CYPHRUS

Tech for Techies.

[cyphrus-blog]

GATEONE SSH CLIENT AND TERMINAL EMULATOR

Hello guys, 

I am now going to show you all a cool stuff about SSH’ing to remote server through websockets. First of all i would like to thank "LiftOff software"(http://liftoffsoftware.com) for offering such a wonderful opensource product, “GATEONE”.

Bringing terminal to web browser is one of the coolest things, which is more useful in accessing our remote servers from any where in the internet. In this post i’m going to talk about, how to install Gateone and using it.

Gateone a HTML5 Web-based Terminal Emulator, the best I have ever seen, works on all modern browsers, with no need of browser plugins to be installed. Gateone is written in Python and Javascript purely, so it requires Python to be installed with out any doubt. Also we need to install Python-Tornado webserver framework, and some dependencies.

Lets go with installation,

Run update for apt repository on your linux system. I’m using ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

Installing dependencies that are required to run Gateone.

sudo apt-get install python-tornado python-pip dtach python-pyopenssl python-kerberos python-dev git build-essential sudo apt-get purge python-tornado sudo pip install tornado pyopenssl

Go to https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne, and clone the repository by running following command.

git clone https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne.git

I always recommend to get the latest commited code from githib.com, so that it is more improved and bugless. After cloning you will get a directory named ‘GateOne’, enter into it. Run the below commands to build Gateone.

sudo ./setup.py install

After you run this command, you can see a folder named ‘gateone’ inside your /opt/ path, enter into it and place the below start up script to start Gateone application. You can also start Gateone by running gateone.py script directly, butit will through output’s on your terminal, so to overcome that we use the below script. So copy paste the below shell script into file, say for example ‘gateone’.

#!/bin/bash case "$1" in start) echo "Starting GateOne" nohup ./gateone.py & ;; stop) echo "Stopping GateOne" ./gateone.py --kill ;; *) echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/gateone {start|stop}" exit 1 ;; esac exit 0

To start Gateone appplication run the above shell script by running command,

sudo ./gateone start

Thats all to do with the installation and starting up Gateone. Now lets go to the configuration part. Once you started Gateone application, you can see a newly generated file named ‘server.conf’ inide your /opt/gateone path. Now stop the Gateone application by running below command to kill the gateone.py script.

sudo ./gateone stop

Go to your browser and run https://localhost, you can access your Gateone app. Note that you cannot not run other applications on port 443, because Tornado webserver framework requires it,so that an internal conflict occurs. Okay that’s it done with Gateone.

Advantages:

You can add authentication mechanism such api, kerberos, pam etc.

Embedded into other application is easy, some amount of javascript skills required. (WOW this is awesome!!!)

You can record and playback sessions.

Can be easily controlled by other applications, its flexible.

You can read through documentation from http://liftoff.github.com/GateOne. There are lots of stuff can be done with Gateone. Once again thanks for LiffOff software, for this extraordinary effort and thanks for those who read this post. Very soon i’ll come up with an idea of embedding Gateone into other applications…so stay tuned. - Cyphrus... :) 

[cyphrus-blog]

POWERDNS ON UBUNTU

PowerDNS is an open source DNS program, which runs on most of Linux and Unix distributions. PowerDNS does not support dynamic DNS update, but known for its scalability, performance and reliability. PowerDNS provides good database integration with MySQL, PostgreSQL, LDAP, DBMS, Oracle etc, so it is easily manageable.

This post will let you know ‘How to setup PowerDNS with MySQL backend on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machine’. When i tried this setup for first time, i faced many problems in connecting PowerDNS with MySQL backend, and that caused me to write this post. By default PowerDNS package on Ubuntu 12.04 contains, slightly different configurations, which caused all the errors. Anyway i debugged those errors and finally made it to work, as i expected. Lets start, by loggin to the server machine. Before doing anything login as ‘root’ user, by running below command.

sudo su

First install MySQL database server by running below command. The Ubuntu installer will prompt you to set password for ‘root’ user in MySQL. Set the password and remember it.

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

To verify whether MySQL has been installed correctly, run the below command.

netstat -nlp | grep mysql

You will see output similar to below.

tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1344/mysqld unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 6620 1344/mysqld /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Next install PowerDNS and PowerDNS MySQL backend packages by running below command. The Ubuntu installer will ask you, if you want PowerDNS to be configured with dbconfig-common, choose ‘NO’ for this question and press ENTER.

apt-get install pdns-server pdns-backend-mysql

Next create database, schema, users and privileges necessary for holding PowerDNS data. Here i’m setting the MySQL storage engine as ‘InnoDB’. First login to MySQL console.

mysql -u root -p

Create database named ‘powerdns’, you can name it whatever you need.

create database powerdns;

Create a user named ‘powerdns’ and give privileges to access the ‘powerdns’ database. Replace ‘mypassword’ with your’s.

grant all on powerdns.* to 'powerdns'@'localhost' identified by 'mypassword';

flush privileges;

Enter into database ‘powerdns’.

use powerdns;

Create database schema.

