Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Technical Analysis

Technical Analysis: Installing Apache on Windows

jcannon — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:21:00 GMT

Abstract: By many estimates, Apache is the world's most popular web server software, hosting more than half of active domains according to Netcraft. Typically, Apache is run on Linux or UNIX, but it runs quite well on Windows. This paper provides an introduction to running this software on Windows and provides a framework for understanding how Apache on Windows is fundamentally different from Apache on Linux.

Download Installing Apache on Windows

Note:This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Apache with mod_auth_kerb and Windows Server

jcannon — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:58:00 GMT

Abstract: The Apache authentication module mod_auth_kerb allows Apache to authenticate users against a Kerberos KDC including one from ActiveDirectory. Kerberos itself can be fairly complex to set up. This guide will attempt to show the specific steps required to make this possible as well as discuss security limitations specific to the interoperability matters. This guide assumes a basic understanding of Kerberos V and that the Active Directory domain controller is properly configured prior to starting this process.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Installing Apache with SSL on Windows

jcannon — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:02:00 GMT

Abstract:
Often SSL or TLS is required to secure data from web applications. Sometimes this is just prudent to prevent confidential or sensitive data from being confiscated. Sometimes this is required by regulations like HIPAA or industry bodies, such as the Payment Card Industry. This guide will show how to install Apache with SSL on Windows.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Download Report Installing Apache on Windows

Technical Analysis: Active Directory and Linux Identity Management

jcannon — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:22:00 GMT

Abstract: This paper is written for a somewhat technical audience and covers how the identity management expectations differ between the Windows Server platform and Linux - and how Windows Server can be used to manage both. This paper assume that the reader is familiar with general Windows administration tasks, such as user management.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Recovering Data from Windows systems by using Linux

jcannon — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:19:00 GMT

Abstract:
We have all run into cases where Windows fails to load for one reason or another. The problem may be hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable. Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost. Another application of using Linux recovery is in the creation of disk images for post-mortem analysis of security breaches. While such images are not created according to forensics standards (which usually requires special hardware) and would not be likely to be of help in legal cases, they are helpful in internal reviews following such incidents.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Recovering GRUB, Dual Boot Solutions

jcannon — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:43:00 GMT

Today's post returns Port 25 to our more regular technical analysis that examine common technical scenarios when running Windows and Linux together, or Windows and other popular open source projects. This week, the lab looks at at disk recovery options using GRUB and dual boot scenarios.

Abstract:
Those of us who dual boot have seen it happen. Somewhere down the line, we overwrite the bootloader (or configure it to ignore one of the operating systems) and suddenly we can only boot into one of the operating systems. Probably the most common causes of these issues involve the use of fdisk /mbr and Windows installations overwriting GRUB or LILO (but it happens with Linux too). In this paper, I will assume that you can only boot into Windows, and that you have decided to use GRUB as your bootloader. A few of these notes are distribution-specific and those portions will be clearly marked. However, most of the process will work on any Linux distribution which conforms to accepted standards.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Systems Manageability Part 7 - Log Management and Analysis

kishi — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:57:00 GMT

Level-Set – Log Management: This section includes open-source technology directed primarily on host-based logging, log file rotation and log file analysis. Many of these tools are very common free and open-source software tools that are distributed and preconfigured with most of the major Linux systems, including major vendors such as RedHat and Novell.

I. Logrotate

Logrotate is a very popular application utilized in a number of Linux systems, including all RedHat and SUSE based systems. The logrotate utility typically runs periodically via cron, a task scheduling application. The utility will read a configuration file (/etc/logrotate.conf), and archive and compress log files according to the configuration. Administrators can configure when log files should be rotated based on age and size, and how long backlogs should be maintained. Older archived log files can then be swapped out and replaced with newer archives.

II. Syslogd and klogd

Typical Linux systems utilize a syslog daemon to capture log messages from userspace applications and write them to text-based log files or send them to a logging host over the network. The syslogd daemon is often accompanied by a klogd application which is designed to capture and log kernel messages.

The behavior of the syslog daemon can be configured via the /etc/syslog.conf configuration file. All messages captured by syslog are categorized by facility and priority. Messages can then be sent to particular log files or logging hosts, or dropped completely based on their facility and priority attributes.

Facilities

Priorities

- auth or security

- authpriv

- cron

- daemon

- kern

- lpr

- mail

- mark

- news

- syslog

- user

- uucp

- local0 through local7

- debug

- info

- notice

- warning or warn

- err or error

- error

- crit

- alert

- emerg or panic

List of syslog facilities and priorities.

