Tag: Linux

A handy tip for entering long and/or complicated commands at the Linux command prompt (when using the bash shell) from a Mastodon user

Saw this tip on Mastodon from user Stephan (@durchaus@mastodon.social) and thought it worth passing along:

When you are about to write a long and complicated command in bash, then hit CTRL+x CTRL+e to enter an editor window in which you can write the command with your default editor. The command will be executed immediately after the file is saved and the editor is closed.

(Link to post)

I never knew you could do this. And it was only a year or two ago that I found about about CTRL+r which lets you do a text search for commands in your history (so you don’t need to keep pressing the up arrow). Then again I am not a big command line user, but when I do need to use it, tips like these can be quite helpful IF I can remember them when I need them!

Thanks to Stephan for sharing this tip!

Link: A Primer for Scheduling Cron Jobs in Linux

Cron jobs in Linux are simple scheduled tasks that can be set to run commands at specific times. Unfortunately, the syntax isn’t the easiest to use or remember, but in this month’s column I’ll share some examples and tips to help you better understand and utilize cron jobs.

Full article here:
A Primer for Scheduling Cron Jobs in Linux (ServerWatch)

Note that if you have Webmin installed on a system, it may be easier to use that to schedule cron jobs.

Link: How to protect Apache with Fail2ban

Around 2 years ago I wrote an article about fail2ban.

Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention framework written in the Python programming language. It is able to run on POSIX systems that have an interface to a packet-control system or firewall installed locally (such as, iptables or TCP Wrapper).

Fail2ban’s main function is to block selected IP addresses that may belong to hosts that are trying to breach the system’s security. It determines the hosts to be blocked by monitoring log files (e.g. /var/log/pwdfail, /var/log/auth.log, etc.) and bans any host IP that makes too many login attempts or performs any other unwanted action within a time frame defined by the administrator.

Today I want to show you some configurations that you can use to improve the security of your Apache.

Read the rest here:
How to protect Apache with Fail2ban (Linuxaria)

Link: 10 Annoying Apps We’re All Stuck Using (and How to Make Them Better)

There are probably at least two or three things on this list that you use almost every day, and some of you may use all of them:

10 Annoying Apps We’re All Stuck Using (and How to Make Them Better) (Lifehacker)

Installing Linux in place of OS X on an older Mac

Former title: Installing Ubuntu Linux (or Mythbuntu) in place of OS X on a Mac Mini (changed because this article is now less specific to Ubuntu or the Mac Mini).

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

All computers have their day in the sun, and then something new comes along that makes them less desirable. I have a Mac Mini that I acquired sometime around the time OS X Leopard came out, probably in 2009. As time went by it became slower and slower and I finally replaced it. However, it seemed a bit of a shame to have it just sitting in a closet doing nothing, so I decided to see if I could put Ubuntu Linux 12.04 (at that time the most recent LTS version) on it. I started out by trying to follow the instructions on this page (the Single Boot/MBR option) but ultimately it turned out to be not nearly that complicated. NOTE THAT THIS WILL NOT GIVE YOU A DUAL BOOT SYSTEM; THIS IS REPLACING OS X WITH UBUNTU LINUX, AND ALL YOUR EXISTING DATA ON THE HARD DRIVE WILL BE ERASED!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

Also: THIS IS FOR EXPERIMENTAL AND INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. This is what worked for ME. This MAY or MAY NOT work for you. It may even brick your system (if that should happen, try doing a PRAM reset before you totally panic). It did not do that to me, and I have never heard of anyone having that problem, but your hardware may be a bit different than mine, so I make NO guarantees!!! Here’s all I wound up having to do:

  • Connected a USB keyboard and mouse.
  • Before proceeding I made sure I had the latest firmware upgrade – that is very important since you can’t do it once you have installed Ubuntu, and the rest of this might not work if you have old firmware. Another thing you can’t do is disable the startup chime so if you don’t want that after Linux is installed, find a way to turn it off before proceeding (I wanted it, and it’s used in the instructions that follow, so I didn’t search for a way to disable it, and I don’t recommend you do either).
  • Inserted my old OS X Leopard installation CD (any OS X installation CD that works with the Mac should be fine for this procedure)
  • Rebooted while holding down the “C” key
  • Accepted the default language (English) and pressed Enter
  • From the top menu bar, I selected Utilities | Disk Utility
  • In Disk Utility I selected the internal hard drive in the left hand side panel. You have to select the drive itself (it shows the brand name of your drive), not the partition
  • Clicked the Partition tab, selected 1 Partition under the Volume Scheme (instead of Current)
  • Clicked the Options button and selected “Master Boot Record”
  • Clicked the Continue button (this erases the hard drive)
  • When the above finished, I quit Disk Utility, then quit the installer
  • The Mac rebooted — at that point I clicked and held the leftmost mouse button until the CD ejected
  • Inserted the Ubuntu Install CD, then power cycled the Mac Mini
  • At the startup chime I pressed the “C” key to boot from the CD
  • When the Ubuntu CD boots, you are given the option to install Ubuntu directly, or to try Ubuntu (which takes you to the Ubuntu desktop). As it turns out, I could have simply ran the installer. Instead, I did it from the desktop because I was following some instructions that said you have to type in some things during the install, and you need to have access to a terminal window to do that. But when I tried to type those things in, Ubuntu rejected them with errors, so I just let it complete the install (answering the questions it asked during the install). I did NOT select any special partitioning, etc. – I pretty much did a plain vanilla installation, generally accepting the defaults except where they weren’t appropriate or weren’t what I wanted.
Important
NOTE: If, when you boot into the Ubuntu installation CD, you are greeted with a screen that asks you to “Select CD Rom boot type” but you cannot select anything because neither the keyboard nor the mouse are functional, or if you get a black screen at some point early in the install process, then you may need a special build of Linux intended for use with 64-bit Macs that use a 32-bit EFI. Such models were mostly manufactured in the last half of the 2000’s. In that case you can try the solution offered here, if you can understand the instructions, or you can see if you can find a suitable ready-made .iso file at Matt Gadient’s site (note that even though it says “late 2006 models” in the title, those builds should work with late 2006 and later 64-bit Macs that use a 32-bit EFI).

