monitoring know- how.
Due to the great success in the past two years, we are again offering a hackathon, which is bookable as an add-on.
We’re very excited and would be happy to welcome you to Nuremberg in November!
Julia hat 2017 ihre Ausbildung zum Office Manager bei NETWAYS absolviert und währenddessen das Events&Marketing Team kennen und lieben gelernt. Besondere Freude bereiten ihr bei NETWAYS die tolle Teamarbeit und vielseitige Herausforderungen. Privat nutzt Julia ihre freie Zeit, um so oft wie möglich über's Handballfeld zu flitzen und sich auszutoben. In ihrer neuen Rolle als Marketing Managerin freut sie sich auf spannende Aufgaben und hofft, dass ihr die Ideen für kreative Texte nicht so schnell ausgehen.
As you may remember we gave the Foreman Project another party to celebrate its 8th birthday, so now it is time for a small recap.
At 12:30 I welcomed a group of about 20 people for the event coming mostly from Southern Germany, but with Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden coming down from the Netherlands we had again at least one international guest. Afterwards we started with the hands-on session. This session was planned as a completely open session, so some discussions and hacking started while others played around with the demo systems I prepared. In addition to the basic setup containing several ways of provisioning, Puppet for configuration management and some plugins like OpenSCAP, Remote Execution and Expire Hosts one demo setup included the Monitoring Plugin, so Host provisioning included adding them to Icinga Web 2 Director and monitor them. Another one had added Docker integration, CoreOS provisioning and updating via Foreman’s Omaha Plugin. The third one was installed using nightly builds of Foreman and the plugins to demonstrate Puppet 5 and Ansible. The last demo was showing Katello and its Lifecyclemanagement. I think every system has created some interest but this year the most persons were interested in Ansible and Monitoring Integration, followed by Lifecyclemanagement and OpenSCAP.
I tried to get the talks in a reasoned order, so Michael Moll started with his talk “The last year in Foreman” which gave a nice look inside last year’s development and changes and some hints on future improvements. The second speaker was Timo Goebel with “Foreman – Advanced Use Cases” who had many ideas what he could talk about from his experience at dm/filiadata, but in the end he demonstrated how to deploy a CoreOS cluster including update management via the Omaha Plugin he created. Third talk was “Refactoring Katello Installer modules” by Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden who is constantly improving the quality of the Puppet modules used by the Foreman, Katello and the Kafo installer. I and probably many others will be really happy when he reaches his goal to allow a distributed setup of Katello and users being capable of upgrading Foreman to Katello. Last but not least Evgeni Golov explained some lessons learned and showed possible problems he come across while migrating a big environment to Red Hat Satellite 6 (the Red Hat branded version of Katello) in his talk “Mass-Migration of 5000 Servers to Foreman/Katello with bootstrap.py”.
The casual part started afterwards with beer and pizza but it did not stop nice and productive discussions from going on. From the feedback I got all attendees enjoyed the event like I did and everyone took some additional knowledge and ideas with him when I closed the door 3 hours later. So I think you can look forward for next year and Foreman’s 9th birthday. If you can not wait, our next Foreman training is already end of September.
Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Nagios, Puppet und andere Systems Management Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich.
Nextcloud offers plenty of different useful apps. Many of them work straight away with no further configuration, but some of them require you to complete additional setup steps or even to have extra services running. One of them is Collabora Online. In this post I won’t go into detail about the setup steps and the problems you might experience. Instead I’ll show how well Collabora Online integrates into Nextcloud.
How to Collaborate
So how do you get started if you have Nextcloud and Collabora up and running? First you need some additional users to share your files with. I would recommend to create some groups if you plan on sharing files with multiple users at once. Then add users to these groups. Create some folders for different purposes and share them with the groups. The folders will appear on the other users accounts as soon as they log in to Nextcloud or reload the page.
So now you’ll be able to collaborate on editing the files located inside the shared folders. You can create new spreadsheet (.ods), text document (.odt) and presentation files (.odp) right from your Nextcloud or you can also upload and edit existing files in all kinds of different office file formats. In the following short video I documented the steps of sharing and collaborative editing.
Another way of sharing files in groups is to enable the “Group folders” module in the Nextcloud Appstore and then create some folders from the Admin-Panel in the “Group folders” section. It simplifies the process of sharing folders in groups and you can even set quota limits for the shared folders.
Group folders
Something to note: if your Nextcloud is reachable from multiple domains and you want to use collaborative editing, then you and the person with whom you want to edit a document with should access Nextcloud from the same domain. If you try to use collaborative editing by accessing from different domains or sub-domains, it wont work, you won’t see the changes made by the other person inside the document in real-time.
What if you want to collaborate with a person who has no user account on your Nextcloud? You can share files via link, set optionally an expiration date and a password and then start collaborating with anyone. Just provide them with the shared link (and password if set) and they will be able to use Collabora aswell.
CODE and alternatives
Collabora itself is based on LibreOffice and has a lot of features built-in that you may know from other office applications. But there are some limitations in terms of concurrent open documents and simultaneous connections. In the free version CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) it is limited to 10 documents and 20 connections at once. There is another online office suite that you can use with Nextcloud, it’s called Onlyoffice. For Nextcloud you would set up a Onlyoffice Document Server and then get the Onlyoffice App from the Nextcloud Appstore. In comparison to CODE it requires more hardware resources. At least 1 CPU core (with 2 GHz), 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB of disk space. Collabora on the other hand will be fine with 1 CPU Core, 512 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB disk space.
Try Nextcloud with CODE for free
If you want to try it yourself you can quickly spin up a Nextcloud app using our Netways Web Services and test Nextcloud with Collabora Online for 30 days for free. We now include Collabora preconfigured in all our Nextcloud plans.
Gabriel freut sich nun in seiner Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration bei NETWAYS endlich sein im Informatikstudium gesammeltes Wissen artgerecht anwenden zu können. Wenn er nicht gerade an Servern, PC’s und sonstigem bastelt, vertreibt sich der gebürtige Oberfranke seine Freizeit mit Radfahren, Fotografie und Snowboarden. Vor allem reizen ihn interessante Projekte und das Arbeiten an Open Source basierten Linux-Systemen.
In August, Johannes Meyer began with an overview of some future Github topics and Lennart continued with part 6 of Icinga 2 Best Practice.
Most system administrators know how to use key-based authentication with SSH. Some of the more obvious benefits include agent forwarding (i.e. being able to use your SSH key on a remote system) and not having to remember passwords. There are, however, a few issues with having your SSH key on a general-purpose computer: Malware can obtain an unencrypted copy of your private SSH key fairly easily. Also, while migrating your key to another system is fairly easy it’s virtually impossible to securely use your SSH key on another untrusted system (e.g. at a customer).
Vim is pretty great, honestly. But since I started using vim after growing tired of nano, a lot in my .vimrc changed… To the point where colleagues who use vim on their machine rather use nano on mine before trying to wrap their head around my workflow. Every .vimrc is different and a lot of them exist out there, over twelve thousand repositories of shared vim configurations on GitHub alone and many more on private laptops and computers.
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