WordPress password recovery for when things go horribly wrong

  One of my relatives, whom I’m hosting a WordPress site for, recently forgot their administrator password and couldn’t get into their WordPress Dashboard. I of course being the server provider was able to see the actual user table where their account was stored inside of MySQL but wasn’t able to interpret the password since it’s stored as a hash. We tried several times to retrieve the password using the “Lost your password?” option on the user login screen but I guess his work was filtering the emails. So, I started doing some digging around. A number of folks said to use PHPMyAdmin to manipulate the database that’s connected to the WordPress blog and change it that way. To that I reply, “Over my dead body.” I refuse to install PHPMyAdmin on a production machine since it simply opens up yet another attack vector. So digging a little bit deeper past the PHPMyAdmin recommendations I found the emergency.php script for WordPress. Essentially this is a drop-in PHP page that you FTP to your website, use it once and quickly delete it! It allows you to reset your WordPress admin account password for those times when you’ve forgotten the password. Again, I can’t say it enough, remove the file afterwards else someone else stumbles upon your emergency.php page and resets your password w/o your authorization!

Couple of links that might be helpful:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/the-agony-of-the-lost-wordpress-password/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Resetting_Your_Password
http://codex.wordpress.org/User:MichaelH/Orphaned_Plugins_needing_Adoption/Emergency

SharePoint DCOM issue appearing in the System Event logs

At work, we’ve installed SharePoint servers a couple of times. A reoccurring issue, is a permissions issue that appears in the event logs as Event ID: 10016 or 10017 but doesn’t seem to effect SharePoint performance. We just recently installed SharePoint 2010 and I decided to chase these errors down since it’s annoying and fills up the log files. Seems the local domain account you create to run specific SharePoint services during the initial installation don’t have specific permissions for local activation.


The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
and APPID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
to the user SOMEDOMAIN\SOMEUSERACCOUNT_SVC SID (S-1-5-21-BLAHBLAHBALHBLAH) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

So if you run off to the Component Services, find the offending CLSID object and right click->properties, hit the Security tab to allow this account to run this DCOM object it’s greyed out!

You’ve apparently got to find it in the registry first (should be “Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\YOUR_CLASSID_HERE.”)

Once found, right click the key in the left pane and goto permissions. From there, you’ll want to take ownership of the registry object from the Trusted Installer which will allow you, the admin, to change its’ security permissions w/in the dcomcnfg application.

Now that’s done, open up the “DCOM Config” node of the local computer, find your AppID GUID, right click and select properties. Now select the Security tab and change your Launch & Activation Permissions for your domain account that’s generating your error.

As always, here’s some links to explain:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/tfsadmin/thread/883b5f1c-1718-4b9a-a6c8-bf32c5d4d6d2

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920783

http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Fix-the-SharePoint-DCOM-10016-error-on-Windows-Server-2008-R2.aspx

Remote Windows shutdown via CLI

Here’s a tidbit of information that I had to use last night on a Windows 2003 server which got hung up on a reboot in a remote location. I’ve used this a couple times before but always double check the “help shutdown” before proceeding. The shutdown command has been available on all Windows OSes since Windows 2000 came out and can be very useful when working with a virtualized server, a headless server or a box in a remote location. Last night’s server reboot somehow got hung; probably on some application that required user interaction (I could still ping the box remotely, couldn’t RDP back into it but could still access it via RPC.) I just issued a quick:

shutdown /r /f /m \\"IP ADDRESS HERE!"

And the box finished its reboot and I was back in business. If it hadn’t been for that command at 10pm last night I would have had to wait until morning to get it back up and running!

Here’s a couple useful links w/ more info.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/w2k3/shutdown.htm

http://www.shutdown.cc/

quick tips!

 

Moving lots of data:I do all sorts of networking related stuff and one of the few things I do often are server migrations. So eventually, there comes a time for me to copy a large amount of data from one server to another while maintaining the file permissions and structure. That’s where tar & ssh come into play. If I’m moving a users’ home directory from one server to another I usually use tar & ssh together via a pipe and let it copy off the files perfectly.

tar zcvf - jsmith | ssh "destinations IP" "cd /home/; tar zpxvf -"

Within seconds of the command starting off, you’ll be asked for the password for your ssh session. Then, the data will get flung across the network to the destination folder. Works great!

Verifying Apache Configuration:When adding additional Virtual Hosts to your Apache config file it’s nice to make sure they’ve been picked up correctly (or! that you’ve modified the right httpd.conf file!) A simple way of letting Apache tell you what it’s going to use is via the -t option.

httpd -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS

It parses the running configuration and dumps the virtual hosts a nice readable format. You can also use “DUMP_MODULES” to see a list of the modules it will use which can be useful for whether or not that database module is going to be loaded or not.

