Sysadmin

Exploring Linux Terminals

Josh Reichardt 4 Comments

I have been experimenting with Linux on a recently acquired Lenovo X1 Carbon and as part of the process I have been exploring and testing out various productivity tools, including terminal emulators.

The first thing I discovered in this process is that there’s a lot of terminals out there. And they’re all slightly different, and in my experience, almost none of them were able to do all of the tweaks I like.

Here is the list of terminals I have tested out (so far).

As you can see, that is a bunch of terminals. To keep things short, in my exploration and testing, the best 3 I found were as follows.

Alacritty – 3rd

It is fast, defaults are great, works perfectly with the tiling window managers. This one would would probably have been first on the list if it was able to provide a blinking cursor but as I found with many of the options there seemed to almost always be a gotcha.

A few high points for this terminal, written in Rust, it uses the GPU to offload rendering, cross platform, and maybe my favorite feature, the configuration file is yaml based. Docs are also good and the community is really taking off so I have a strong feeling this one will continue improving.

urxvt – 2nd

The biggest problem with this terminal for me is that it is painful to configure. There are no preferences configured out of the box, which to some is preferred, but also, digging through old blog posts and perl scripts is not how I like to spend my time.

This terminal is second on the list because it was the only other terminal that was able to do all of the small little tweaks and adjustments that suit my preferences. And it is fast and light weight, which are good things.

Here is the configuration I ended up with if interested.

Kitty – 1st

This terminal was a clear winner. It was able to do all of my custom tweaks and settings and because it has nice defaults I only needed to add about 10 lines of extra configuration.

This terminal has a lot of other stuff going for it. It is written in Rust, which makes it fast, it uses the GPU to offload rendering, which also makes it fast, easy to configure, and for the most part just works. Only gotcha I found was that I needed to explicitly turn on copy to selection in my configuration, but that was easy.

Here is the configuration I ended up with if interested.

Conclusion

I plan on keeping this list updated to some extent as I find more Terminals to try out. As you can see, there are many different options and seem to be more and more all the time.

Your experience may differ so obviously take these musings with a pinch of salt, and please do look through the various options and try things out to see if they will work for you. That said, I do think I have a specific enough use case that these recommendations should be helpful in guiding most users.

Here is the repo with all of my various configurations if you want to check something out. There were a few terminal configs that didn’t end up there just because they were too minimal or I didn’t like them.

Read More

Idempotent Shell Scripts with Terraform

Josh Reichardt 2 Comments

One challenge when dealing with Terraform is keeping things clean and repeatable. My current favorite approach to accomplish this task using shell scripts is by using a combination of null_resources and triggers to control when scripts should be updated. These controls combined with Terraform provisioners and template_files provide a nice flexible way to deal with otherwise potentially messy scripts.

I like to provide more than one trigger so that they can be recomputed when either a variable that gets passed into the script changes, or, the script itself changes. This trick is handy when you need to bend Terraform into doing something that it usually doesn’t handle, like some startup or bootstrap process.

Below is the full example with templated scripts and triggers in Terraform v0.11. The same logic should also work with Terraform v0.12 with minimal changes. 

data "template_file" "cool_script" {
  template = "${file("${path.module}/script.sh")}"

  vars {
    my_cool_var = "${var.my_cool_var}"
  }
}

resource "null_resource" "script" {

  # Trigger when the script when variables change
  triggers = {
    my_trigger = "${var.my_cool_var}"
    script_sha = "${sha256(file("${path.module}/script.sh"))}"
  }

  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command   = "${data.template_file.cool_script.rendered}"
    interpreter = ["/bin/bash", "-c"]
  }
}

You can provide as many variables to the template_file as the script needs and any time those get updated, the null_resource will pick these changes up and update/rerun your script for you. Notice that the provisioner in the null_resource is basically set up to call bash against the rendered script that we created, using the values in the vars.

If you call the script again, nothing should change because we already computed the SHA of the rendered script and told Terraform to keep track of that state. The below example is a simple way for telling Terraform to keep track of changes to the script/template.

script_sha = "${sha256(file("${path.module}/script.sh"))}"

Once the script is updated, the next time the script gets called, its values and output should update accordingly. Likewise, since we are also using a var as a trigger, when that changes the script will also be updated.

Terraform is flexible enough to allow us to do things like this because often times there are situations and edge cases where Terraform can’t really perform some actions. The above example is a common workaround for provisioning resources that either don’t have an API that Terraform can tap into, or are just tasks that are only handled via some startup or bootstrap script/process.

Read More

Bash Quick Substitution

Josh Reichardt 3 Comments
big brain
Big Brain Time

One thing that I love about bash is that there is never a shortage of new tips and tricks to learn. I have been using bash for over 10 years now and just stumbled on this little trick.