III. Syslog-ng

The syslog-ng application aims to be an enhanced drop-in replacement for the traditional syslog daemon. It provides many of the same features of the standard syslog daemon, but includes additional features such as advanced message filtering based on content, remote logging via UDP or TCP, and the ability to write log files to a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. More recent SUSE-based systems such as SLES10 have switched to syslog-ng as the default syslog server.

IV. Viewing Logs

Most log files on a Linux system are stored in plain-text, which means they can be viewed and parsed using a number of different command-line tools. Typical utilities such as tail, head, grep, cat, less, more, sed and awk can be used to view and filter log messages via the command line.

There are also a myriad of utilities designed to parse and view log files via a GUI or web browser. Some utilities are even designed to handle specific log formats, such as those generated by Linux’s Netfilter firewall subsystem.

GNOME System Log Viewer

The GNOME system includes a GTK-based system log viewing application that displays system logs via the GUI.

YaST System Log Module

SUSE-based systems using YaST typically include a module called View System Log (called internally as view_anymsg). Similar to the GNOME System Log viewer, the YaST module allows an administrator to view many of the various system logs without using the command-line.

V. Log Analysis

LogWatch

The logwatch utility is designed to parse system logs and located any entries that might indicate security threat or system failure and send an email report to a designated address. Logwatch is distributed with RedHat Enterprise Linux systems. The following is an excerpt from the RPM description:

“LogWatch is a customizable log analysis system. LogWatch parses through your system's logs for a given period of time and creates a report analyzing areas that you specify, in as much detail as you require. LogWatch is easy to use and claims that it will work right out of the package on almost all systems. Note that LogWatch now analyzes Samba logs.”

LogWatch is typically executed periodically via cron, a task scheduling application.

LogCheck

The logcheck utility is a part of the Sentry Tools project that also includes portsentry, a utility designed to detect port scans. Similar to the LogWatch utility, the software is designed to parse system log files, find log entries that may indicate security problems and send an email to a preconfigured address. Also similar to the LogWatch utility, logcheck relies on the standard cron utility to be periodically executed.

That does it for Log Management and Analysis section. We have one last blog to go and certainly hope that you found the information we have captured for you useful. If you’re running any special toolsets or customizable scripts for log management and analysis and would like to share your experience with us, please send us your feedback and as always, THANK YOU for tuning into Port25.

Data Recovery Using Linux

MichaelF — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:15:00 GMT

It's happened to me and I'm sure it has happened to you: your software won't load and your data is now trapped inside your PC. The problem may be a hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable. Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost. This paper describes how one can use Linux to recover data from a non-functioning Windows machine.

Windows Vista Beta/Linux IPsec Interop Testing

MichaelF — Wed, 09 May 2007 21:27:00 GMT

In addition to technical tips, blogs and video interviews, the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft conducts a number of technical analysis and research projects throughout the year to help inform and solve key interoperability challenges between Microsoft and open source technologies. This particular research was conducted after reviewing data from our VPN research which was previously posted to Port 25.

Abstract:

This document provides an overview of Linux IPsec solutions as well as detailed discussions on configuring IPsec-Tools for interoperability scenarios between Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 and Windows Vista Ultimate Beta.

Systems Manageability Part 3 - Provisioning and Deployment

kishi — Thu, 03 May 2007 17:29:00 GMT

I want to start this blog with a note of Thanks to Ajay Mungara, the Manageability Developer Community Manager from Intel and “einhverfr”, both of whom gave some very constructive feedback on the previous blog. In the next six blogs to follow, including this one, I will do a “deep-dive” into the six specific areas we covered under the “Systems Manageability” ontology.

Let’s start this blog with the first of the six categories from the ontology - “Deployment and Provisioning”

Level-Set: Deployment and Provisioning as we understand it, encompasses all tasks related to the initial installation of an operating system on remote system, as well as post-installation of software on a remote system. Much of these toolsets are geared toward automated system provisioning and cloning. There’s lots of different tools out there that can be used but we have focused on the most popular ones, namely Kickstart, Autoyast, “Bare-Metal” provisioning and RedHat Network. In the paragraphs to follow, we have attempted to lay out our understanding of these tools after using them in the OSSL:

