FTTP to the house, so FTTH

February 12, 2021

Having moved to the countryside 3 years ago and having to put up with 6Mb down and 1Mb up, yesterday we have FTTP installed. It was a local community thing organised by one of the neighbours nearby. You can get vouchers for everyone who agrees to take a FTTP package, and then give those to Openreach to offset their cost of installing the fibre. (Or something like that).

Anyway some pictures of what our install looks like. Note I asked for them to put it in a different location to the existing BT master socket. As you can see the ONT (modem) is pretty small these days. Though there is a bit of spaghetti coming out of it, and it needs power.

They could have put it through the stonework, but I asked, and they were happier, for it to go through the wooden window frame.


URL Test

November 17, 2020

What sort of URL protocols are allowed?

HTTP http://www.bbc.co.uk/ – obvs

FTP ftp://ftp.ed.ac.uk/

Spotify spotify:playlist:1KbqfipyuyIHzWNy0X9Axu

HOP hop://virtual.aiai.ed.ac.uk:8002/Openvue/128/128/25


I think I’m done

October 2, 2018

I think I’m done. There is now a final report https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/FinalProjectReport364SchoolEdWeb and a catalogue entry https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/ServiceCatalogueEntryInfWeb. I need to archive these blog pages and submit it for official sign off. It’s only been 4 years in the making!


Get it Finished

April 25, 2018

As usual the last 10% of the project is taking 90% (of the real time) to complete. This post is a kick up my own backside to get this project finished.

So, even though the things to do are recorded on https://computing.projects.inf.ed.ac.uk/#364, as a note to myself, the things I need to do are:

  • Proper disaster recover instructions. Currently web.inf is being mirrored to KB, but needs to be done better and documented. I think I’ll create a new VM at KB, rather than piggyback on the physical DR for www.inf.ed.ac.uk – Now done https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/WebInfEdAcUKDisasterRecovery
  • Document the routine tasks. Which basically means what to do when updates come out, as we no longer need to worry about our local patches, as they’ve been incorporated into the official distribution, or equivalent functionality has been provided.
    • I do need to provide some info on our Feature module, and what to check of our local config after upgrades

    Done?! https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/SchoolEdWeb

  • Lastly, write a final report.

Embedded Video Test

March 9, 2018

Just testing links to videos, or embedded videos.

Link to media hopper
https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_7e2hiffw

Embed media hopper

Link to YouTube

Embed – uses iframe


MathJax Test

April 12, 2017

Apparently the mathjax CDN is closing at the end of April.

https://www.mathjax.org/cdn-shutting-down/

Our blog has a MathJax plugin that uses this CDN, so we will be affected (if anyone uses it).

This is a test to see if I can use it!

Simple shortcode version \(E=mc^2\)
Native format $$E=mc^2$$
Not getting far \(x^2\).
Ah ha, need to select not default from the plugin configuration.

$$
f(x)=x^2 = 4
\newline
\rightarrow x=2
$$

Update: Well it’s May now, and the above sort of still works. Not sure the last multiline thing ever did.


HP G2 ME firmware update

March 6, 2017

Just some notes on what worked for me to update an HP G2 Elite ME firmware, when it isn’t running Windows.

There’s a bug in HP ME firmware that can brick a machine – http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=7815289&docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-c05306753
They’ve released an update that contains a Windows installer and an EFI installer.

To use the EFI update I needed:

Now go into the HP G2 BIOS and enable UEFI USB booting (you don’t need to disable legacy booting).

Insert the USB into the G2.
Reset the G2, and press F9 or Escape to get to the option to boot from USB.
Select “File” and browse to the EFI/Boot dir and select Bootx64.efi (if it didn’t just automatically run itself).

You’ll probably get a warning about choosing to abort running startup.nsh, that’s an MSI file that is benign, and you could have not bothered copying it.

You can let it run, or skip it, eventually you’ll end up with at the EFI Shell prompt.

Type:

fs0:
cd Local-EFI
update

and the updater should run (without further prompting).

Remember to undo the USB booting in the BIOS (if that was your previous setting)

You could do some tidying and reorganising, eg that zip contains more than you need, but it shows that it can be done.

We are hoping to PXE boot into the EFI Shell, so hopefully removing the need to mess with BIOS settings. After some experimenting and reading, this looks like it is only possible by enabling EFI mode in the BIOS anyway, so doesn’t save you from having to fiddle with the BIOS.