This one (as the title implies) allows you to quickly substitute a string into the previous command and rerun the command with the substitution.

Quick substitution is officially part of the Bash Event Designators mechanism and is a great way to fix a typo from a previous command. Below is an example.

# Simple example to highlight substitutions
echo foo

# This will replace the string "foo" with "bar" and rerun the last command
^foo^bar

This shorthand notation is great for most use cases, with the exception of needing to replace multiple instances of a given string. Luckily that is easily addressed with the Event Designators expanded substitution syntax, shown below.

# This will substitute ALL occurrences of foo in the previous command
!!:gs/foo/bar/

# Slightly different syntax allows you to do the same thing in ZSH
^foo^bar^:G

The syntax is slightly more complicated in the first example but should be familiar enough to anyone that has used sed and/or vim substitutions, and the second example is almost identical to the shorthand substitution.

fc

Taking things one step further, we can actually edit the previous command to fix anything more than a typo of different argument. fc is actually a bash builtin function so it is available almost everywhere.

fc is especially useful for dealing with very long, complicated commands.

# Oops, we messed this up
echo fobarr | grep bar

# To fix it, just open the above in your default editor
fc

# when you write and quit the file it will put the contents into your current command

There are many great tutorials available so I would recommend looking around to see all the options and get more ideas.

Read More

Quickly securing local secrets

Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

One thing I have run into recently and have been thinking about a little bit lately, is a simple way to hide environment variables that contain sensitive information. For example, when working in a local environment, if you need access to a secret like an oauth token or some authentication method to an API, the first inclination is usually to just hard code the secret contents into your local bash/zsh profile so that it can be read anytime you need access to it. This method obviously will work but if the filesystem itself isn’t encrypted, the secret can easily be leaked and for a small amount of effort I believe I have found an effective way of shrinking the visibility of these secrets.

Inspired by the aws-vault tool which is a simple but secure way of storing local AWS credentials in environment variables using a local password store, in this post I will show you a quick and dirty way to add an extra layer of security to your (other) local environment by injecting sensitive secrets stored in an encrypted location (password store) into your local terminal. This method works for both OSX and Linux and is just a few lines of configuration and examples for both OSes are shown below.

In OSX the keychain is a good starting place for storing and retrieving secrets and in Linux the combination of GPG and the standard unix password manager “pass” work well together. Pass also works on OSX if you aren’t a fan of keychain.

Below are steps for storing and retrieving local secrets using the Linux pass tool. There are installation instructions and full documentation for how to use the tool in the link above. It should also be noted that the system needs to have GPG installed in order to write and read secrets.

One you have GPG configured, create the password store. I am skipping most of the GPG configuration because there is a lot to know, the command below should be enough to get things started. If you already have GPG set up and configured you can skip the setup.

Set up GPG and pass.

gpg2 --full-gen-key # follow prompts to create a gpg store with defaults
pass init <email> # use the same email address used with gpg
pass git init # optionally set pass up as a git repo

To create/edit a secret.

#pass insert/edit <secret>
pass insert mysecret
pass edit mysecret

Pass allows for hierarchies but in the example we are just going to put the secret at the top level. The command above will open the default editor. After closing the editor, the password will be written to an encrypted file in ~/.password-store. Once you have added the password you can show the contents of the newly added secret.

To read a secret into the terminal.

#pass show <secret>
pass show mysecret

You can also quickly list all of your secrets.

pass ls

Now that we have a created secret, we can write a little bash function to pull out the contents of the password and export them as an environment variable when the shell gets sourced. Put the following snippet into your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashprofile to read secrets.

get_password () {
  pass show "$1"
}

A similar result can be achieved in OSX using the “security” command line tool.

get_password () {
  security find-generic-password -ga "$1" -w
}

In your shell configuration file you can simply export the result of calling the get_password() function into an environment variable.

export MYSECRET="$(get_password mysecret)"

Source the shell profile to pickup the new changes. After that, you should now see the contents of the secret inside an environment variable in your terminal.

source ~/.bashrc
env | grep MYSECRET

Conclusion

Obviously this isn’t a perfect way to secure your environment since the secret is available to anyone who is able to connect to this user so make sure you practice good security in as many other ways as possible.

What this method does do though is cuts down the amount of sensitive information that can be gleaned from a user account by ensuring that shell secrets are encrypted at rest and unavailable as clear text.

