Make your Own private file Sharing server- 1

Hello Guys,
Few days back I have to share some files with my friend and I was searching for a way how to go it.
As the files were confidential I cant put them on Dropbox or on google drive.that time I have share those file using Apache web server with basic authentication.but i was not happy with the way i have share them.so I have started searching a cool way to do it and I come across i really cool way.so Here we go with pydio is a file sharing software.and it has some really cool features like google drive but it will be great it you explore then at your own.
                     So cumming back to installation of pydio it really a cool having a nice webbased GUI and all.so Lets start.
So I have a VM on Amazon having 20GB of disk and 4GB of RAM and Yes the OS is Ubuntu 14.04

Some Basic INFO about the Pydio

Having a private file server is always a best idea. Instead of saving your precious data in the third party servers and Cloud, why not turn your old system into a robust File server, put your data safely in it, and access them anywhere from any device? Sounds good? Let me introduce Pydio, an open source alternative to Dropbox and box.net.

Pydio, formerly known as AjaXplorer, is an open source application that can be used to setup fileserver on any system. It is an alternative to SaaS Boxes and Drives, with more control, safety and privacy, and favorable TCOs. It provides the easy access to files/folders from any system, from any browser over LAN or WAN. It has an embedded WebDAV server and native mobile applications for iOS and Android. It is easy to install, configure and it is designed to provide enterprise grade security and control over your data. Moreover, Pydio users and groups can be mapped directly from your external LDAP/AD server, or from the most common PHP-based CMS.

on the VM use the below command to add the repo and make your life easy.

$ sudo -i 

# echo " deb http://dl.ajaxplorer.info/repos/apt stable main " >> /etc/apt/sources.list

# echo "deb-src http://dl.ajaxplorer.info/repos/apt stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

after that do update the and upgrade

#sudo apt-get update 

# sudo apt-get upgrade

  

#sudo apt-get install pydio*

After all this finish your pydio is installed on your server just few configuration are remaining.

install mysql if it is not install.

#sudo apt-get install mysql-server

mysql> create database pydiodb;

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.05 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL ON pydiodb.* TO pydiouser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'centos';

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)

mysql> exit

Then 

sudo  vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

find 

<Directory /usr/share>

        AllowOverride None

        Require all granted

</Directory>

 

and replace the None with all so it will look like

<Directory /usr/share>

        AllowOverride All

        Require all granted

</Directory>

and then close the file 

Configuration to reflect the change restart the apache and make the pydio directory writable

#sudo service apache2 restart && chmod -R 777 /usr/share/pydio

Now, open up the browser and type http://domain-name/pydio or http://ip-address/pydio in the address bar.

You will see the following screen. It will show you any warnings or errors if exists. Review the error lines to check what action you should do.

Then, Click on the link that says: click here to continue to Pydio.

Click Start Wizard to continue.

Click on the each section and set the required parameters.

Setup Admin account:

Set default language and file server title:

Configure MySQL database name and user. Enter mysql database and user details and click “try connecting to database”. If everything ok, you should see a message: “Connexion established” in the bottom.

Copy the contents shown in the above window and paste them in /usr/share/pydio/.htaccess file.

And we are done doing our configurations

A very nice screen will appear  in front of you and now you can login and explore the features of it at you own or you can refer the manual for it 

Enjoy In the next part I will explain you how you can integrate your Pydio with your Ldap server which will reduce   your overhead of creating the users.

Till Then Enjoy.....

Happy to Help you....!

How to Increase the size of a Linux LVM by expanding the virtual machine disk

Hello Guys,
I was working on my virtual machine and suddenly i got this isssue that i dont have disk space left. and then i started increasing the disk sapce from 20G to make the disk space to 30G.

This post will cover how to increase the disk space for a Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine running Linux that is using logical volume manager (LVM). Firstly we will be increasing the size of the actual disk on the Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine, so at the hardware level – this is the VM’s .vmdk file. Once this is complete we will get into the virtual machine and make the necessary changes through the operating system in order to take advantage of the additional space that has been provided by the hard drive being extended. This will involve creating a new partition with the new space, expanding the volume group and logical group, then finally resizing the file system.

