Scripting

Generate Certbot certificates with a container

Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

This is a little bit of a follow up post to the origin post about generating certs with the DNS challenge.  I decided to create a little container that can be used to generate a certificate based on the newly renamed dehyrdated script with the extras to make DNS provisioning easy.

A few things have changed in the evolution of Let’s Encrypt and its tooling since the last post was written.  First, some of the tools have been renamed so I’ll just try to clear up some of the names if there is any confusion.  The official Let’s Encrypt client has been renamed to Certbot.  The shell script used to provision the certificates has been renamed as well.  What used to be called letsencrypt.sh has been renamed to dehydrated.

The Docker image can be found here.  The image is essentially the dehydrated script with a few other dependencies to make the DNS challenge work, including Ruby, a ruby script DNS hook and a few Gems that the script relies on.

The following is an example of how to run the script:

docker run -it --rm \
    -v $(pwd):/dehydrated \
    -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="XXX" \
    -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="XXX" \
    jmreicha/dehydrated-dns --cron --domain test.example.com --hook ./route53.rb --challenge dns-01

Just replace test.example.com with the desired domain.  Make sure that you have the DNS zone added to route53 and make sure the AWS credentials used have the appropriate permissions to read and write records on route53 zone.

The command is essentially the same as the command in the original post but is a lot more convenient to run now because you can specify where on your local system you want to dump the generated certificates to and you can also easily specify/update the AWS credentials.

I’d like to quickly explain the decision to containerize this process.  Obviously the dehydrated tool has been designed and written to be a standalone tool but in order to generate certificates using the DNS challenge requires a few extra tidbits to be added.  Cooking all of the requirements into a container makes the setup portable so it can be easily automated on different environments and flexible so that it can be run in a variety of setups, with different domain names and AWS credentials.  With the container approach, the certs could potentially be dropped out on to a Windows machine running Docker for Windows if desired, for example.

tl;dr This setup may be overkill for some, but it has worked out well for my purposes.  Feel free to give it a try if you want to test out creating Certbot certs with the deyhrdated tool in a container.

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Fixing docker-machine shared folder performance issues

Josh Reichardt 8 Comments

It is a known issue that vboxsf (Virtualbox Shared Folders) has performance problems.  This ugly fact becomes a problem if you use docker-machine with the default Virtualbox driver to mount volumes, both on Windows and OS X, especially when mounting directories with a large amount (~17k and above files).  Linux does not suffer from this performance problem since it is able to run Docker natively and does not require you to run docker-machine.

There are various issues floating around Github referencing this problem, most of which remain unresolved.

Unfortunately there is currently not a proper fix for the vboxsf performance issues on OS X and Windows.  In fact, I reached out to the Virtualbox developers around a year ago asking what the deal was and was basically told that fixing shared folder performance was not a high priority issue for their dev team.

After hearing the unsettling news, I set out to find a good way to deal with shared volumes.  I stumbled across a few different approaches to solving the problem but most of them ended up being glitchy (at the time) or overly complicated.  There is a nice write up that mentions many of the tools that I tried myself.

Having tried most of the methods out there, easily the best workaround I have found is to use NFS file shares to mount the “Users” directory using a tool called docker-machine-nfs.  It is easy to install and run and most importantly it just works out of the box, which is exactly what most folks are looking for.

Sadly this method does not work on Windows.  And as far as I can tell there is not a good workaround to this problem if you are running docker-machine on Windows.  It does sounds like some folks maybe have had some success using samba but I have not attempted to get fast volumes working on Windows so can’t say for sure what the best approach is.

To install docker-machine-nfs

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adlogix/docker-machine-nfs/master/docker-machine-nfs.sh |
  sudo tee /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-nfs > /dev/null && \
  sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-nfs

To run it

Make sure you already have created a docker-machine VM and verify that it is running.  Then run the following command.

docker-machine-nfs <machine-name>

And that’s pretty much it…  It requires admin access to do the NFS mounting so you might need to punch in your password, other than that you can pretty much follow along with what the output is doing.

There are a few caveats to be aware of.

I have noticed that on newer versions of docker-machine, if you run the script too quickly after creating the VM, docker-machine ends up having issues communicating with the Docker daemon.  The work around (for now) is just to wait ~30 seconds the docker-machine VM to boot fully before running the command to mount nfs.

There is also currently an issue on the docker-machine side on version 0.5.5 and above that breaks docker-machine-nfs on the first run, which is described here.  The workaround for that issue is to modify the script and place a “sleep 20” in the script, as per the comments in the issue.  The author appears to have brought the issue up with docker-machine developers so should fixed properly in the near future.

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Autosnap AWS snapshot and volume management tool

Josh Reichardt 19 Comments

This is my first serious attempt at a Python tool on github.  I figured it was about time, as I’ve been leveraging Open Source tools for a long time, I might as well try to give a little bit back.  Please check out the project and leave feedback by emailing, opening a github or issue or commenting here, I’d love to see what can be done with this tool, there are lots of bugs to shake out and things to improve.  Even better if you have some code you’d like to contribute, this is very much a work in progress!

