Doug's Home On The Web

January 25th, 2020March 14th, 2024

Welcome to dmuth.org!

Welcome to my website and blog! It has been been around in one form or another for well over a decade. It’s changed purposes a few times, and at this point is now a mostly tech blog where I share things I’ve learned or made.

Feel free to have a look around, or consider checking out some of the more popular posts I’ve made over the years:

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to reach out if you have any comments or just want to chat!

January 25th, 2020January 26th, 2020

SSH At Scale: CAs and Principals

If you manage Linux servers over the Internet, you use SSH to connect to them. SSH lets you have a remote shell on a host over an encrypted channel so that an attacker cannot watch what you are doing over the network. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about using SSH at scale across thousands of posts.

Phase 0: Passwords

When you get started with SSH for the first time, you likely won’t have keys set up and will instead use passwords to authenticate to your servers. It will look something like this:

ssh dmuth@cheetah.dmuth.org
dmuth@cheetah.dmuth.org's passsword: ********
$

You use SSH to connect to the server, type in your password, and you’re good to go. That’s fine for small scale, such as managing a single server, but it doesn’t come without downsides. Specifically, you won’t be able to easily use a tool such as Ansible nor do code checkins with Git.

And that’s actually a bigger problem than it sounds, because if you make it harder to use a tool, that tool will be used far less often. This can lead to things such as configuration drift due to Ansible being run less often, or giant code pushes happening once a day if Git is being run less. And giant code pushes are a particular problem, because if other engineers have written code, you’ll have to do a merge, and if a bug presents itself, you’ll now have to think back to what you did 8 hours ago, not 8 minutes ago. Having to type in a password every single time will also slow down the rate of deployment, which in turn slows down the rate of product releases. Not good.

Seriously, don’t use SSH with a password for any reason other than as a stepping step to using keys. And that brings us to…

January 2nd, 2020October 28th, 2022

Staying Safe Online: A Guide For Everyone

Perhaps you’re worried about being doxxed, perhaps you’ve received some specific threats, maybe you just want to increase your security. No matter the reason, this article is for you! Below I will list a collection of good practices to keep you and your accounts safe online. I fully expect to update this post as things change in the future.

I have tried to put things in a logical order, with some later steps depending on earlier steps, and some things that may be considered “controversial” towards the end.

This post was last updated on Oct 27, 2022.

Passwords

Let’s start with passwords. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will do so anyway: do not reuse passwords. Reusing passwords means that if a single account provider is breached and your plaintext password is recovered, you now have additional accounts at risk of compromise. This has happened before.

*Anyone in a hoodie is NOT to be trusted.*

I recommend using a password manager such as 1Password to keep track of your passwords. While having your passwords stored in an app that uploads them somewhere increases your risk slightly, I feel it is outweighed by using a different password for each service. For passwords themselves, you can use random characters or a system such as Diceware to create long passwords that are easier to remember. While the latter is slightly less secure, a password that can be remembered is one less password to store into a password manager.

November 24th, 2019December 3rd, 2019

Removing Dependent Child Images of a Docker Container

As much as I love using Docker, one of the frustrations I have is when I try to remove an an image which other images are based on, only to get this error:

$ docker rmi b171179240df
Error response from daemon: conflict: unable to delete b171179240df (cannot be forced) - image has dependent child images

I did some searches on Google, and most of the advice centered around the heavy-handed approach of removing all Docker images and basically starting over with a clean slate. That approach didn’t sit well with me because it doesn’t strike me as all that efficient, and also causes me to have to spend more time waiting for unrelated containers to rebuild.

That prompted me to write a script which, when provided with the ID of a container to remove, will recurse through all child containers and delete them first.

Quick and Dirty Usage

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmuth/docker-remove-dependent-child-images/master/docker-remove-image) IMAGE_ID

That will delete the image IMAGE_ID, and all child images.

No muss, no fuss, no awkward explanations to senior engineers.

When run successfully, the output will look something like this:

The source and testing scripts can be found over on GitHub at https://github.com/dmuth/docker-remove-dependent-child-images.