Most of this is from memory, so some details may need checked.

Neil


Auth SMTP fail2ban

February 28, 2017

I’ve added fail2ban to the SL7 version of our auth smtp service. None of the sendmail filters that come with the fail2ban RPM seemed like they’d do the trick for us, so I’ve just overridden the supplied filter.d/sendmail-auth.conf with a sendmail-auth.local containing just:

[Definition]
failregex = ^%(__prefix_line)s.*AUTH failure.*\[\]( \(may be forged\))?$

Though that isn’t enough to get it to match, as the default log level (9) for sendmail doesn’t log auth failures. So we also have to run at log level 10.

Currently I’m using the local lcfg-hostsdeny and tcpwrappers template like sshd does, but we should probably look at using iptables instead.

In the few days its been running, 21 IP addresses have been banned.


Cosign/EASE drupal admin problem

October 28, 2016

We’ve been holding off using Cosign/EASE on our EdWeb distro site, until we had a clear solution to the issue of how to become the Drupal admin user (user=1). As soon as we turn on Cosign authentication, then we’ll only ever be able to be user UUN. Even if we created functional accounts (to use IS parlance), then due to our automatic authentication via browsers on DICE, it isn’t very convenient to become anyone other than our UUN. Also, on principle, we don’t have accounts in our authentication service that aren’t associated with an actual individual.

Asking around it sounded like there were two options people used:

  1. Just don’t sweat it, and use drush from the command line to do all your admin type duties.
  2. Either give yourself (or a functional account) all the available drupal permissions, so you can do everything.

Not being that fluent with drush, and that our web editors wouldn’t have necessary command line access to the server, 1. didn’t seem the best solution. Options 2 has problems, as the EdWeb developers are a bit wary of this and are not making any guarantees (in fact more likely the opposite) that we wouldn’t be storing up problems if user regularly published with all permissions granted.

So what we’ve decided to do is something a bit like a blend of the two options above.

Our solution

Ceate a new “admin user” role:

drush role-create 'admin user'

Give the existing EdWeb role “system administrator” a couple of extra
permissions:

drush role-add-perm "system administrator" "administer permissions"
drush role-add-perm "system administrator" "administer users"

The “system administrator” role is already one that should only be given to a few select people who know what they are doing. Generally people will not have this role.

Then as one of those users who is a “system administrator”, via the web GUI,  give the new “admin user” role all the other permissions with a couple of mouse clicks,  excluding the “bypass …” permissions.

The above steps should only need to be done once to get things set up.

Now if any of the existing “system administrators” need to do something as the admin (user=1) person, then they can temporarily give themselves the “admin user” role, do what we need to do, and then remove the role from themselves once they are done. They should know not to create or modify content with the “admin user” role, but if they did, then hopefully by not having the “bypass …” permissions, things would be OK, but we shouldn’t rely on that.

As I write this, I might look at adding a block that only shows up when you have the “admin user” role, to remind you that you are (nearly) all powerful.

It’s a bit of a faff to have to add and then remove the “admin user” role, but luckily the times you need to be user=1 is fairly rare. And probably just as much as a faff if we were to do thing via functional accounts.

Notes

The suggestion to not grant the “bypass …” permissions came from Mairi. In an email/slack post she said:

On the subject of the ‘bypass content access control’ permission, the problem is that because permissions are being bypassed, you wouldn’t necessarily know which hooks are firing & which aren’t. Bypassing permissions will just invisibly allow the user to do anything, with no indication of whether data integrity is OK until something goes wrong. For example, we believe it’s probably OK to publish as user 1, provided that user is configured with relevant group memberships; however, we advise against it because nothing will tell you, when logged in as user 1, that the group hooks are actually firing. Which leads to unforeseen consequences when content is inadvertently created/published without the correct permissions being in place. If you give another user those ‘bypass’ permissions, the same will apply – i.e. that user could be publishing content without the correct hooks firing.

She also pointed me at this article from Stanford https://drupaltraining.stanford.edu/node/13.

Neil


Code sprint

August 26, 2016

Back in July I attended IS’ first EdWeb code sprint. IS are trying out the idea to encourage more collaboration, and find an alternative source of resource to actually get EdWeb code development done.

I found it very useful, though for this first one, everyone was learning, and though I did get my submission back to their git accepted, it was a rather minor change, but real outstanding work that needed done at some point.

There’s a new updated, 1.12, which I’m about to try. It will be interesting to see if my code changes are in there.