Here is the project – https://github.com/jmreicha/autosnap.

Introduction

Essentially, this tool is designed to ease the management of the snapshot and volume lifecycle in an AWS environment.  I have discovered that snapshots and volumes can be used together to form a simple backup management system, so by simplifying the management of these resources, by utilizing the power of the AWS API, you can easily manage backups of your AWS data.

While this obviously isn’t a full blown backup tool, it can do a few handy things like leverage tags to create and destroy backups based on custom expiration dates and create snapshots based on a few other criteria, all managed with tags.  Another cool thing about handling backups this way is that you get amazing resiliency by storing snapshots to S3, as well as dirt cheap storage.  Obviously if you have a huge number of servers and volumes your mileage will vary, but this solution should scale up in to the hundreds, if not thousands pretty easily.  The last big bonus is that you can nice granularity for backups.

For example, if you wanted to keep a weeks worth of backups across all your servers in a region, you would simply use this tool to set an expiration tag of 7 days and voila.  You will have rolling backups, based on snapshots for the previous seven days.  You can get the backup schedule fairly granular, because the snapshots are tagged down to the hour. It would be easy to get them down to the second if that is something people would find useful, I could see DB snapshots being important enough but for now it is set to the hour.

The one drawback is that this needs to be run on a daily basis so you would need to add it to a cron job or some other tool that runs tasks periodically.  Not a drawback really as much of a side note to be aware of.

Configuration

There is a tiny bit of overhead to get started, so I will show you how to get going.  You will need to either set up a config file or let autosnap build you one.  By default, autosnap will help create one the first time you run it, so you can use this command to build it:

autosnap

If you would like to provide your own config, create a file called ‘.config‘ in the base directory of this project.  Check the README on the github page for the config variables and for any clarifications you may need.

Usage

Use the –help flag to get a feeling for some of the functions of this tool.

$ autosnap --help

usage: autosnap [--config] [--list-vols] [--manage-vols] [--unmanage-vols]
 [--list-snaps] [--create-snaps] [--remove-snaps] [--dry-run]
 [--verbose] [--version] [--help]

optional arguments:
 --config          create or modify configuration file
 --list-vols       list managed volumes
 --manage-vols     manage all volumes
 --unmanage-vols   unmanage all volumes
 --list-snaps      list managed snapshots
 --create-snaps    create a snapshot if it is managed
 --remove-snaps    remove a snapshot if it is managed
 --version         show program's version number and exit
 --help            display this help and exit

The first thing you will need to do is let autosnap manage the volumes in a region:

autosnap --manage-vols

This command will simply add some tags to help with the management of the volumes.  Next, you can take a look and see what volumes got  picked up and are now being managed by autosnap

autosnap --list-vols

To take a snapshot of all the volumes that are being managed:

autosnap --create-snaps

And you can take a look at your snapshots:

autosnap --list-snaps

Just as easily you can remove snapshots older than the specified expiration date:

autosnap --remove-snaps

There are some other useful features and flags but the above commands are pretty much the meat and potatoes of how to use this tool.

Conclusion

I know this is not going to be super useful for everybody but it is definitely a nice tool to have if you work with AWS volumes and snapshots on a semi regular basis.  As I said, this can easily be improved so I’d love to hear what kinds of things to add or change to make this a great tool.  I hope to start working on some more interesting projects and tools in the near future, so stay tuned.

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Setting up a private git repo in Chef

Josh Reichardt 28 Comments

It turns out that cloning and managing private git repo’s in Chef is not as easy as it looks.  That said, I have a method that works.  I have no idea if this is the preferred method or if there are any easier ways but this worked for me, so let me know if there is an easier way and I will be glad to update this post.

First, I’d like to give credit where it is due.  I used this post as a template as well as the SSH wrapper section in the deploy documentation on the Chef website.

The first issue is that when you connect to github via SSH it wants the Chef client to accept its public fingerprint.  By default, if you don’t modify anything SSH will just sit there waiting for the fingerprint to be accepted.  That is why the SSH Git wrapper is used, it tells SSH on the Chef client that we don’t care about the authentication to the github server, just accept the key.  Here’s what my ssh git wrapper looks like:

 #!/bin/bash 
 exec ssh -o "StrictHostKeyChecking=no" -i "/home/vagrant/.ssh/id_rsa" $1 $2

You just need to tell your Chef recipe to use this wrapper script:

# Set up github to use SSH authentication 
cookbook_file "/home/vagrant/.ssh/wrap-ssh4git.sh" do 
  source "wrap-ssh4git.sh" 
  owner "vagrant" 
  mode 00700 
end

The next problem is that when using key authentication, you must specify both a public and a private key.  This isn’t an issue if you are running the server and configs by hand because you can just generate a key on the fly and hand that to github to tell it who you are.  When you are spinning instances up and down you don’t have this luxury.

