My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 1, Motivation and Research

Published on 22 October, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In January 2016 I gave a presentation at the Canberra Linux Users Group about my journey developing my own Open Source home automation system. This is an adaptation of that presentation for my blog. Big thanks to my brother, Tim, for all his help with this project!

Comments and feedback welcome.

Why home automation?

  • It’s cool
  • Good way to learn something new
  • Leverage modern technology to make things easier in the home

At the same time, it’s kinda scary. There is a lack of standards and lack of decent security applied to most Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

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Configuring QEMU bridge helper after “access denied by acl file” error

Published on 31 August, 2016 in Fedora. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

QEMU has a neat bridge-helper utility which allows a non-root user to easily connect a virtual machine to a bridged interface. In Fedora at least, qemu-bridge-helper runs as setuid (any user can run as root) and privileges are immediately dropped to cap_net_admin. It also has a simple white/blacklist ACL mechanism in place which limits connections to virbr0, libvirt’s local area network.

That’s all great, but often you actually want a guest to be a part of your real network. This means it must connect to a bridged interface (often br0) on a physical network device.

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Live migrating Btrfs from RAID 5/6 to RAID 10

Published on 26 August, 2016 in Fedora. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Recently it was discovered that the RAID 5/6 implementation in Btrfs is broken, due to the fact that can miscalculate parity (which is rather important in RAID 5 and RAID 6).

So what to do with an existing setup that’s running native Btfs RAID 5/6?

Well, fortunately, this issue doesn’t affect non-parity based RAID levels such as 1 and 0 (and combinations thereof) and it also doesn’t affect a Btrfs filesystem that’s sitting on top of a standard Linux Software RAID (md) device.

So if down-time isn’t a problem, we could re-create the RAID 5/6 array using md and put Btrfs back on top and restore our data… or, thanks to Btrfs itself, we can live migrate it to RAID 10!

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Command line password management with pass

Published on 10 August, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Why use a password manager in the first place? Well, they make it easy to have strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts on every system you use (and that’s a good thing).

For years I’ve stored my passwords in Firefox, because it’s convenient, and I never bothered with all those other fancy password managers. The problem is, that it locked me into Firefox and I found myself still needing to remember passwords for servers and things.

So a few months ago I decided to give command line tool Pass a try. It’s essentially a shell script wrapper for GnuPG and stores your passwords (with any notes) in individually encrypted files.

I love it.

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Setting up OpenStack Ansible All-in-one behind a proxy

Published on 9 August, 2016 in FOSS and OpenStack. 7 Comments Tags: , , .

Setting up OpenStack Ansible (OSA) All-in-one (AIO) behind a proxy requires a couple of settings, but it should work fine (we’ll also configure the wider system). There are two types of git repos that we should configure for (unless you’re an OpenStack developer), those that use http (or https) and those that use the git protocol.

Firstly, this assumes an Ubuntu 14.04 server install (with at least 60GB of free space on / partition).

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Booting Fedora 24 cloud image with KVM

Published on 17 June, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Fedora 24 is on the way, here’s how you can play with the cloud image on your local machine.

Download the image:
wget https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/24_RC-1.2/CloudImages/x86_64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-24-1.2.x86_64.qcow2

Make a new local backing image (so that we don’t write to our downloaded image) called my-disk.qcow2:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b Fedora-Cloud-Base-24-1.2.x86_64.qcow2 my-disk.qcow2

The cloud image uses cloud-init to configure itself on boot which sets things like hostname, usernames, passwords and ssh keys, etc. You can also run specific commands at two stages of the boot process (see bootcmd and runcmd below) and output messages (see final_message below) which is useful for scripted testing.

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How to find out which process is listening on a port

Published on 30 May, 2016 in Fedora. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Say that you notice UDP port 323 is open (perhaps via netstat -lun) and you’ve no idea what that is!

With lsof it’s easy to find out which process is guilty:


[15:27 chris ~]$ sudo lsof -i :323
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
chronyd 1044 chrony 1u IPv4 19197 0t0 UDP localhost:323
chronyd 1044 chrony 2u IPv6 19198 0t0 UDP localhost:323

In this case, it’s chrony, the modern time keeping daemon.

As Jonh pointed out in the comments, you can also use netstat with the -p flag.

For example, show all processes listening (-l) on both TCP (-t) and UDP (-u) by port number (-n) showing the process (-p), while I grep for port 323 to show what’s running:

[19:08 chris ~]$ sudo netstat -lutnp |grep 323
udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:323 0.0.0.0:* 1030/chronyd
udp6 0 0 ::1:323 :::* 1030/chronyd

Signal Return Orientated Programming attacks

Published on 13 May, 2016 in Fedora. 0 Comments

When a process is interrupted, the kernel suspends it and stores its state in a sigframe which is placed on the stack. The kernel then calls the appropriate signal handler code and after a sigreturn system call, reads the sigframe off the stack, restores state and resumes the process. However, by crafting a fake sigframe, we can trick the kernel into executing something else.

My friend Rashmica, an intern at OzLabs, has written an interesting blog post about this for some work she’s doing with the POWER architecture in Linux.

TRIM on LVM on LUKS on SSD, revisited

Published on 12 May, 2016 in Fedora. 22 Comments Tags: , .

A few years ago I wrote about enabling trim on an SSD that was running with LVM on top of LUKS. Since then things have changed slightly, a few times.

With Fedora 24 you no longer need to edit the /etc/crypttab file and rebuild your initramfs. Now systemd supports a kernel boot argument rd.luks.options=discard which is the only thing you should need to do to enable trim on your LUKS device.

Edit /etc/default/grub and add the rd.luks.options=discard argument to the end of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, e.g.:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.luks.uuid=luks-de023401-ccec-4455-832bf-e5ac477743dc rd.luks.uuid=luks-a6d344739a-ad221-4345-6608-e45f16a8645e rhgb quiet rd.luks.options=discard"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

Next, rebuild your grub config file:
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

If you’re using LVM, the setting is the same as the previous post. Edit the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file and enabled the issue_discards option:
issue_discards = 1

If using LVM you will need to rebuild your initramfs so that the updated lvm.conf is in there.
sudo dracut -f

Reboot and try fstrim:
sudo fstrim -v /

Now also thanks to systemd, you can just enable the fstrim timer (cron) to do this automatically:
sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer

Running scripts before and after suspend with systemd

Published on 11 May, 2016 in Fedora. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve had this question a few times, so it’s probably a good candidate for my blog.

If you want to do something before you suspend, like unload a module or run some script, it’s quite easy with systemd. Similarly, you can easily do something when the system resumes (like reload the module).

The details are in the systemd-suspend man page:
man systemd-suspend.service

Simply put an executable script of any name under /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/ that checks whether the first argument is pre (for before the system suspends) or post (after the system wakes from suspend).

If it is pre, then do the thing you want to before suspend, if it’s post then do the thing you want to do after resume. Simple!

Here’s a useless example:
#!/bin/sh
if [ "${1}" == "pre" ]; then
  # Do the thing you want before suspend here, e.g.:
  echo "we are suspending at $(date)..." > /tmp/systemd_suspend_test
elif [ "${1}" == "post" ]; then
  # Do the thing you want after resume here, e.g.:
  echo "...and we are back from $(date)" >> /tmp/systemd_suspend_test
fi