Does this script save you some time? Let me know in the comments!

September 15th, 2019September 15th, 2019

Doing Rollups of AWS S3 Server Access Logs

If you are storing files in Amazon S3, you absolutely positively should enable AWS S3 Access Logging. This will cause every single access in a bucket to be written to a logfile in another S3 bucket, and is super useful for tracking down bucket usage, especially if you have any publicly hosted content in your buckets.

But there’s a problem–AWS goes absolutely bonkers when it comes to writing logs in S3. Multiple files will be written per minute, each with as few as one event in them. It comes out looking like this:

2019-09-14 13:26:38        835 s3/www.pa-furry.org/2019-09-14-17-26-37-5B75705EA0D67AF7
2019-09-14 13:26:46        333 s3/www.pa-furry.org/2019-09-14-17-26-45-C8553CA61B663D7A
2019-09-14 13:26:55        333 s3/www.pa-furry.org/2019-09-14-17-26-54-F613777CE621F257
2019-09-14 13:26:56        333 s3/www.pa-furry.org/2019-09-14-17-26-55-99D355F57F3FABA9

At that rate, you will easily wind up with 10s of thousands of logfiles per day. Yikes.

Dealing With So Many Logfiles

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to perform rollup on those files so they could be condensed into fewer bigger files?

Well, I wrote an app for that. Here’s how to get started: first step is that you’re going to need to clone that repo and install Serverless:

git clone git@github.com:dmuth/aws-s3-server-access-logging-rollup.git
npm install -g serverless

Serverless is an app which lets you deploy applications on AWS and other cloud providers without actually spinning up virtual servers. In our case, we’ll use Serverless to create a Lambda function which executes periodically and performs rollup of logfiles.

So once you have the code, here’s how to deploy it:

cp serverless.yml.exmaple serverless.xml
vim serverless.xml # Vim is Best Editor
serverless deploy # Deploy the app. This will take some time.

September 11th, 2019September 13th, 2019

Saving and Restoring Your development/ Directory

If you’re like me, you write a fair bit of a code, which means you have to interact with many Git repositories. If you’re also like me, chances are you have them in a directory called development/ or similar. It might even have some nested directories, something like this:

./allaboutcheetahs.info
./diceware
./docker/check-disk-space
./docker/health-check
./node/circuitbreaker-demo
./node/neural-network
./s3/bucket-sizes
./s3/disk-usage
./snowdrift
./ssh-to

So that’s cool, but let’s say that you get a new machine and you want replicate your development/ directory structure onto it? One way is to check out everything by hand, but that’s laborious and time consuming. A second way is to keep backups–and you should absolutely do this–but aside from challenges of restoring a single directory out of an entire archive, what if that backup doesn’t have the latest commits in it?

I can now offer a third way. I recently wrote a couple of scripts available on GitHub that can be used to extract Git remote from each repo in an entire directory stucture, and save those remotes and the directories they belong in to a file. Given the above example, it might look something like this:

./allaboutcheetahs.info git@github.com:dmuth/dmuth.github.io.git
./diceware      git@github.com:dmuth/diceware.git
./docker/check-disk-space       git@github.com:dmuth/docker-check-disk-usage.git
./docker/health-check   git@github.com:dmuth/docker-health-check.git
./node/circuitbreaker-demo      git@github.com:dmuth/another-circuit-breaker.git
./node/neural-network   git@github.com:dmuth/neural-network.git
./s3/bucket-sizes       git@gitlab.com:dmuth/s3-bucket-sizes.git
./s3/disk-usage git@github.com:dmuth/s3-disk-usage.git
./snowdrift     git@github.com:Comcast/snowdrift.git
./ssh-to        git@github.com:Comcast/ssh-to.git

June 20th, 2019July 20th, 2019

Splunk Lab News and Updates

Hey everyone! I’ve been hard at work on Splunk Lab these last few months, and I wanted to share what I’ve done with it.

Splunk: Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts. Yield to Temptation.