Read More

Build a Pine64 Kubernetes Cluster with k3os

Josh Reichardt Leave a comment
Kubernetes (k3os) arm64 cluster with custom 3D printed case

The k3os project was recently announced and I finally got a chance to test it out. k3os greatly simplifies the steps needed to create a Kubernetes cluster along with its counterpart, k3s, to reduce the overhead of running Kubernetes clusters. Paired with Rancher for the UI, all of these components make for an even better option. You can even run Rancher in your (arm64) k3os cluster via the Rancher Helm chart now.

Instead of using Etcd, k3s opts to use SQLite by default and does some other magic to reduce extra Kubernetes bloat and simplify management. Check here for more about k3s and how it works and how to run it.

k3os replaces some complicated OS components with much simpler ones. For example, instead of using Systemd it uses OpenRC, instead of Docker it uses containerd, it also leverages connman for configuring network components and it doesn’t use a package manager.

The method I am showing in this post uses the k3os overlay installation, which is detailed here. The reason for this choice is because the pine64 boards use u-boot to boot the OS and so special steps are needed to accommodate for the way this process is handled. The upside of this method is that these instructions should pretty much work for any of the Pi form factor boards, including the newly released Raspberry Pi4, with minimal changes.

Setup

If you haven’t downloaded and imaged your Pine64 yet, I like to use the ayufan images, which can be found here. You can easily write these images to a microSD card on OSX using something like Etcher.

Assuming the node is connected to your network, you can SSH into it.

ssh rock64@rock64 # or use the ip, password is rock64

When using the overlay installation, the first step is to download the k3os rootfs and lay it down on the host. This step applies to all nodes in the cluster.

curl -sL https://github.com/rancher/k3os/releases/download/v0.2.1/k3os-rootfs-arm64.tar.gz | tar --strip-components=1 -zxvf - -C

The above command is installing v0.2.1 which is the most current version as of writing this, so make sure to check if there is a newer version available.

After installing, lay down the following configurations into /k3os/system/config.yaml, modifying as needed. After the machine is rebooted this path will become read only so if you need to change the configuration again you will need to edit /etc/fstab to change the location to be writable again.

Server node

ssh_authorized_keys:
- ssh-rsa <your-public-ssh-key-to-login>
hostname: k3s-master

k3os:
  data_sources:
  - cdrom
  dns_nameservers:
  - 192.168.1.1 # update this to your local or public DNS server if needed
  ntp_servers:
  - 0.us.pool.ntp.org
  - 1.us.pool.ntp.org
  password: rancher
  token: <TOKEN>

The k3s config will be written to /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml on this node so make sure to grab it if you want to connect the cluster from outside this node. Reboot the machine to boot to the new filesystem and you should be greeted with the k3os splash screen.

Agent node

The agent uses nearly the same config, with the addition of the server_url. Just point the agent nodes to the server/master and you should be good to go. Again, reboot after creating the config and the host should boot to the new filesystem and everything should be ready.

ssh_authorized_keys:
- ssh-rsa <your-public-ssh-key-to-login>
hostname: k3s-node-1

k3os:
  data_sources:
  - cdrom
  dns_nameservers:
  - 192.168.1.1 # update this to your local or public DNS server if needed
  ntp_servers:
  - 0.us.pool.ntp.org
  - 1.us.pool.ntp.org
  password: rancher
  server_url: https://<server-ip-or-hostname>:6443
  token: <TOKEN>

You can do a lot more with the bootstrap configurations, such as setting labels or environment variables. Some folks in the community have had luck getting the wifi configuration working on the RPi4’s out of the box, but I haven’t been able to get it to work yet on my Pine64 cluster. Check the docs for more details on the various configuration options.

After the nodes have been rebooted and configs applied, the cluster “should just work”. You can check that the cluster is up using k3s using the kubectl passthrough command (checking from the master node below).

k3s-master [~]$ k3s kubectl get nodes
NAME         STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION
k3s-master   Ready    <none>   6d1h    v1.14.1-k3s.4
k3s-node-1   Ready    <none>   7m10s   v1.14.1-k3s.4

NOTE: After installing the overlay filesystem there will be no package manager and no obvious way to upgrade the kernel so use this guide only for testing purposes. The project is still very young and a number of things still need to be added, including update mechanisms and HA. Be sure to follow the k3os issue tracker and Rancher Slack (#k3os channel) for updates and developments.

Conclusion

This is easily the best method I have found so far for getting a Kubernetes cluster up and running, minus the few caveats mentioned above, which I believe will be resolved very soon. I have been very impressed with how simple and easy it has been to configure and use. The next step for me is to figure out how to run Rancher and start working on some configurations for running workloads on the cluster. I will share more on that project in another post.

There are definitely some quirks to getting this setup working for the Pi and Pine64 based boards, but aren’t major problems by any means.

References

This post was heavily inspired by this gist for getting the overlay installation method working on Raspberry Pi.

Read More