Important Note: Be very careful when working with the commands in this article as they have the potential to cause a lot of damage to your data. If you are working with virtual machines make sure you take a snapshot of your virtual machine beforehand, or otherwise have some other form of up to date backup before proceeding. Note that a snapshot must not be taken until after the virtual disk has been increased, otherwise you will not be able to increase it. It could also be worth cloning the virtual machine first and testing out this method on the clone.

Prerequisites: As this method uses the additional space to create a primary partition, you must not already have 4 partitions as you will not be able to create more than 4. If you do not have space for another partition then you will need to consider a different method, there are some others in the above list.

As this method focuses on working with LVM, we will first confirm that our partition type is actually Linux LVM by running the below command.

fdisk -l

As you can see in the above image /dev/sda5 is listed as “Linux LVM” and it has the ID of 8e. The 8e hex code shows that it is a Linux LVM, while 83 shows a Linux native partition. Now that we have confirmed we are working with an LVM we can continue. For increasing the size of a Linux native partition

Below is the disk information showing that our initial setup only has the one 20gb disk currently, which is under the logical volume named /dev/mapper/Mega-root – this is what we will be expanding with the new disk.

Note that /dev/mapper/Mega-root is the volume made up from /dev/sda5 currently – this is what we will be expanding.

first click on windows button on you workstation and then type "cmd"  in then   it will open a command prompt go to path  "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox"
 By using Command

C:\Users\nrathi>cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox

after that locate your vdi file for the vm like in my case the path is "C:\Users\nrathi\VirtualBox VMs\ubuntu\ubuntu.vdi"

Then use the below command in the command prompt to increase the dick space

c:\Users\nrathi> "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" modifyhd   "C:\Users\nrathi\VirtualBox VMs\ubuntu\ubuntu.vdi" --resize 30G

after using this command your disk space will increase to 30G but your Guest os still can access only 20G bacause of the LVM now we need to fix that too 

so lets start doing that.

Below is an image after performing this and confirming that the new space is displaying.

Partition the new disk space

As outlined in my previous images the disk in my example that I am working with is /dev/sda, so we use fdisk to create a new primary partition to make use of the new expanded disk space. Note that we do not have 4 primary partitions already in place, making this method possible.

fdisk /dev/sda

We are now using fdisk to create a new partition, the inputs I have entered in are shown below in bold. Note that you can press ‘m’ to get a full listing of the fdisk commands.

‘n’ was selected for adding a new partition.

WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to
         switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to
         sectors (command 'u').

Command (m for help): n

‘p’ is then selected as we are making a primary partition.

Command action
   l   logical (5 or over)
   p   primary partition (1-4)
p

As I already have /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 as shown in previous images, I have gone with using ‘3’ for this new partition which will be created as /dev/sda3

Partition number (1-4): 3

We just press enter twice above as by default the first and last cylinders of the unallocated space should be correct. After this the partition is then ready.

First cylinder (2611-3916, default 2611): "enter"
Using default value 2611
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (2611-3916, default 3916): "enter"
Using default value 3916

‘t’ is selected to change to a partition’s system ID, in this case we change to ‘3’ which is the one we just created.

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-5): 3

The hex code ‘8e’ was entered as this is the code for a Linux LVM which is what we want this partition to be, as we will be joining it with the original /dev/sda5 Linux LVM.

Hex code (type L to list codes): 8e
Changed system type of partition 3 to 8e (Linux LVM)

‘w’ is used to write the table to disk and exit, basically all the changes that have been done will be saved and then you will be exited from fdisk.

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at
the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8)
Syncing disks.

You will see a warning which basically means in order to use the new table with the changes a system reboot is required. If you can not see the new partition using “fdisk -l” you may be able to run “partprobe -s” to rescan the partitions. In my test I did not require either of those things at this stage (I do a reboot later on), straight after pressing ‘w’ in fdisk I was able to see the new /dev/sda3 partition of my 10gb of space as displayed in the below image.

For CentOS/RHEL run a “partx -a /dev/sda3” to avoid rebooting later on.