I.KICKSTART: is an automated installation utility for RedHat-based systems, including Fedora Core and RHEL based systems. Kickstart software requires the creation of a configuration file (similar to an “answer file” in Windows lingo) which contains all the information the installation program will require to install the operating system. The configuration file and all the RPM software packages are typically kept on a remote server such as a HTTP or FTP. The location of the Kickstart configuration file is typically passed to the kernel at boot time. For example, once the bootloader (GRUB, LILO) loads, the user is often presented with a “boot:” prompt that allows the user to pass arguments to the kernel. To load a kickstart configuration file from a remote server one would type the following:

boot: linux ks=http://<server>/location/of/kickstart.cfg

The administrator can then create multiple Kickstart configuration files for different configurations. With the addition of a PXE-based server, much of the provisioning process can be automated. A Kickstart configuration file is simply a text file, which can be created and edited manually with any text-editor. A GUI-based Kickstart file creation program called system-config-kickstart is also available from the Fedora and RHEL distributions. Both kickstart and autoYaST provide the ability to run arbitrary commands during the post-installation phase. This allows administrators to run individual commands, or entire shell scripts to automate any post installation tasks that may be required. RedHat provides a GUI-based tool to assist one in building a kickstart configuration , however in practice it is very easy to customize the configuration file by hand. The ability to run shell commands via the post-configuration phase is simple yet extremely powerful.

II. AutoYaST: is another automated installation utility, similar to RedHat’s Kickstart utility, but used primarily with SUSE-based systems. Novell provides a YaST2 module for autoYaST, which is a GUI tool that can be used to create an autoYaST configuration file – also similar to RedHat’s system-config-kickstart utility. Many of the same rules and procedures used with the kickstart utility also apply to autoYaST. Administrators that need to deploy SUSE clients or servers can create any number of autoYaST configuration files to fit a particular system profile. These can then be used to automate the installation of a SUSE system over a network. When combined with PXE/DHCP setup administrators can deploy and start a SUSE install without using any physical media (i.e. an installation CD/DVD).

III. Bare-Metal Provisioning: Automated deployment tools such as Kickstart and Autoyast support system provisioning via HTTP, (T)FTP and NFS. Completely automated installations can also be configured using the Pre-Execution Environment (PXE), DHCP, tftp and kickstart or autoyast. By automating the boot process, it no longer becomes necessary to manually initialize the installation process via a CDROM or other bootable medium.

Many cluster deployment solutions utilize these very same technologies to deploy large numbers of nodes in a very short time. ROCKS, for example, automates the booting and (re)deployment cluster nodes on the network using PXE, DHCP and kickstart, a process that can sometimes require less than 10-minutes for a single node. Proprietary tools such as CSM, IBM’s cluster management software, also utilizes PXE, DHCP and kickstart or autoYaST to (re)provision cluster nodes as needed.

Configuring a PXE Server for Automated Installations: There are two common utilities one may use to configure a PXE server on Linux. Testing for this scenario was done using a RedHat based system. Therefore some aspects of the following descriptions, such as locations of configuration files, will be RedHat-centric. The general necessity of the configuration and the components, however, are not distribution specific.

pxeos – This utility can be used to configure operating system descriptions within the PXE boot files. Operating system descriptions include the OS name, the protocol used to obtain the OS files (HTTP, FTP, NFS) and the full URI and path to the installation files.
system-config-netboot – The system-config-netboot utility is a graphical application that can perform many of the same tasks as the pxeos utility.

Configuring DHCP: The DHCP daemon can be configured via the /etc/dhcpd.conf file. Those options that are specific to allowing PXE boot clients are listed below.

allow bootp;
class "pxeclients" {
match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient";
filename "linux-install/pxelinux.0";
}

Configuring TFTP: The TFTP daemon must first be enabled via xinetd super daemon. The following configuration is added to /etc/xinetd.conf, or sometimes /etc/xinetd.d/tftp, depending on the distribution:

service tftp
{
        disable                 = no
        port                   = 69
        socket_type             = dgram
        protocol                = udp
        wait                    = yes
        user                    = root
        server                  = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
        server_args             = -s /tftpboot
        per_source              = 11
        cps                     = 100 2
        flags                   = IPv4
}
TFTP Configuration in xinetd.conf
The directory /tftpboot/linux-install is the default used by the system-config-netboot configuration tool. The directory contains kernels and the necessary configuration files required to boot a system and begin a kickstart installation. The configuration file /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.cfg/pxeos.xml contains specific definitions about which network install profiles are available to PXE boot clients.

That’s it for the Provisioning and Deployment section. As always, please let us know if you found the above mentioned useful and any comments/feedback you may have. Thank you for tuning into Port25.

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

MichaelF — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:05:00 GMT

In cases where business applications have been built on open source databases, it may be necessary to connect other Windows applications, such as Microsoft Access or Excel, to these databases for reporting or business intelligence purposes.

