Amazon

Howto: Allowing SFTP access while chrooting the user and denying shell access.

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Usually SFTP will allow a system user to access their home directory to upload and download files with their account. The SFTP user can navigate anywhere in the server some times can download files it will produce security vulnerability.

The Chroot for SFTP will be denied to access the rest of the system as they will be chrooted to the user home directory. Thus users will not be able to snoop around the system to /etc or application directories. User login to a shell account will also be denied.

I the below procedures will allowed me to enable SFTP security,

1, Add a new group

2, Create a Chroot dir for launch the logins, which should owned by root

3, Modify sftp-internal for forcing chroot dir

4, reload the configuration

Steps :

Create Chroot launch directory with other have no previlege

mkdir /opt/chroot
chown root:root /opt/chroot
chmod 700 /opt/chroot

Create a common group for the chrooted users , SSH rule will work for the group

groupadd sftpgroup
useradd -g sftpgroup -s /sbin/nologin  -d /opt/chroot/planetuser planetuser
passwd planetuser

Modify ssh configuration

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Comment the general sftp subsubsystem and add new rule

#Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

#Add the line 
Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

# Rules for sftp group
Match group sftpgroup
ChrootDirectory %h
X11Forwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
ForceCommand internal-sftp

Then restart SSH service

service sshd restart

This entry was posted in Amazon, EC2, ftp, Linux, SSH and tagged , , , .

HowTo: Change Instance store AMI to EBS-backend AMI

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Amazon not providing any feature for changing AMI root device type, once we generate an instance with Instance-store  we can’t upgrade the instance because for upgrading instance should stop. The stop option is disable for such instance-store AMI’s. I followed the steps below, It can be workout by two ways either using rsync or dd

Here is the steps:

  • Create an EBS vol with size as same or more, I used 10G because my existing instance having 10G on root.

EBS_fresh

After creating which is look like this

EBS_new

  • Attach the EBSLogin to existing Instance-store backend AMI,

Right- click and select Attach Volume,

EBS_attach

  • Login to the Instance-store backend  server, and stop all the running services (Optional), (eg., mysqld , httpd , xinted )

Execute the the disk mirroring commands below, it will take few min to complete according to the server perfomance.

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# dd bs=65536 if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdf

or

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf                              #create filesystem
mkdir /mnt/ebs                                  #New dir for mounting 
mount /dev/sdh /mnt/ebs                         #Mount as a partition
rsync -avHx / /mnt/ebs                          #Synchronizing root and ebs  
rsync -avHx /dev /mnt/ebs                       #Synchronizing device informations  
tune2fs -L '/' /dev/sdf                         #Creating partition label for ebs  
sync;sync;sync;sync && umount /mnt/ebs          #Sync and umounting ebs

Check the EBS volume for consistency

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# fsck /dev/sdf
 fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
 e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
 /dev/sdf: clean, 126372/1310720 files, 721346/2621440 blocks

Mount the EBS volume into the instance, Remove the /mnt entry from the fstab on your EBS vol

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# mount /dev/sdf /mnt/ebs-vol
[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# vim /root/ebs-vol/etc/fstab
  • Create a snapshot of the EBS volume using the AWS management console

Right-Click the EBS_vol –> select Create Snapshot , it will take few min to create

EBS_snapshot

After creating snapshot it will list under snapshot list.

EBS_snapshotpng

Now Right-click snapshot  –> select Create Image from snapshot

EBS_create_image

  • Launch new EC2 using newly create AMI, so while creating new EC2 you can select any instance type also you may use the same keypair and Elastic IP for the new instance

Creating New instance using new AMI.

NEW_EC2

Running instance

EC2_newpng

  • Now you can login to the new server, If you select more than the size of snapshot you have to use the below command to retain the storage back
#resize2fs /dev/sda1
  •  Successfully migrated the server as EBS-backend. Start all the services if it is necessary, This time we can upgrade the instance type

This entry was posted in Amazon, EBS, EC2, Linux and tagged , , , , , , , .

HowTo: S3 bucket dynamic URI access

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s3cmd is a command line tool for uploading, retrieving and managing data in Amazon S3. Still their are no wiki is updated.
you may get the packages from sourceforge official

Also the download repository is available here : Download Now

It will also support including unix dynamic resource access method, for example we can use * for calling all the resources or {dir1,file2} for specific resource.

I was shown in the example for setting up public acl for dynamic sub directories.

Installation:

root@planetcure:wget http://kaz.dl.sourceforge.net/project/s3tools/s3cmd/1.0.1/s3cmd-1.0.1.tar.gz
root@planetcure:tar -zxvf s3cmd-1.0.1.tar.gz
root@planetcure:export  PATH=$PATH:/opt/installer/s3cmd-1.0.1

Now we can access the binary from any of the location.

root@planetcure:/opt/installer/s3cmd-1.0.1# s3cmd setacl --acl-public s3://my-bucket-name/{dev,stg1,stg2}/*/dir5/*/3/*

This command will execute the following scenarios

s3://my-bucket-name/  is my S3 bucket

* will represent all the subdirectories

{dev,stg1,stg2} will represent the specific directories from the group of directories

dir5/ ,3/ will represent specific sub-directory

Enjoy the day, 🙂

This entry was posted in Amazon, S3, s3cmd and tagged , , , , , , , .