Archive for March, 2010
Setting up scponly
Mar 24th
In the past, if I wanted to create a restricted account for a user, to upload files via scp/sftp for example, I normally setup rbash with a defined set of commands. However, it’s possible to break out of an rbash environment quite easily.
Recently, whilst setting up an account for one of the Eirtakon guys to modify their drupal install, I decided to give scponly a whirl. This is a restricted shell that, as the name implies, only allows access to scp and sftp. It also provides a chroot mode (scponlyc) to lock users into a specified directory hierarchy, which I configured for this particular user.
Installation on Debian is simple:
aptitude install scponly
To enable the chrooted version of scponly, do:
dpkg-reconfigure -plow scponly
Unzip the chroot setup script and make it executable
cd /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot gunzip setup_chroot.sh.gz chmod 755 setup_chroot.sh
If you are on a 64 bit system, scponly is basically broken out of the box. You need to do a couple of things to make it work, the first is to apply this diff to setup_chroot.sh, it adds /lib/ld-2.7.so to the LDSO_LIST variable.
--- setup_chroot.sh 2010-03-24 18:53:15.000000000 +0000
+++ setup_chroot.sh.busted 2010-03-24 18:52:24.000000000 +0000
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
#
# we also need to add some form of ld.so, here are some good guesses.
#
-LDSO_LIST="/lib/ld-2.7.so /lib/ld.so /libexec/ld-elf.so /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 /usr/libexec/ld.so /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1"
+LDSO_LIST="/lib/ld.so /libexec/ld-elf.so /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 /usr/libexec/ld.so /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1"
for lib in $LDSO_LIST; do
if [ -f $lib ]; then
LDSOFOUND=1;
You can now run the setup script
./setup_chroot.sh
This creates a chrooted user and sets up the necessary environment.
Now set up /dev/null:
cd ~scponlyuser mkdir dev cp -a /dev/null dev/
For a 64 bit system, you need to copy across a few more supporting libraries into the chroot:
cd ~scponlyuser cp -p /lib/libncurses.so.5 lib/ cp -p /lib/libncurses.so.5 lib/ cp -p /lib/libdl.so.2 lib/ cp -p /lib/libc.so.6 lib/ mkdir lib64 cp -p /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 lib64/
To restrict the user to only the path I want them to see, I set their home directory to /home/scponlyuser//drupal. The // has the effect of dropping them into that particular directory once they get chroot’ed, which is /drupal in the chroot environment.
I also wanted to let them have access to /var/www/eirtakon.com/drupal, but without symlinks or other nonsense. This can be done with the bind option in mount:
mount -o bind /var/www/eirtakon.com/drupal /home/scponlyuser/drupal
To test it out
sftp scponlyuser@longcat.spoofedpacket.net
Switching to NSD
Mar 7th
Whilst BIND is a nameserver I use nearly every day, it’s somewhat large and unwieldy being a reference implementation of the DNS spec.
Where possible, I always like to split out resolving and authoritative functionality into two seperate pieces of software. Unbound does a great job in the latter role – also from the authors of NSD, NLnetlabs – so I thought I’d give NSD a go on ns.spoofedpacket.net.
This machine serves only handful of zones, so it’s easy enough to migrate. The transition is made even simpler since NSD supports the old bind zonefile format out of the box. I decided to install NSD from source, following the tried and tested method:
cd /usr/local/src wget http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/nsd/nsd-3.2.4.tar.gz tar zxvf nsd-3.2.4.tar.gz cd nsd-3.2.4 ./configure make make install
The dependencies are very few, it should compile without much fuss on nearly any modern *nix system.
By default, all configuration files and zones go into /etc/nsd. There is also an nsd.conf.sample that you can use as a base config. The config file is extremely simple, for a basic setup you only need to look at the server: and the n-number of zone: sections. In the server: section, I only changed the location of the zone files:
zonesdir: "/etc/nsd/zones"
At this point, it’s always good practice to organise your zonefiles into directories according to their roles. Here is what I have:
/etc/nsd/zones/master /etc/nsd/zones/slave (nothing here yet) /etc/nsd/zones/master/forward /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse/IPv4 /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse/IPv6
If you have an old BIND install that you are replacing, it is just a simple matter of copying/moving the existing zonefiles to their new locations. The zones can then be configured in nsd.conf as follows:
# spoofedpacket.net
zone:
name: "spoofedpacket.net"
zonefile: "master/forward/spoofedpacket.net.zone"
notify: 193.1.193.194 NOKEY
provide-xfr: 193.1.193.194 NOKEY
name and zonefile are pretty self explanatory, just remember that the path to your zonefile is always prefixed with the zonesdir statement from earlier on. notify lists all the nameservers you wish to send DNS notifies to when a zone is updated. provide-xfr controls who can carry out zone transfers (AFXR) from your nameserver. The NOKEY statement tells NSD that no cryptographic keys are required to authenticate the notifies or zone transfers between your nameserver and the secondary nameservers.
Once you’ve finished editing nsd.conf, you must now compile your zonefiles into the binary format that NSD understands. This is one of the main reasons for NSDs speed and low footprint:
nsdc rebuild nsdc reload
Verify that nsd is running and serving zones:
pgrep -lf nsd dig @ns.spoofedpacket.net www.spoofedpacket.net