When the install was finished (after quite some time), I rebooted. The only unusual thing was that after the reboot, the screen remains white for about 20-30 seconds right at the start of the reboot. Then after that delay, it finally decides it will load Ubuntu. That still happens and while it makes the startup take a bit longer, I’ve seen worse. The reason for this (and a possible fix) can be found here: Reducing the 30 second delay when starting 64-bit Ubuntu in BIOS mode on the old 32-bit EFI Macs.

Oh, and the sound was muted by default for some reason, and the volume slider set all the way down. After I unmuted it and turned up the volume slider, the sound worked normally.

The wired network connection worked fine. I don’t use WiFi here so I did not test that. If you have issues with those, or any other issues see GNU/Linux Debian on a Macbook Pro 11-1, which contains some additional hints that may make things run more smoothly (or work at all) after installation. I would use any hints on that page only if you have one of the specific issues that the author had. Another page with possibly useful additional hacks to make this work is Mac book pro 11.3 Linux customization (2): grub and hardware, which may be helpful if you have issues with an unrecognized Intel Iris GPU or Thunderbolt, but again I would only use these if you really need them, since this article is from 2014 and such hacks may no longer be necessary (by the way, this blog has several other pages of rather technical hacks for using Linux on a Mac Book Pro, and while many users will not need any of them, you can search that site for the phrase “Mac book pro 11.3 Linux customization” to find the other articles).

The only real hitch I found was that it wouldn’t boot if I didn’t have a video display connected! I have no idea why that was the case but there is a hardware workaround described on this page. Hope you didn’t misplace your Mac Mini’s DVI to VGA adapter! I had a 100 Ω resistor handy and that seems to work fine (it’s probably about 40 or 50 years old but what the heck, carbon resistors don’t change value that much just sitting in a junk box). If you can’t find the DVI to VGA adapter, I have read that at least one user placed a resistor directly into the DVI port between pins C2 and C5; you can use this pinout diagram to find those pins. However, I have not tried this, so I make no guarantees. Either way, the point is that the resistor goes between the analog green signal output and the analog ground return. If you can’t find the adapter, can’t get this to work, or if you just don’t want to mess around with a resistor, you can try a DVI Emulator/Dummy Plug that includes an EDID chip, that may be available from Amazon or eBay. A DVI 1920×1080 or 1920×1200 model should be sufficient. Such a device fools the Mac Mini into thinking a display is connected.

After I had this running for a year or two I read that Ubuntu doesn’t control the system fan properly. You can do this in some newer versions of Ubuntu (and possibly other Linux builds) to get fan control to work. First, try using your chosen Linux distribution’s Software Center or package manager to search for and install the macfanctld package (after you check for updates). If that doesn’t work, try this (assuming you’re using a Ubuntu or Debian based distribution):

sudo apt install -y macfanctld

On my system at least, it appeared that this did cause the fan to run a bit faster but not enough that I really noticed it. Once it is installed, you can type man macfanctld at a Linux command prompt to get configuration instructions. Changes to temperature limits and minimum fan speed are made in the file /etc/macfanctl.conf.

Also, although I have not personally done this, I have read on a couple of pages that you can enable automatic reboot after a power interruption by adding one line to /etc/rc.local (this may be Ubuntu-specific, but you can always remove it if it doesn’t work):

setpci -s 0:1f.0 0xa4.b=0

If you have smb or samba installed (it is installed by default in many distributions) and find that your samba/smb log files fill up with complaints such as “Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost:631 – Connection refused”, here is a workaround. In the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf add these lines:

printing = bsd
printcap name = /dev/null

Then from a command prompt restart samba:

sudo service smbd restart

Long ago I read a post on Reddit where the author said, “After months of headaches and tinkering I’ve finally found the stupid way to let Linux work properly on Macs. Just add acpi_osi=Darwin as boot parameter.” Unfortunately I did not save a link to that post so I have no idea if still valid advice, and therefore I would only try it if something (particularly Thunderbolt) isn’t working right and you can’t resolve it any other way. If you understand Linux kernel stuff see the final paragraphs of this page for a discussion of this setting, also see Section 2 on this page. If you don’t use the Thunderbolt port then you probably don’t need this, and you may not anyway.