MySQL database dump:It never fails, when doing a migration you’re going to need to dump your databases from a MySQL DB into another DB on your newer system. If they’re the same version however you can run mysqldump w/ a couple command-line switches and then import them on the new server.

mysqldump -u root -p --databases "your DB here" > dbfilename.sql

After you’ve moved your database file to the new server you can then import it in via:

mysql -u root -p -D "your DB here" < /path/to/dbfilename.sql

Keep in mind, we’re assuming you’ve already created the database inside your new MySQL server and will assign it proper permissions so your end user can connect to it!

Just a couple quickies for today’s post.

As always, a couple useful links:

http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-create-a-mysql-database-and-set-privileges-to-a-user

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum49/723.htm

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqldump.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/default-privileges.html

vsftpd, FTPES & CentOS 5.5 part 2

 

This is the second part of my FTPES, vsftpd & CentOS article. In the first part I walked you thru how I built a certificate, sent the CSR off to my CA and finally, modified the vsftpd.conf file. In this part I’ll show you how to test the service via command-line so you can actually see the certificate and how to punch a hole thru your FW because the data part of your FTP session is now encrypted.

First, let’s talk about verifying the configuration. One of the obvious things you can do is open up a command prompt session and attempt to log into your ftp server. Once connected, does it accept an anonymous connection? Was that what you wanted? Also, was the plain jane ftp command allowing you to log in or did you get a 331 error, “Non-anonymous sessions must use encryption.” If you’ve configured it correctly it shouldn’t allow you to login at all. So how do you test it using encryption? By using openssl w/ s_client of course! Use…

openssl s_client -starttls ftp -connect yourserver.example.com:21

This will allow you to not only log into your server using encryption via command-line but also verify that you’ve got the proper certificate & certificate chain installed. I personally tried connecting w/ out the starttls option but wasn’t successful (instead I get a “SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol” error message. I beleive this is because I’m using vsftpd in explicit mode not impicit mode.) The openssl s_client command can also be used for a number of other encrypted services for debugging certificates which is extremely helpful!

So you’ve verified that FTPES does work on the local LAN but doesn’t seem to work thru your FW. This is where passive ftp comes into play because your FTP traffic is now encrypted and your FW can’t do an inspection to determine which port is going to be used next and open it up for you ahead of time. Most FWs come with some sort of FTP inspect feature but we just killed it because that data is totally encrypted now and it’s unable to sniff the FTP traffic and sense which port needs to be opened. You won’t have to turn on passive FTP because it’s on by default with vsftpd. You should specify the port range and I also turned on pasv_address too:

pasv_enable=YES
pasv_addr_resolve=YES
pasv_address=yourserverhere.example.com
pasv_min_port=63000
pasv_max_port=65535

Once done, this will force your vsftpd server to use a port range of 63000 to 65535 for data connections. Alot of the commands I used above can be found w/in the man page for vsftpd.conf (along with their default values!)

Now you just need to open up that same range on your FW device (NOTE: Each FW is going to be different!) On my Cisco Adaptive Security appliance (ASA) I’m defining an object-group first for the port range like such:

object-group service ftp_passive tcp
  description ftp passive range
  port-object range 63000 65535

Then I use that port range in my outside ACL for inbound traffic like such:

access-list outside_access_in extended permit tcp any host YOUR_PUBLIC_IP object-group ftp_passive
.
.
.

Just be sure to use your public IP address for ‘YOUR_PUBLIC_IP’ in the above ACE. Now when it comes to ACL rules there’s tons of different ways to allow traffic so I won’t go into much more detail here other than how I punched a hole thru my FW to allow the encrypted vsftpd data channel traffic through.

That’s about it folks. Remember, if you’re having problems with your configuration, break it down into simple pieces and troubleshoot it that way versus trying to eat the entire problem at once!

-Q

Oh, almost forgot. Here’s a couple links that might be helpful!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPES
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/unix-sysadmin/troubleshooting-ssltls-mail-services-29266
http://www.wowtutorial.org/tutorial/26.html
http://vsftpd.beasts.org/
http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/s_client.html
http://blogs.iis.net/robert_mcmurray/archive/2008/11/10/ftp-clients-part-2-explicit-ftps-versus-implicit-ftps.aspx

Export/Import SSL Certificate from one Windows Server to another

 

At home I typically use Linux whenever possible and feel pretty familiar working with Openssl when it comes to generating different certificates, making a certificate signing request (CSR) and what the different files mean. But when it comes to Windows boxes, I’ve generally used the certificate wizard like everyone else. Today I had an issue with moving a wildcard certificate from one windows box to another because you can’t just look in the file system to find the private key for the public key your certificate authority (CA) just finished issuing to you from the CSR you built previously.