CREATE TABLE domains ( id INT auto_increment, name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, master VARCHAR(128) DEFAULT NULL, last_check INT DEFAULT NULL, type VARCHAR(6) NOT NULL, notified_serial INT DEFAULT NULL, account VARCHAR(40) DEFAULT NULL, primary key (id) )ENGINE=InnoDB;

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX name_index ON domains(name);

CREATE TABLE records ( id INT auto_increment, domain_id INT DEFAULT NULL, name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL, type VARCHAR(6) DEFAULT NULL, content VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL, ttl INT DEFAULT NULL, prio INT DEFAULT NULL, change_date INT DEFAULT NULL, primary key(id) )ENGINE=InnoDB;CREATE INDEX rec_name_index ON records(name);

CREATE INDEX nametype_index ON records(name,type);

CREATE INDEX domain_id ON records(domain_id);

CREATE TABLE supermasters ( ip VARCHAR(25) NOT NULL, nameserver VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, account VARCHAR(40) DEFAULT NULL )ENGINE=InnoDB;

exit;

Now that we have installed PowerDNS and MySQL, lets configure PowerDNS to work with MySQL. Run the below command to edit the PowerDNS-MySQL configuration file.

vim /etc/powerdns/pdns.d/pdns.local.gmysql

Your modified configuration file must look like below. Replace ‘mypassword’ with your’s.

# MySQL Configuration file # # Launch gmysql backend launch=gmysql # gmysql parameters gmysql-host=localhost gmysql-port=3306 gmysql-dbname=powerdns gmysql-user=powerdns gmysql-password=mypassword gmysql-dnssec=no # gmysql-socket=

Save the file and restart PowerDNS service by running below command.

/etc/init.d/pdns restart

The next step is to populate the records in PowerDNS. For now, to populate DNS records, we need to run MySQL queries. But we are not going to do that, instead i’m going to show you, the installation process of PowerAdmin, a simple Web UI to populate records into PowerDNS database. To run PowerAdmin, we need a HTTP server with PHP as a backend to serve the pages, because PowerAdmin is built with PHP. Normally i use Nginx as HTTP server, with PHP-FPM as gateway interface.

First install Nginx.

apt-get install nginx

Install PHP and its extensions. First install ‘php5-cli’ package, because if you install ‘php5′ package directly, apt-get will forcely install Apache packages, which we dont need here, because we are using Nginx instead of Apache.

apt-get install php5-cli

Install required PHP extensions.

apt-get install php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-fpm

Now that all the prerequisites for PowerAdmin were installed. Download latest stable version of PowerAdmin package and extract it under /opt dirtectory. Lets see it in commands.

wget https://github.com/downloads/poweradmin/poweradmin/poweradmin-2.1.6.tgz tar xvzf poweradmin-2.1.6.tgz mv poweradmin-2.1.6 /opt/poweradmin touch /opt/poweradmin/inc/config.inc.php chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/poweradmin

Inorder to run the installation process of PowerAdmin, we need to add Virtual Host configuration file for Nginx, under /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory, to access PowerAdmin through HTTP protocol.

server { server_name dns.cyphrus.in; ## Add your own server name, such as 'dns.example.com' root /opt/poweradmin; index /index.php; error_log /var/log/nginx/poweradmin-error.log; access_log /var/log/nginx/poweradmin-access.log; location / { location ~ ^(.+\.php)$ { try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } location ~* ^(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ { root /opt/poweradmin; } } }

Create a file named ‘poweradmin’ under /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory. Now copy the above configuration and paste in this file and save it.

touch /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/poweradmin vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/poweradmin

Then restart Nginx HTTP server to load our new Virtual Host configuration.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

NOTE: Here i’m having a proper A record in my Public DNS for ‘dns.cyphrus.in’ to access the Web UI.

I’m now going to access http://dns.cyphrus.in/install/ in my browser, and i can now see PowerAdmin installation page. Likewise, if you see PowerAdmin’s installation page, then you are done. Just proceed through the installation process. Please populate correct data in form fields, to complete the installation successfully.

Once you complete the installation successfully, remove the ‘install’ directory under /opt/poweradmin. This is for security reasons. [

cc lang="bash"

] rm -rf /opt/poweradmin/install [/cc]

Now that we are ready to populate DNS records into PowerDNS, using PowerAdmin. Just play around with it, by populating some test records. Thats all, we have successfully setup our own DNS server.

Stay tuned, thanks, bye……..