By the way, I had intended to try Linux Mint but they no longer offer a version that fits on a CD, and I still have about a gazillion blank CDs (plus I already had Ubuntu 12.04 burned to CD) and since the Mac Mini doesn’t have a BIOS in the traditional sense, there is no way to install from a USB stick, so Ubuntu it was. For what I plan to do with this, having Mint would be no advantage. Many older Macs have issues booting from a USB memory stick, although one site I read said that they might be able to if you use UNetbootin to transfer the Linux image file to the USB stick. I did not attempt that, so I cannot say whether that works. I got it to work using a CD, but I do realize that CD and DVD burners are becoming somewhat of a scarce item these days.

Note that nowhere above did I mention a program called rEFIt, nor did I mention BootCamp. I didn’t need either of those.

Had this not worked I could have always reinstalled Leopard, but again, for what I was doing with this system (running a Tvheadend backend, for one thing) Linux was probably a better choice, but I still wanted to be able to use this as a backup regular desktop computer, should the need ever arise.

One final note: This is the xorg.conf I used with my “headless” system. It came from this blog post and I did have to save it as /etc/X11/xorg.conf and not the filename shown in the post (in newer versions of Linux I believe this location may have moved yet again, so you may need to search to find the correct location for the xorg configuration for your distro). Note this is only something you might consider using if you have installed a version of Linux that includes a desktop; you don’t need this if you have a server-only version of Linux that has no desktop installed (one where you do everything from a Linux command prompt):

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier "Monitor0"
  Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 1118  -HSync +Vsync
  Modeline "1024x768_60.00"  64.11  1024 1080 1184 1344  768 769 772 795  -HSync +Vsync
EndSection
Section "Screen"
  Identifier "Screen0"
  Device "VGA1"
  Monitor "Monitor0"
  DefaultDepth 24
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth 24
    Modes "1920x1080_60.00" "1024x768_60.00"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

A real help for Linux users with bad memories: Aliaser — take control of your aliases on Linux

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.
Tux, the Linux penguin
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a program that may be useful for those of you who, like me, sometimes find ourselves at a Linux command prompt trying to recall the syntax of a command we use frequently (because, you know, it would never have occurred to the designers of Linux to actually implement commands with names that have a clear meaning in plain English):

Alias are a great tool to help increment your productivity on the terminal with bash (or any shell program you’re using), but usually we are too lazy to think at what are the most common, or long commands that we use frequently and prepare an alias for them.

And so someone has done a small piece of software to do this job: aliaser

Aliaser helps you identify frequently typed commands and creates bash aliases for them. Aliaser analyses your bash history and helps you identify commands that you use frequently.

Full article (with installation instructions) here.

One thing they forgot to mention is that once you’ve added an alias, it won’t actually be available for use until you log out and then log back in.  Also, you can delete the aliaser file and temporary directory from your /tmp directory once installation is complete.  If you ever want to uninstall aliaser, just remove the three lines added to your .bashrc file, remove the ~/.aliaser directory, and remove the /usr/bin/aliaser file.

One way I find this useful is to make commands I can’t remember into ones that that I can remember.  For example, I did this:

aliaser add processes “ps awx”

The Linux purists are probably rushing to comment that I just turned a six character command into a nine character one.  Yes, BUT, I can actually remember the word “processes”, whereas I cannot remember the options I need to use after “ps” to get the output I want. The designers of Linux seem to not realize that some of us users have really bad memories.  Another use for this is turning arcane Linux commands into the equivalent Windows commands that you’re familiar with.  You could do this:

aliaser add dir “ls -al”

So that when you type “dir”, you get a directory listing similar to what you are used to.

If you can’t even remember the aliases you’ve created (yeah, my memory really is that bad some days), just use aliaser show to see all the aliases you’ve added.

The Linux equivalent of Little Snitch, ZoneAlarm, and similar per-application firewalls?

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

EDIT: This article is very old and outdated. For more current information, see OpenSnitch: The Little Snitch application like firewall tool for Linux.

If you are a Mac user, you’ve probably heard of Little Snitch.  It’s a commercial (as in, not free) program that lets you allow or deny connections to the Internet from individual applications.  One reason for using such a program is to detect software that should have no reason to connect to the Internet nevertheless attempting to do so.  For example, you download a free screensaver (dumb move to start with) and it sends all the personal information it can find on you to some group of hackers on the other side of the world.  A program like Little Snitch would let you know that the screensaver  is trying to connect to the Internet, and allow you to deny that connection.  In the Windows world, I believe that ZoneAlarm has a similar capability, and it’s also a commercial (as in, not free) program.

Leopard Flower personal firewall for Linux OS screenshot
Leopard Flower personal firewall for Linux OS screenshot

It appears that these is a similar program for Linux users, and it IS free!  It’s called Leopard Flower and it’s described as a “Personal firewall for Linux OS (based on libnetfilter_queue) which allows to allow or deny Internet access on a per-application basis rather than on a port/protocol basis.”