Essentially, you’ve got to use the Windows mmc console, add the certificate Snap-in and export the certificate’s private key & public key to the new server via a PFX file which is password protected. Once you’ve moved it. You can simply select the new certificate at the Bindings option or use the certificate wizard to bring it in. I won’t go into lots of details but will show you the link I found here: http://www.sslshopper.com/move-or-copy-an-ssl-certificate-from-a-windows-server-to-another-windows-server.html

Adding multiple SSL sites to IIS 6.0

 

So, for some time now I’ve worked w/ HTTPS and SSL and have had no real issues. Today however, I finally got a chance to put multiple SSL sites on one IIS 6.0 server which wasn’t very intuitive. HTTPS is funny in that the host header data that a web server needs to have access to is encrypted and can’t be used until it’s decrypted. Course for it to decrypt the packet, it must know which certificate to use and very quickly we’ve got a circular issue. Long story short, web servers CAN host multiple SSL websites so long as the sites are variations of  <something>.example.com and you use an apporpriate wild card certificate that will cover all the different sites on your HTTPS web server (such as an SSL certificate issued to *.example.com to cover all of the variations of <something>.example.com.) Ya, I know, confusing.

So while I was applying my craft to a Windows Server 2003 R2 box running IIS 6.0 I quickly encountered an error when I tried to put another website on port 443. Error was, “Cannot register the URL prefix https://*:443/ for site ‘<your site identifier here>’. The necessary network binding may already be in use. The site has been deactivated.” I believe it was event ID 1007 in the event viewer system logs. God I love logs 🙂

Quick search on Google reveals you’ve got to go command-line for this one by executing cscript.exe like so:

cd C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /w3svc/Identifier/SecureBindings ":443:host header"

.
.
.
.

You can find your site identifier inside of IIS for the site you’re trying to attach on port 443 and just use your site’s FQDN for the host header field.

See this link for a more thorough walk thru:
http://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/configure-iis-host-headers.htm

DNSBL, Sendmail and my Aunt…

So this past weekend I went to visit my Aunt & Uncle in Harrisonburg, VA. While there, my Aunt tells me she can’t send email thru my server which I was fairly certain was once again, “user error.” Come to find out. It was a misconfiguration on my part! Ah ha!

Long story short, I had reconfigured my email server about two months ago and added a DNSBL (zen.spamhaus.org) to my sendmail features and it was blocking her from relaying email thru my sendmail server. I simply had to add…

FEATURE(`delay_checks')

… to my sendmail.mc file and restart the service. (NOTE: On CentOS 5.0 if you restart the sendmail service it will check your sendmail.mc & sendmail.cf files and do a ‘make -C /etc/mail’ for you if the sendmail.mc is newer.)

Now, Sendmail will wait on the DNSBL and give the user a chance to authenticate first which will allow them to then bypass the DNSBL. Seems her residential comcast IP Address was added to zen.spamhaus.org which is commonly done to blocks of residential user IP address spaces to prevent spam.

vsftpd, FTPES & CentOS 5.5 part 1

Ask anyone that knows me and they’ll tell you I love Linux. In particular, I love Red Hat’s flavor of Linux. I’ve still got my first Linux book “The Complete Red Hat 5.2 Installation Guide” and while I don’t consult it first for all problems I do remember thumbing thru its pages when trying to configure those tulip.o drivers and how to change my X Windows config file settings (NOTE: I still to this day get tripped up on configuring X Windows!) So that having been said, it’s no wonder I’m using CentOS and have been for years since Red Hat has stopped releasing a free desktop variety for users to use (I know they’ve got Fedora but that product lines’ release cycle is too aggressive for my tastes.) 

  So that having been said, I love CentOS. I’ve been using it at home for a while now and whenever possible do my best to stick w/ the stock rpms so updates go smoothly. I’ve recently been trying to get vsftpd daemon to use encryption while still jailing my end users in their home directories and here’s what I found out. Vsftpd doesn’t natively do sftp but it does do ftpes pretty well. So I’m going to walk thru generating a private key, making a certificate signing request, adding the public key from your third party certificate authority (CA) to their certificate bundle to form a chained public key and finally, configuring vsftpd to do ftpes.

First, I logged into the box and grabbed superuser.

su -

Then changed directory to the location of the certificates.

cd /etc/pki/tls/certs/

Next, I ran openssl to generate my private key w/o a passphrase! (NOTE: If you decide to use a passphrase a number of services won’t auto start on a power failure which means you’ll need to run home, start the service manually again and enter in the passphrase so the service can use the certificate. Some services can be configured to manually put the passphrase in for you but that’s lots of effort.)

openssl genrsa -out myserver.mydomain.private.key 2048

Had I wanted to generate a private key w/ a passphrase it would have been…

openssl genrsa -des3 -out myserver.mydomain.private.key 2048

You’ll notice at the end of the command I put 2048. That stands for how many bits this certificate is generated with. A number of CAs will require now a days that you use a 2048 bit key versus the old standby of 1024 bit ( the CA I use GoDaddy is one of them.)

