Category Archives: cloud

cloud, fedora, linux, ubuntu

Dynamic DNS

I have used dynamic dns for around 20 years, I think. But I have always used dyndns.com which these days seems to want to call themselves dyn.com. And some years back they were bought by Oracle, the kiss of death, and now they are impossible to deal with, arrogant, unsupportive, insular – all the things I expect of Oracle.

And why have I kept using them? Because that is what the routers supported. Dyndns was  there first, and the ubiquitous linksys and netgear routers usually have a feature to do automatic updates for dynamic dns, but (often) the router will only update dyndns: nobody else. And I’ve got routers installed in various people houses that are doing this.

But I recently added a new house that I support, and that person has a proprietary and ponderous comcast router, which will barely do anything useful, and has no facility to update dynamic dns.

Continue reading Dynamic DNS →

apache, cloud, encryption, fedora, linux, security, ubuntu, website building

LetsEncrypt Wildcard Certificates

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Comodo is after me to renew, offering a free year. The last time I attempted to install a wildcard certificate from Lets Encrypt, shortly after they introduced the feature, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Now, 9 months later, there is a lot more information about how to do it. Before spending the money for a commercial cert, I thought I would give it a try.

I used the following on tarragon:


certbot certonly \
--server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory \
--manual
-d wmbuck.net -d *.wmbuck.net \
--preferred-challenges dns

It is important that the server url by v02, because v01 servers can’t issue wildcard certs. I had to put TXT records in the DNS for them to verify, and they created the cert into the /etc/letsencrypt/live directory where all the others are.

This was trivially easy. Goodbye Comodo.

backup, cloud, linux, ubuntu

S3cmd on ubuntu 15.04

After installing ubuntu 15.04 my backups to S3 stopped working.

I tried running them manually to see what was happening and I got errors – some goofy stuff about the url I was using net.wmbuck.backups….s3.amazonaws.com not being part of *s3.amazonaws.com. When I searched the net I found that there was a change in python 2.7.9 having to do with evaluating certificates, and some conflict with the wildcard cert being used by Amazon S3, with the result that there is an error which occurs whenever an S3 bucket happens to contain the “.” character in its title.

My buckets are all named net.wmbuck.x so I am vulnerable to this error.

There is a fix for this in S3cmd version 1.6.0 but the latest ubuntu as of this writing has only S3cmd 1.5.x and attempting to upgrade using apt-get doesn’t get anything new.

I did an apt-get remove of s3cmd, and then downloaded a tarball, and installed it into /usr/local/bin.

Ubuntu 15.10 will be coming out next month, and when I get around to installing that perhaps the version of s3cmd will have the fix.

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cloud, encryption, fedora, linux, ubuntu, website building

Managing passwords on this server

This blog is running on my wmbuck.net server, tarragon, in the Amazon cloud. This server, in addition to hosting this blog, hosts about 20-25 websites (for friends, most of them very low traffic), including my own. It also operates mail for myself and a few others, and provides some other services.
One of the weaknesses has been that most of the people who use the server aren’t really very unix literate, and they don’t really WANT to be. Perhaps they want a website, or they want to have a good place to manage their mail. But in general, the last thing they want is to learn how to ssh into the server to change their password.
So, for most of them, they just use whatever password I set up for them.
One of my friends, who just began using mail on the server, was surprised that it was not convenient to change his password. That spurred me to address the long standing problem. How to let people manage their password for access to services.
The blog now has a new menu on the left, for access to the backend, and for linking to the reset-password screen. There is also a reset password link on the login page https://wmbuck.net/index/login.
The same password is used for all the wmbuck.net stuff: the password for access to mail, the password to get access to protected websites in apache, and the password for logging in to the wmbuck.net backend website.
Continue reading Managing passwords on this server →

btrfs, cloud, linux

New Server

The server for wmbuck.net (tarragon is its name) has been moved to Amazon EC2.

In part this was an experiment, motivated by curiosity about the ease or difficulty of maintaining a server in the cloud. But also in part it was motivated by dissatisfaction with the previous hosting environment, superb hosting. I needed to upgrade the server capacity. It had not been improved for 7 years, and it was ancient hardware when I got it. But at superb I ran into a lot of trouble, because I wanted to use btrfs (see earlier post  about using btrfs on the home computer, oregano). Superb offers old stable kernels, but I really  needed a kernel new enough to have a stable btrfs in it. After I lost all my work owing to btrfs driver problems in an old CentOS kernel, I was highly motivated to try another hosting arrangement where I could have my kernel of choice.

In mid May I set about creating a new tarragon. It took less than a week to set up, including all my learning curve, and all the migration issues, data transfer, etc. It has been running as wmbuck.net for over a month. The few hiccups were mistakes of transition on my part. Up to this moment I have had no problem which has turned out to be of any but my own making.
Continue reading New Server →