Looking at the screenshot it appears to have very much the same per-application blocking functionality you’d get in one of those other programs.  I have not personally tried it yet, but I wanted to create a post about it so if someday in the future I am trying to remember the name of this program, I’ll know where to find it (yes, this blog does sort of serve as my long-term memory!).  🙂

Since this article was originally published, I have been made aware of another similar application called Douane: Linux personal firewall with per application rule controls – here are a couple of screenshots:

Douane personal firewall for GNU/Linux screenshot
Douane personal firewall for GNU/Linux screenshot
Duane configurator screenshot
Duane configurator screenshot

The only downside to this one is that as of this writing the only available package is for Arch Linux but if you want to try to build it for a Ubuntu or Debian system, they provide a page showing the needed dependencies.

There is an older similar program called TuxGuardian but apparently is hasn’t been updated since 2006, so I have no idea if it will even work with current versions of Linux. And as for you Android users, try the NoRoot Firewall app.

If your Linux-based PC with NVIDIA graphics started booting to a black screen or text only, here is the fix — maybe!

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.
Image representing NVidia as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

I’ve seen this happen several times now on Ubuntu-Linux based systems that have NVIDIA graphics.  What happens is that “Update Manager” pops up and tell you there are updates for your software, and you accept them.  It then tells you that your system has to be rebooted.  And when you do that, you get no video, or text only.  What probably happened was that the updates you installed included an update to the Linux kernel, and the NVIDIA graphics driver currently installed on the system was compiled against the OLD kernel.

Note that this generally can only happen if you manually updated the NVIDIA graphics driver at some point. If you always installed it from the standard repositories for your distribution, you’ll probably never see this issue. So a word to the wise — when you finally get around to doing an upgrade of your Linux distribution, try to avoid manually installing the NVIDIA graphics driver. Instead, let the distribution pull it from its repository. After that, you should not have this issue in the future. By the way, if you currently are running Ubuntu, we recommend upgrading to Linux Mint rather than a newer version of Ubuntu. Linux Mint is very similar to Ubuntu, but leaves out some of the things that users seem to hate about newer releases of Ubuntu. More to the point, they are not currently talking about switching their base graphics system from the X window server system to a new display manager, which I have a feeling might cause problems for some NVIDIA graphics users.

But if you’re not yet ready to do a full reinstall of Linux, the fix for this problem is easy IF you had the foresight to set up SSH access to your Linux system BEFORE the trouble started.  If you didn’t, and you’re not a true Linux geek, you may be kind of screwed.  So if you’re reading this and your system is working fine, and you haven’t yet set up SSH access, you may want to do that.  There are several sites that tell you how to do that; here are two that I found using Google:

Basic SSH Setup On Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Using OpenSSH Server
SSH—OpenSSH—Configuring

If you didn’t do this beforehand, you may still be able to do it if you can get to a command prompt.

Anyway, the actual fix is to (re-)install the latest NVIDIA driver for your system. They will be compiled against the new Linux kernel and then everything should work fine. To find the correct NVIDIA driver, go to the NVIDIA Driver Downloads page, and use the dropdowns to select the correct driver for your system.  Download it to your local system, then upload it to your Linux PC (if you have SSH access working then you can use an SFTP client, such as WinSCP or Transmit, to upload your driver file).  Once you have it on your PC, from a command prompt navigate to the directory where you put the driver and then change the permissions to make it executable:

sudo chmod +x driver_upgrade_script_filename

Now try running the script (it should have a .run extension):

sudo ./driver_upgrade_script_filename

It should not complain that the Gnome Display Manager or KDE Display Manager is running (if it were, you wouldn’t be in a state of near-panic right now), but if you were just doing a regular update you’d have to do this when the GDM/KDM is stopped. For a guide that covers that scenario, see How To Install Official Nvidia Drivers in Linux, or just know that to stop the display manager,

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

should stop the Gnome Display Manager, or if you’re using KDE then the command would be

sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop

Most sources I’ve seen suggest that you answer yes to any questions the installer may ask. The only one I’d be cautious about is letting it create a new xorg.conf if you are using a customized one (which you may well be if you’ve used any of my previous HTPC-related articles). If you have edited xorg.conf, then I’d make sure you at least have a backup before letting the installer create a new one, so you can revert back to your custom one (or compare the two and insert your customizations into the new one) if necessary.

Under Ubuntu, you may get a message similar to “Provided install script failed”. That will happen every time you update the NVIDIA driver this way and it is normal. Just ignore it and continue the installation. If you get “Error locating kernel source”, run  sudo apt-get install kernel-source  from the command prompt, then run the driver upgrade script again.

When the installer has successfully finished, reboot the system and when it comes back up, hopefully you should be happy again!

Problems you may encounter when attempting to install phpMyAdmin on your Centos server, and how to solve them

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

This article was originally published in August, 2011 and may contain outdated information.

phpMyAdmin logo
Image via Wikipedia

I just spent an interesting couple of hours trying to install phpMyAdmin on an Asterisk server running CentOS 5.5. As I encountered each problem and solved it, I had to wade through a lot of pages that weren’t applicable to my installation, etc. Since many readers of this blog run similar configurations I thought I’d just list the hiccups I encountered, and what I had to do to solve them. Note that some distributions come with phpMyAdmin already installed, so make sure you don’t already have it before you try to install it!