One potential application of this process is to use Excel as a front-end for data analysis. Data can be pulled from views or tables and then further analyzed, graphed, and the like. Even pivot tables can be used to create even more powerful reporting solutions.

This how-to walks through this process using Excel as an example application. Although in this example, the MySQL and PostgreSQL servers are running on Linux, the steps are no different if the software is running on Windows. These steps are:

1.         Setting up authentication
2.         Installing the ODBC Drivers
3.         Configuring the data source
4.         Importing the data.

Systems Manageability – Part 2: Scope, Methodology and Ontology

kishi — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:14:00 GMT

In my last blog called “Why Manageability Matters” I talked about why we chose to work on “Systems Manageability” as a whole and get a grassroots understanding of it within the context of Linux and Open Source space. In this blog, I’m going to address the Methodology and Ontology of the Systems Manageability project. This will shed immediate light on how we approach, design and implement projects in the OSSL. Let’s start with the main goals and purpose behind the project.

I. Systems Manageability Project Goals:

Survey the scope, depth and breadth of Linux manageability solutions, primarily utilizing open source software
Use the knowledge from the research to develop an understanding of Manageability landscape in the Linux and Open Source
Build and simulate common Linux management solutions in the OSSL (SMORG scale – small and medium sized organizations )
Understand if a cohesive Linux manageability stack exists today--Understand manageability focus from a Linux Sysadmin’s perspective (SMORG scale)

Once we defined what we needed to get into, yet another realization dawned on us, which was the sheer size and volume of the data and information that was staring at us in the face. Let’s just say “overwhelmed” was a mild word compared to what we were looking at. My colleague, Steve Zarkos and I immediately realized that it was time to trim the scope of what we were doing and limit ourselves to what’s achievable in three months and with two people J. This called for drawing up what we considered to be “out-of-scope”, which was:

II. Out-of-scope:

Enterprise-level Management Stacks such as HP Openview, Tivoli etc.
Security and user management, which is a very large area in itself, and would include policies, permissions, authentication, identity management etc.
Asset management frameworks that allow for inventory management, asset tracking etc.
Disaster recovery and planning which would include backup technologies and data protection management

III. Systems Manageability Project Methodology:

The approach taken for the project was simple and scientific. The project was divided into three stages:

Stage 1 – Discovery and Definition: We would explore, uncover and scour the Linux Manageability landscape for toolsets, apps and frameworks prevalent in the SMORG scale workspace today
Stage 2 – Lab Implementation: We would implement the results of our research which would be actual Linux and Open Source products in the Lab
Stage 3 – Analysis and Conclusion: After discovering, defining and implementing Linux and Open Source based manageability toolsets, apps and frameworks in the lab, we would spend time understanding their form, function and experience to draw conclusions

IV. Systems Manageability Project Ontology (classification):

The hardest and most challenging aspect of the project was to develop some sort ontology, characterization or classification of the manageability technologies prevalent in the IT environments today. The diagram below represents the overall "buckets" defined as part of this exercise. Each section of the diagram is broken down to provide a detailed breakdown of each of these Systems Manageability classifications represented:

In the next blog to follow, I will break down the first segment of ontology i.e. “Provisioning and Deployment” and discuss our research with all of you. Meanwhile, we always look forward to hearing from you, our audience and urge you for any feedback you may have about the topic. Thank You for tuning into Port25.

Cheers!

MySQL on Windows: Configuration & Install

jcannon — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:02:00 GMT

This week, the lab looks at configuring and installing MySQL - an open source relational database management system which is typically used for web applications.

This paper will provide an overview of configuring & installing this software on Windows. MySQL does not have as many features as PostgreSQL, however, and one would expect it to perform substantially better than PostgreSQL on Windows because of its thread-based architecture (PostgreSQL uses a process-based architecture instead).

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Linux VPN & How-To

jcannon — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:08:00 GMT

In our continuing series of papers describing both the research undertaken by the Open Source Software Lab, and technical tips, here is the latest networking configuration technical analysis.

Abstract:
This document provides the reader with an analysis of VPN functionality within the Linux operating system. Specifically, it provides a breakdown of VPN components and a description of what is available to Linux Administrators, in terms of manageability and functionality. It also provides a set of HOW-TO’s in the area’s of VPN and IPsec.

PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer

MichaelF — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:06:00 GMT

This paper will cover the installation and initial configuration of PostgreSQL 8.2 on Windows up to a point where a database is created and plpgsql is installed in it. We assume an ability to walk through the install wizard in general, though screens that do require additional information will be covered (with screenshots). Important options in the postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf will be covered, as will database creation in PgAdmin III.