The first thing is that I baked in several Splunk apps so that they are all available when launching the app! That list includes:

I’ve also written (or, in one case, re-written) apps using Splunk Lab as a jumping off point. Here’s what I have so far:

Splunk Yelp Reviews – Lets you pull down Yelp reviews for venues and view visualizations and wordclouds of positive/negative reviews in a Splunk dashboard
Splunk Telegram – This app lets you run Splunk against messages from Telegram groups and generate graphs and word clouds based on the activity in them.
Splunk Network Health Check – Pings 1 or more hosts and graphs the results in Splunk so you can monitor network connectivity over time.
…plus a few other things that I’m not quite ready to release yet. 🙂

June 2nd, 2019June 2nd, 2019

YouTube Channels I Like

Earlier today I had breakfast with one of my drinking buddies, and he asked me for some YouTube recommendations, because he’s bored with the stuff that he watches. I was going to DM them to him, but thought it would be more sensible for me to make a blog post and share them with others, as well.

I can’t say that this is an exhaustive or authoritative list, rather it’s a list of channels which I have found enjoyable or at least interesting.

The list

HowtoBasic – An educational channel which explains how to perform many common tasks. Often with thousands of eggs. 🍳
Star Wars Reading Club – This channel features numerous videos, most under 7 minutes in length, which examine a specific plot point or character in the Star Wars universe. Such as the imperial officers who conspired to kill Darth Vader.
Eckharts Ladder – A channel which focuses mostly on Stars Wars and Halo, this one focuses mostly on the warfare aspects of the Star Wars universe, such as the different kinds of ships and weapons.
DeSinc – Video game speedruns gone horribly sideways.
Down The Rabbit Hole – A series of videos by YouTube user Fredrik Knudsen, each video does a deep dive into a specific topic, complete with supporting research and documentation.
The Infographics Show – This channel hosts non-fiction videos between 5 and 15 minutes in length which cover some science-related aspects of history.
SciShow – Another science-related channel which focuses more on pure science-related topics, with most videos under 10 minutes in length.
Pretty Good – I’ll admit, I am not a sports guy. However, I adore the story telling in this series of videos from Jon Bois and SB Nation. He covers everything from the 222-0 blowout in college football to the psychology behind professional gambling to Scorigami in American Football.
Epic Rap Battles of History – Ever wanted to see Deadpool vs Bobba Fett? Or Mozart vs Skrillex? Check out ERB.
SF Debris – He describes his channel as “serious reviews with silly commentary”. Most of the reviews are on works of science-fiction with an emphasis on the Star Trek franchise. He has even more reviews on his website.

Bonus Channel

Finally, I’ll leave you with The Instant Regret Playlist. This is a playlist of over 2,800 videos, and it is just a thing of beauty. Put it on the TV at your next party.

What do you like to watch on YouTube? Let me know in the comments!

May 18th, 2019May 19th, 2019

On the Virtue of Laziness in Software Engineering

Many years ago, I recall reading in an O’Relly book which stated that when it comes to programming, “laziness” is considered a virtue.

That may seem like a strange thing to utter, but hear me out. When working in software engineering, you will find yourself doing the same thing over and over. It can be tedious and mind-numbing, and if it’s the sort of thing that involves multiple steps, can increase the risk of human error. For example, one case of human error cost a company millions of dollars and ultimately tanked that company.

This means that the more things that are automated or at least semi-automated, the better. There will be less manual steps to run, and less things that can go wrong because a step was missed or not executed properly. Conversely, because automation means the same thing is done over and over, you’ll get repeatable builds which make things like troubleshooting, multi-tenancy, and disaster recovery easier to perform.

May 3rd, 2019May 3rd, 2019

META: Final Wishes

This beer truck from Denmark could be the very thing that takes me out. Who knows?

I don’t normally like to talk about these sorts of things, but I am not only getting older, I am also mortal. So I just wanted to put out there that if something does happen to me some day, I wrote a blog post expressing my final wishes.

Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging. 🙂