NOTE: Think carefully about whether you really want to follow the instructions below, particularly if it requires adding a repository. If you do that, make sure you only install the software you actually need from that repository, then disable it (set enabled=0). If you don’t do that, you could easily get into a situation where some of your curent software (such as PHP) simply will not upgrade no matter what you do. And if you are running a PBX “install and go” distribution, they may specifically warn you not to add repositories, or it will break your installation, so don’t do it!

If you do anything suggested below, you do it at your own risk!

• yum install phpmyadmin doesn’t work — try using the dag repository — there are several pages on the Web that tell how to do this. Use Google to search for “how to enable the dag repository” (without the quotes) if you need help. The basic idea is you need to create a file called /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo (with the proper permissions, ownership, etc.) and put something like this inside:

[dag] name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

BUT you also need to install a GPG key, and getting THAT can be a bit of a problem. Some instructions will tell you to do this:

rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

That link no longer works, and you have to do this instead:

rpm –import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

But for some people even THAT doesn’t work, in which case it’s suggested you use wget to obtain the file, then import it:

wget http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

I’m being a bit non-specific because the instructions could change, and I’d prefer you find a current reference on how to enable this repository. Also, some may prefer to install RPMforge, which is a collaboration of Dag and other packagers. Regardless of the effort involved, I do suggest you install phpMyAdmin using yum, because it will install everything in the correct locations for CentOS, and you don’t have to compile it or anything like that.

Note that when you do install phpMyAdmin using yum, it may also install required dependencies such as libmcrypt and php-mcrypt (another advantage to using yum).

• You don’t have permission to access /phpmyadmin/ on this server.

Go to /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
Under the line:
Allow from 127.0.0.1
You could add a line to allow access from your local network, for example:
Allow from 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
(But use values appropriate to your network).

If you are accessing the box remotely, then add a line allowing access from your IP address. Be VERY careful, because you don’t want to let the entire world into your databases!

• Existing configuration file (./config.inc.php) is not readable.

If you’re doing this on a system running FreePBX, scroll down to where I discuss changing the ownership of all phpMyAdmin-related files and directories to be the same as the MySQL user. Otherwise, the easiest solution (though not necessarily the most secure) is to change the permissions of the file /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php from the default of 640 to 644 (add user read permission). If no one can get to your system from outside your local network, this probably isn’t an issue, but if anyone has a better idea on this, feel free to leave a comment.

• “Error
The configuration file now needs a secret passphrase (blowfish_secret).”

Open /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and find this section:

* This is needed for cookie based authentication to encrypt password in
* cookie
*/
$cfg[‘blowfish_secret’] = ‘oh my this is such a wonderful passphrase‘; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */

Insert any phrase you like (within reason) between the second pair of single quotes in the last line shown above (but don’t use ‘oh my this is such a wonderful passphrase‘, I just inserted that as an example.  Be creative!).  Don’t worry, this isn’t something you’ll actually have to type in every time you want to use phpMyAdmin.

– Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ (using password: YES)

You don’t login as root, you use your MySQL username and password. In FreePBX-based systems these can be found in /etc/amportal.conf, in the AMPDBUSER and AMPDBPASS settings. BUT… if you enter a wrong user name before logging in correctly, it may have already set a cookie with that username and password and then you won’t be able to get in even if you DO use the correct username and password. The solution is to clear all browser cookies for the address of your server, then try again — and make sure you get it right this time! 😉

I will note here that you can avoid some of these cookie-related issues, probably including those mentioned above, by going into /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and finding this section:

/* Authentication type */
$cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘auth_type’] = ‘cookie’;

If your system is behind a hardware firewall or is otherwise VERY secure, you could change the auth_type from ‘cookie’ to something else, such as ‘http’. This will save you a lot of frustration during the login process, but at the possible expense of making your database less secure.  For those concerned about security, a document on the phpMyAdmin wiki advises you to “See the page on Security or the multi–user sub–section of the FAQ for additional information, especially FAQ 4.4.”  I personally found their security documentation rather useless, because they make a lot of suggestions but provide no specific examples of how to implement those suggestions.  Anyway, I personally feel that as long as a system is behind a good firewall that doesn’t permit anyone on the “outside” to access phpMyAdmin, ‘http’ is a good compromise between a security model that might drive you crazy (‘cookie’) and one of the other models that’s fairly insecure, such as ‘config’ (which some consider insecure because it stores your server username and password in plain text).  However, if your system is otherwise VERY secure and you just don’t want to have to enter a password to use phpMyAdmin, then it is possible to change the ‘auth_type’ to ‘config’ and (in the same config file), look for these lines:

/*
 * End of servers configuration
 */

And just above those lines, insert these lines:

$cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘user’] = ‘mysqluser’;
$cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘password’] = ‘mysqlpassword’;

Change mysqluser and mysqlpassword to the correct vales for your system (on a FreePBX-based system, these are the values in /etc/amportal.conf mentioned above).  I do not recommend using ‘config’ because it is less secure (be sure to read the page on Security mentioned above), but it’s up to you to decide how secure you want your system to be.