That’s all for partitioning, we now have a new partition which is making use of the previously unallocated disk space from the increase in VMware.

Increasing the logical volume

We use the pvcreate command which creates a physical volume for later use by the logical volume manager (LVM). In this case the physical volume will be our new /dev/sda3 partition.

root@Mega:~# pvcreate /dev/sda3
  Device /dev/sda3 not found (or ignored by filtering).

In order to get around this you can either reboot, or use partprobe/partx as previously mentioned to avoid a reboot, as in this instance the disk does not appear to be there correctly despite showing in “fdisk -l”. After a reboot or partprobe/partx use the same command which will succeed.

root@Mega:~# pvcreate /dev/sda3
  Physical volume "/dev/sda3" successfully created

Next we need to confirm the name of the current volume group using the vgdisplay command. The name will vary depending on your setup, for me it is the name of my test server. vgdisplay provides lots of information on the volume group, I have only shown the name and the current size of it for this example.

root@Mega:~# vgdisplay
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               Mega
...
VG Size               19.76 GiB

Now we extend the ‘Mega’ volume group by adding in the physical volume of /dev/sda3 which we created using the pvcreate command earlier.

root@Mega:~# vgextend Mega /dev/sda3
  Volume group "Mega" successfully extended

Using the pvscan command we scan all disks for physical volumes, this should confirm the original /dev/sda5 partition and the newly created physical volume /dev/sda3

root@Mega:~# pvscan
  PV /dev/sda5   VG Mega   lvm2 [19.76 GiB / 0    free]
  PV /dev/sda3   VG Mega   lvm2 [10.00 GiB / 10.00 GiB free]
  Total: 2 [29.75 GiB] / in use: 2 [29.75 GiB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]

Next we need to increase the logical volume (rather than the physical volume) which basically means we will be taking our original logical volume and extending it over our new partition/physical volume of /dev/sda3.

Firstly confirm the name of the logical volume using lvdisplay. This name will vary depending on your setup.

root@Mega:~# lvdisplay
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/Mega/root

The logical volume is then extended using the lvextend command.

root@Mega:~# lvextend /dev/Mega/root /dev/sda3
  Extending logical volume root to 28.90 GiB
  Logical volume root successfully resized

There is then one final step which is to resize the file system so that it can take advantage of this additional space, this is done using the resize2fs command for ext based file systems. Note that this may take some time to complete, it took about 30 seconds for my additional space.

root@Mega:~# resize2fs /dev/Mega/root
resize2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem at /dev/Mega/root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 2, new_desc_blocks = 2
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/Mega/root to 7576576 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/Mega/root is now 7576576 blocks long.

Alternatively if you’re running the XFS file system (default as of RedHat/CentOS 7) you can grow the file system with “xfs_growfs /dev/Mega/root”.

That’s it, now with the ‘df’ command we can see that the total available disk space has been increased.

SO We have successfully increase the disk space from 20G to 30G.

Thanks guys.and let me know if you want any help with linux...

Once Again...
Happy To Help You.....

Setting Secure LDAP and Authenticating client with Secure LDAP Server

Hello boys,

follow All the post of my previous 2 blogs it will help you to setup LDAP server and authenticating client using LDAP now lets move 1 step ahead and start making our ldap server secure.

Enable SSL in OpenLDAP Server

Using encrypted sessions we can secure LDAP communication.  Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used for this purpose. Recent releases of  slapd  in Ubuntu is compiled with support for GnuTLS instead of OpenSSL, there for we need to install following packages now.

$sudo apt-get install gnutls-bin

After that we need to create certificate authority(CA) for this purpose.

#certtool --generate-privkey > /etc/ssl/private/cakey.pem

After that create a template file(/etc/ssl/ca.info) to assist the creation of self-sign CA.

cn = Example Company
ca
cert_signing_key

Now sign the generated CA.

#certtool --generate-self-signed \
--load-privkey /etc/ssl/private/cakey.pem \ 
--template /etc/ssl/ca.info \
--outfile /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem

Now create the key for slapd and sign it using generated CA.