The very next thing we need to do is lock down your private key. This is used to encode encrypted communications to the end user who will now use your public key to decrypt the data. So let’s make it readable only by root.

chmod 600 myserver.mydomain.private.key

Once that’s done, it’s time to generate our certificate signing request (CSR) that needs to be passed to your CA so they can generate a public certificate for you.

openssl req -new -key myserver.mydomain.private.key -out myserver.csr

At this point you’ll be prompted for answers to a series of questions which will be placed in your CSR. The big thing you need to get right is your Common Name (CN) question. Make sure the CN is the server name that matches up w/ your DNS entry for this server. Folks are going to use DNS to access your server so the certificate needs to match up with what they are going to use to hit your server across the internet. It’s interesting to note, that w/ GoDaddy, pretty much all of the other fields you fill in get thrown out in the generated public certificate they send back to you so don’t get too freaked out with putting your location information in there. Again, this is with GoDaddy. Other CAs may publish that information w/ the public certificate.

After you’ve submitted your CSR to your CA. You’ll have to go thru the whole domain verification process which can be its’ own little tap dance. I know when our company had their domain names register w/ someone else besides GoDaddy it took 24 to 48 hours for whois verification and whatnot. Once we moved our domain names to GoDaddy the verification process took less that 5 minutes. Coincidence? Business strategy? I don’t know but I’m sure glad we moved our domains over to GoDaddy.

Okay, so you’ve finally gotten your certificate from your CA. Yay! Now comes the fun of lumping that certificate w/ the included CA bundle they sent you and configuring your vsftpd daemon.

First, concatenating the two files together into a combined public certificate file. Why? Cause vsftpd doesn’t have an option for the certificate chain file your CA gave you w/ your public certificate.

cat myserver.crt CA_bundle.crt > myserver.mydomain.public.key

This will put both files together into a combined file which will have all certificates. Now we can configure vsftpd and be done.

Open up the vsftpd.conf file w/ vi.

vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

When looking at your vsftpd.conf file I started at the beginning and slowly worked my way thru turning off features I knew I didn’t need. One of the first was anonymous_enabled. It defaults to enabled unless you uncomment the line and tell it NO. Most everything else I left as is. It’s interesting to note, that the SSL features you’re looking for in the config file aren’t present so you’ll need to add them manually to the file. Here’s what I’ve put in mine. Most of these commands by the way are covered in your man page for vsftpd.conf so take a look there for a more detailed explanation.

ssl_enable=YES
allow_anon_ssl=NO
force_local_data_ssl=YES
force_local_logins_ssl=YES
ssl_tlsv1=YES
ssl_sslv2=NO
ssl_sslv3=NO
rsa_cert_file=/etc/pki/tls/certs/myserver.mydomain.public.key
rsa_private_key_file=/etc/pki/tls/certs/myserver.mydomain.private.key

This essentially turns on SSL, turns off anonymous SSL, forces both data & logins to go over SSL and only allows TLS encryption. It also points to the location of your public & private keys.

This concluded part 1. Part 2 will talk about the implications of encrypting your FTP traffic and how it will mess w/ your FW rules at your border device.

-Q

Links I found useful while doing my install:
http://wiki.vpslink.com/Configuring_vsftpd_for_secure_connections_%28TLS/SSL/SFTP%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPS

http://vsftpd.beasts.org/vsftpd_conf.html

Diskpart FTW!

So I’m playing around w/ a SAN for home use. We’ve virtualized about 80% of our infrastructure at work but most of our VM hosts are standalone with local storage only. So, I’m spending a lot of time at home recently building a SAN on OpenSUSE 11.3 with high hopes of getting iSCSI to play nice. Part of this equation is getting another box to run vCenter Server which will need access to the iSCSI LUNs the VM hosts see.

Hence the title. Windows has a utility called Diskpart.exe which will allow you to turn off auto mount BEFORE you connect your Windows’ iSCSI initiator to your iSCSI target.

Open up a command prompt and type:

C:\Users\yournamehere>diskpart

Once you’re in the diskpart tool, type ‘automount’.

DISKPART> automount
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.

Then finally, ‘automount disable’.


DISKPART> automount disable
Automatic mounting of new volumes disabled.

This will keep your OS from trying to mount your iSCSI volume and mess with your VMFS partition!

Keep in mind, this means any new volumes your system sees will need to be mounted manually w/in the disk partitioning tool.

While you’re in there, type just a ‘?’ and see the whole list of commands you can play with. See the Microsoft KB article below for a more thorough introduction!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

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