(I’m fully aware that any objections to storing the user and password values in plain text in the phpMyAdmin config.inc.php fall a bit flat when you realize the same values are stored in plain text in amportal.conf, but I also feel as though the fewer places those values are exposed, the better.  Why give potential attackers one more place to find this information?)

• phpMyAdmin – Error
Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.

Check your /var/log/httpd/error_log – in my case, the first error message of each set contained a phrase like “open(/var/lib/php/session/sess_somerandomstring, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13)” and I figured that the problem was another permissions issue.

On some sites I have found a suggestion that you change the ownership of all phpMyAdmin-related files and directories to be the same as the MySQL user (in the case of an Asterisk/FreePBX system, that would be asterisk:asterisk). On a FreePBX-based system, you could try this (check to make sure these are the correct paths before doing this):

chown asterisk:asterisk /usr/share/phpmyadmin -R
chown asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/php/session -R

If that doesn’t resolve the issue (or you’re doing this on a system that’s not running FreePBX), perhaps the easiest solution (though not necessarily the most secure) is to change the permissions of the offending file. If you have the same issue I had, try changing the permissions of the directory /var/lib/php/session from the default of 770 to 777 (add full user permissions).

Strangely, this one didn’t show up until after I’d successfully run phpMyAdmin a few times. Go figure. Also, after fixing this, I had to delete cookies again (as mentioned in the previous item) before I could log in, but that was when I still had the ‘auth_type’ set to ‘cookie’ (another reason I decided to change that to ‘http’).

Found and solved any other “gotchas” while installing phpMyAdmin under CentOS? Think I could have solved a problem in a better way? Feel free to share your solutions in the comments.

EDIT: There is one other thing that can happen after you install or update PHP on your system (as might happen if you let a FreePBX-based distribution do an upgrade).  You may start seeing PHP warning messages such as:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: mcrypt: Unable to initialize module
Module compiled with module API=20050922, debug=0, thread-safety=0
PHP    compiled with module API=20060613, debug=0, thread-safety=0
These options need to match
 in Unknown on line 0

If that happens try updating the dependencies that came with phpMyAdmin, for example:

yum update libmcrypt
yum update php-mcrypt

It was the second of those two that vanquished the PHP warning messages for me.

And why did I NEED to install phpMyAdmin, you ask?  Well, because someone (ahem) made a slight configuration error and caused an endless loop, that within the space of about ten seconds or so, generated over a THOUSAND bogus records in the ‘asteriskcdr’ (Call Detail) database.  The only easy way to I knew of at the time to clean them out was phpMyAdmin (since I don’t “speak” MySQL), but I don’t recommend you attempt something like that unless you know what you’re doing, because one wrong move and you could delete your entire FreePBX database (trust me, that would be a VERY bad thing!). In retrospect I probably could have used Webmin, since it also has the ability to access the MySQL database, but I didn’t think of that at the time.

Using a dynamic DNS (DDNS) to solve the problem of keeping a firewall open to remote users at changeable IP addresses

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

(Updated July 1, 2011 to include rudimentary test for string returned that doesn’t contain an actual IP address)

One problem faced by Asterisk users (and probably also users of other software PBX’s) is that you want to secure your system by not opening ports up to the entire Internet, but if you have remote users (users not on the same local network as your Asterisk server) you need to make an exception for them to allow them to penetrate your firewall.  If all your external users have fixed IP addresses, it’s not a problem — you simply add a specific rule in your firewall to permit access from each user’s IP address.  However, if their ISP changes their IP address frequently, or if they are using a softphone on a laptop computer, then you can’t just assume they will constantly be at same IP.  And if one of those users happens to be your boss or your mother, they are not going to be happy if they can’t use the phone until they make contact with you, and you enter their new IP address in the firewall.  And they’re probably not going to be real happy if they have to go to a web site or take some other action before they can make and receive calls.

This solution will work for many users in this situation, provided that you are using the iptables firewall. Again, the goal is to keep all your ports closed to outsiders, except for your authorized users. But if you can get each user to set up a Dynamic DNS account and then set their router to do the Dynamic DNS updates (as described here for DD-WRT users), OR failing that if you can get them to install a software Dynamic DNS client on their computer (which is a poorer choice because the computer has to be on for updates to occur), then you can run a script on your Asterisk box every five minutes to check to see if their IP address has changed, and if so, update iptables. I have one script that is called as a cron job every five minutes, and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someaddress.afraid.org
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someotheraddress.afraid.org
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someaddress.no-ip.com

In other words it has one line for each Dynamic DNS host I want to check. For each host it calls a script named firewall-dynhosts.sh which in turn contains this:

#!/bin/bash
# filename: firewall-dynhosts.sh
#
# A script to update iptable records for dynamic dns hosts.
# Written by: Dave Horner (http://dave.thehorners.com)
# Released into public domain.
#
# Run this script in your cron table to update ips.
#
# You might want to put all your dynamic hosts in a sep. chain.
# That way you can easily see what dynamic hosts are trusted.
#
# create the chain in iptables.
# /sbin/iptables -N dynamichosts
# insert the chain into the input chain @ the head of the list.
# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -j dynamichosts
# flush all the rules in the chain
# /sbin/iptables -F dynamichosts