To get around this, we create a couple of templates in our cookbook to allow our Chef client to connect to github with an already established public and private key, the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files that are shown.  Here’s what the configs look like in Chef:

# Public key 
template "/home/vagrant/.ssh/id_rsa.pub" do 
  source "id_rsa.pub" 
  owner "vagrant" 
  mode 0600 
end 
 
# Private key 
template "/home/vagrant/.ssh/id_rsa" do 
  source "id_rsa" 
  owner "vagrant" 
  mode 0600 
end

After that is taken care of, the only other minor caveat is that if you are cloning a huge repo then it might timeout unless you override the default timeout value, which is set to 600 seconds (10 mins).  I had some trouble finding this information on the docs but thanks to Seth Vargo I was able to find what I was looking for. This is easy enough to accomplish, just use the following snippet to override the default value

timeout 9999

That should be it.  There are probably other, easier ways to accomplish this and so I definitely think the adage “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” applies here.  If you happen to know another way I’d love to hear it.

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Gathering Exchange 2010 mail flow statistics

Josh Reichardt 95 Comments

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There are times when it can be useful and beneficial to have a good grasp on the details of what kind of mail traffic is running through your Exchange environment.  Recently I have been tasked with coming up with some environmental statistics for our Exchange 2010 servers to help size a new project we are starting soon.  There are a few different tools to help gather this information that I’d like to briefly go over today.  Before I start I’d like to point out that most of this stuff I am borrowing from others, however I think it is valuable to know how to do this type of thing.  With that said, I’m definitely not trying to take credit for any of these techniques, just trying to show the benefits.

There are a few different tools that will help to get a handle on your Exchange environment.  The first and quickest way to peer into your Exchange environment for some quick high level overview statistics is to use PowerShell.

The following command can be used to grab some basics statistics such as the total mailbox size, average mailbox size, the max and the minimum sizes in your environment.

Get-Mailbox -Database MBDB1 | Get-MailboxStatistics | %{$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()} | Measure-Object -sum -average -max -min

It is important to note however that this command can take some time to complete and can be an intensive process because there are so many calculations going on, just be careful that you don’t crash anything.  This command may not be viable if the environment is enormous but if that is the case you probably don’t need to use any of these techniques anyway.

The next useful tool to gather up mail flow information uses the Microsoft Log Parser tool, which can be downloaded here.  The log parser basically allows us to query the Exchange message transport logs to pull out interesting information.  I found a great blog post that describes the process of using the log parser tool to query the message tracking logs to help determine daily send and receive traffic in your Exchange environment.  You can find the blog post here and I have it reference at the end of this article as well.

There are a few tricks however that I would like to mention because a few things in the blog post aren’t exactly obvious.  After downloading and installing the Log Parser you must run the command he has listed on his site using CMD, otherwise you will have to modify his commands to use PowerShell.

For this command to work correctly you must also navigate to the correct location where the transport logs are being stored.  In the default install of Exchange they are stored in:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\TransportRoles\Logs\MessageTracking

So after you navigate to the correct location you run the command:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\logparser.exe" "SELECT TO_LOCALTIME(TO_TIMESTAMP(EXTRACT_PREFIX(TO_STRING([#Fields: date-time]),0,'T'), 'yyyy-MM-dd')) AS Date, COUNT(*) AS Hits from *.log where (event-id='RECEIVE') GROUP BY Date ORDER BY Date ASC" -i:CSV -nSkipLines:4 -rtp:-1

This will output the total number of send/receive messages for each date for the last 30 days on that particular server.  Another important thing to keep in mind is that you need to run this command on each server that has either the Hub Transport or Edge Transport role installed because each server houses a unique set of log files.

The last technique I’d like to go over for gathering interesting Exchange mail flow information is a script I found online, which can found here.  This is a very robust script that gathers a lot of specific information for a particular set of logs files.  Essentially this script functions similarly to the above Log Parser, except it grabs a lot more detail for a particular date.

This is easy to get working, just copy the script from the link into a .ps1 file and save it to a server that has the Exchange Management Shell installed on it.  If the EMS is not installed then this script will not function correctly.  The script will output some interesting details for each individual user including things like:

  • Username
  • Messages sent/received
  • Total MB sent/received
  • Internal sent/received stats
  • Unique messages sent

And output this information into a CSV file so it easy to manipulate the data at that point.  This kind of stuff is very useful in helping to determine things like average sent and received message size for example, I have not been able to provide that information to management easily until I found this script.

There are more techniques out there I’m sure, maybe even software that helps gather these sorts of stastics and information but for a quick and dirty way to grab some high level statistics you can’t really beat these techniques.  These methods are quick and will get you the information you need, which more often than not seems to be at least as detailed as the people requesting this information are looking for which is a win-win for everybody.  If you have any other input or questions about mail flow statistics feel free to let me know.

Resources:

http://exchangeserverpro.com/daily-email-traffic-message-tracking-log-parser/
http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-message-tracking/
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/bb94b422-eb9e-4c53-a454-f7da6ddfb5d6

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