HOST=$1
HOSTFILE=”/root/dynhosts/host-$HOST”
CHAIN=”dynamichosts” # change this to whatever chain you want.
IPTABLES=”/sbin/iptables”

# check to make sure we have enough args passed.
if [ “${#@}” -ne “1” ]; then
echo “$0 hostname”
echo “You must supply a hostname to update in iptables.”
exit
fi

# lookup host name from dns tables
IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`
if [ “${#IP}” = “0” ]; then
echo “Couldn’t lookup hostname for $HOST, failed.”
exit
fi

if [ ! `expr “$IP” : ‘([1-9])’` ]; then
echo “Did not return valid IP address, failed.”
exit
fi

OLDIP=””
if [ -a $HOSTFILE ]; then
OLDIP=`cat $HOSTFILE`
# echo “CAT returned: $?”
fi

# has address changed?
if [ “$OLDIP” == “$IP” ]; then
echo “Old and new IP addresses match.”
exit
fi

# save off new ip.
echo $IP>$HOSTFILE

echo “Updating $HOST in iptables.”
if [ “${#OLDIP}” != “0” ]; then
echo “Removing old rule ($OLDIP)”
`$IPTABLES -D $CHAIN -s $OLDIP/32 -j ACCEPT`
fi
echo “Inserting new rule ($IP)”
`$IPTABLES -A $CHAIN -s $IP/32 -j ACCEPT`

echo “Changing rule in /etc/sysconfig/iptables”
sed -i “0,/-A\sdynamichosts\s-s\s$OLDIP\s-j\sACCEPT/s//-A dynamichosts -s $IP -j ACCEPT/” /etc/sysconfig/iptables
# sed -i “s/-A\sdynamichosts\s-s\s$OLDIP\s-j\sACCEPT/-A dynamichosts -s $IP -j ACCEPT/g” /etc/sysconfig/iptables

echo “Sending e-mail notification”
`echo “This is an automated message – please do not reply. The address of dynamic host $HOST has been changed from $OLDIP to $IP. You may need to change the dynamichosts chain in Webmin’s Linux Firewall configuration.” | mail -s “IP address of dynamic host changed on machine name recipient@someaddress.com,anotherrecipient@someaddress.net`

As always, copy and paste the above script, so you can see where the line breaks are really supposed to be (the last line in particular is quite long, and will likely be broken up into four or five lines on the screen). Also, beware of WordPress or other software changing the single or double quotation marks to “prettified” versions — only the plain text normal quotation marks will work.

Note that prior to the first run of the script you will need to run the three commented-out commands shown near the top of the script, right after “create the chain in iptables”, to create the chain. For your convenience here they all are in one place, without the interleaved comment lines:

/sbin/iptables -N dynamichosts
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -j dynamichosts
/sbin/iptables -F dynamichosts

The lines in blue in firewall-dynhosts.sh are custom additions by me. Just in case something goes wrong, I suggest you make a backup copy of /etc/sysconfig/iptables in a safe place before running this script.  My first addition checks the first character of the string returned in $IP to make sure it is actually a number.  This was a quick and dirty addition to keep it from trying to use a string like ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached as a valid IP address (yes, it really did that).  I’m sure that the test there could be improved upon (for example, to do a full check for a valid IP address rather than just checking the first digit) but as I say this was a quick and dirty fix.  If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please leave a comment.  I did find this article, Validating an IP Address in a Bash Script, but it seemed like a bit of overkill considering that in this case what I’m really trying to do is simply weed out error messages.

The second set of additions change the address in the dynamichosts chain of /etc/sysconfig/iptables. Please note that this file may be at a different location in some versions of Linux (such as /etc/iptables.up.rules), if so you will need to change this accordingly. This is particularly important if you run both Webmin and fail2ban. If fail2ban is running it will add some lines to the in-memory version of iptables, so you don’t want to do a simple commit to save the in-memory version back to the iptables file. But at the same time, if you use Webmin’s “Linux Firewall” module to maintain iptables, you want any changes in IP addresses to show up the next time you call up Webmin’s Linux Firewall page. So this simply does a search and replace in /etc/sysconfig/iptables on the rule containing the old IP address, and replaces it with the new one. There are two lines in that section that contain the sed command, the first one will replace only the first instance of the old IP address if it’s in iptables more than once, while the second (which is commented out) would replace all instances of the old IP address. Uncomment whichever you prefer and leave the other commented out, but bear in mind that if two or more of your remote extensions might ever be at the same IP address at the same time, you want the first version (the one that is uncommented above) so that when one of those extensions moves to a different IP address it doesn’t change the IP address for all of the extensions.

Note there’s still a possibility of missing a change if you are actually working in Webmin when a change occurs (since you’ll already have loaded a copy of iptables, and if you then make changes and save it out it could overwrite any change made by the script). But, the last two lines of the script send you an e-mail to alert you to that possibility. If you don’t use Webmin and don’t need or want an e-mail notification for some other reason, you can omit those last two lines, otherwise change the parts in red text to sane values for your situation. While editing, pay attention to the backtick at the end of the line (it’s easy to accidentally delete it when editing an e-mail address — don’t do that!).

When you’re all finished, make sure both scripts are executable and the permissions are correct, then create a cron job to call the first script every five minutes.

The only slight drawback to this method is that when an IP address changes it can take up to ten minutes to update (five for the Dynamic DNS to pick it up, and five more for the cron job to fire that gets it from the Dynamic DNS). Fortunately, most ISP’s tend to change IP address assignments in the middle of the night. Note that using the wrong DNS servers can cause the updates to take significantly longer; I set my computers to use Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and that works fairly well. Note that if ALL your Dynamic DNS addresses are from freedns.afraid.org then you may want to change one line in the above script, from

IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`

to

IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short @ns1.afraid.org $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`

This change will specify that the afraid.org DNS server is to be used for these lookups (and ONLY for these lookups, not for every DNS request your system makes – don’t want to overload the servers of this free service!). This may be particularly important if the DNS server you normally use is a caching server that doesn’t always do real-time lookups for each DNS request (for example, if you have installed the BIND DNS Server on your system). If some of the Dynamic DNS addresses come from other services then you could use a similar modification that checks a public DNS service that does not cache entries for long periods of time; as I write this Google’s DNS servers seem to update in near real time.

One thing some may not like is that this script basically hands the “keys to the kingdom” to your authorized users, by giving them access to all ports, or at least all ports not explicitly denied by rules higher in priority. It would be easy enough to change the rule that is written to iptables, or even add additional ones, in the above script, so that you could specify access to individual ports. The other problem is it works great for those external users at fixed locations that don’t move around a lot. It might not work quite as well as well for softphone users on laptops due to the delay between the time they turn on the laptop and the time your Asterisk server picks up the new address.

This has actually worked the best for me of anything I’ve tried so far because once you get the external user’s router set up to do the Dynamic DNS updates, they don’t have to think about doing anything else prior to making a call.

EDIT (December, 2015): If it is not possible or appropriate to update the dynamic DNS automatically from the users’ router, there may be another option. If any of your users have Obihai devices (or possibly another brand of VoIP device that includes an accessible “Auto Provisioning” feature that is not currently being utilized), you may want to know that they do not need to run a separate client to update their dynu.com or freedns.afraid.org dynamic IP address, because an Obihai device (and possibly some other brands of VoIP devices) can do that automatically. This is NOT a recommendation for Obihai devices, but if you or one of your users happens to already have one, here is the information as originally found in this thread on the Obihai forum, posted by user giqcass, who wrote:

Rough Draft for hackish DNS updates:

This hack will let your OBi update Dynamic DNS. It isn’t perfect but it works very well. It’s as simple as calling a url to update the DNS at afraid.org. I believe it would be a simple task to add this feature to the OBi firmware directly. So please add this OBiHai. Pretty please. Until then here you go.

Set up a Dynamic DNS host at http://freedns.afraid.org/
Go to the Dynamic DNS tab.
Copy the “direct” update url link.
Open your Obi admin page.
Click the System management page.
Click Auto Provisioning.
Under “ITSP Provisioning” Change the following.
Method = Periodically
Interval = This setting must be greater then 400 so not to over use resources. I use 3667.
ConfigURL = Paste the update link you got from afraid.org (use http://… not https://…)

Press Submit at the bottom of the page. Restart you OBi.

If you use choose to use dynu.com instead of freedns.afraid.org (which you might because dynu.com doesn’t force you to visit their web site periodically to keep your domain), the procedure is the same (after the first line), except that for the ConfigURL you would use:

http://api.dynu.com/nic/update?hostname=YOUR_DYNU_DYNAMIC_DNS&username=YOUR_DYNU_USERNAME&password=MD5_HASH_OF_PASSWORD

Replace YOUR_DYNU_DYNAMIC_DNS with your dynamic DNS domain name, YOUR_DYNU_USERNAME with the username you use to log into your dynu.com account, and MD5_HASH_OF_PASSWORD with the MD5 hash of your dynu.com password OR your IP Update Password if you have set one (which is recommended). To get the MD5 hash of the password you can enter it on this page. To set or update your IP Update Password, use this page.

The advantage of this is that if one of your users travels and takes their VoIP device with them, it would be able to change the dynamic DNS each time they plug in at a new location (not immediately, but after several minutes at most), so that if you use the technique outlined in this article your server will recognize their current address and permit access. Remember that it’s okay to use more than one Dynamic DNS service simultaneously, in case you or your user are already using a different one that doesn’t provide a simple update URL like dynu.com and freedns.afraid.org do. Other brands of VoIP adapters that have a similar “Auto Provisioning” feature may be able to do this as well, but we don’t have specific information for any of them. If you do, please feel free to add that information in a comment.

Note that we are not recommending any particular free dynamic DNS service. If you want to know what your options are, there is an article on the Best Free Dynamic DNS Services that will show you some options. You want one that is reliable and that will not disappear in a few months, but since we don’t have a crystal ball, we can’t tell you which ones might fit that criteria.

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