#certtool --generate-privkey \
--outfile /etc/ssl/private/slapd01_key.pem

Create a template file.(/etc/ssl/slapd01.info)

organization = Example
cn = ldap01.example.com
tls_www_server
encryption_key
signing_key
expiration_days = 3650

Create a certificate and sign it with previously created CA.

#certtool --generate-certificate \
--load-privkey /etc/ssl/private/slapd01_key.pem \
--load-ca-certificate /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem \
--load-ca-privkey /etc/ssl/private/cakey.pem \
--template /etc/ssl/slapd01.info \
--outfile /etc/ssl/certs/slapd01.pem

Once the certificate is generated , now we need to tell LDAP about the created SSL certificate, for that we  need to create a LDIF file as below. (/etc/ssl/certinfo.ldif)

dn: cn=config
add: olcTLSCACertificateFile
olcTLSCACertificateFile: /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem
-
add: olcTLSCertificateFile
olcTLSCertificateFile: /etc/ssl/certs/slapd01.pem
-
add: olcTLSCertificateKeyFile
olcTLSCertificateKeyFile: /etc/ssl/private/slapd01_key.pem

Now add it to the LDAP.

$sudo ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /etc/ssl/certinfo.ldif

Also make sure to grant read access to openldap user to each of below files and locations.

$chown openldap:openldap /etc/ssl/private/cakey.pem \
/etc/ssl/private/slapd01_key.pem  /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem   /etc/ssl/certs/slapd01.pem 

$chown -R openldap:openldap /etc/ssl/private 

Now enable SSL in /etc/default/slapd as below and restart the slapd daemon.(add ldaps:/// entry additionally.)

SLAPD_SERVICES="ldap:/// ldapi:/// ldaps:///"

/etc/init.d/slapd  restart

Now lets see how to access the secured LDAP server.

Configure DHCP server to access secured LDAP 

In http://mageconfig.blogspot.com/2014/10/configure-isc-dhcp-server-with-openldap.html  post I have already configured ISC DHCP to communicate with OpenLDAP server, therefor in here I will only show the extra steps required to communicate with secured OpenLDAP server.

In the DHCP server configuration file, change as below and restart the DHCP server.
/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

ldap-server                 "localhost";
ldap-port 636;
ldap-ssl ldaps;
ldap-tls-reqcert never; #Telling Not to verify certificates as we have used self sign certs
ldap-base-dn                "ou=dhcp,dc=example,dc=com";
ldap-method                 static;
ldap-debug-file             "/var/log/dhcp-ldap-startup.log";
ldap-dhcp-server-cn         "server"

Configure Ubuntu Server to Authenticate with Secured LDAP

As I have explained the procedure above I will only show you the extra configurations needed. As I have used self sign certificates in here also I will disable certificate checks.

/etc/ldap.conf

.
.
uri ldaps://IpAddressOfLDAPServer:636/
.
.
ssl on
.
.

TLS_REQCERT never 
tls_checkpeer no
.
.

  
Now  on client machine I hope you have followed the previous blogs for setup ldap auth .now copy the cacaert.pem from server to client machine as it will required to validate the server certificate.

# scp /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem  root@<ip-address-of-client-mahine>:/etc/ssl/certs/




After that on client machine  add the below line

TLS_REQCERT allow #Which tells not to validate self sign certs




now Its a time for testing guys.




$ldapsearch -x  -H ldaps://ldap.example.com -b dc=example,dc=com

if its promts for password that means every thing is ok and now we can reconfigure the ldap-auth-config

$sudo dpkg-reconfigure ldap-auth-config

• LDAP server Uniform Resource Identifier: ldaps://LDAP-server-IP-Address
  • Change the initial string from "ldapi:///" to "ldap://" before inputing your server's information
• Distinguished name of the search base:
  • This should match the value you put in your LDAP server's /etc/phpldapadmin/config.phpfile.
  • Search for: " 'server','base',array " within the file.
  • Our example was "dc=test,dc=com"
• LDAP version to use: 3
• Make local root Database admin: Yes
• Does the LDAP database require login? No
• LDAP account for root:
  • This should also match the value in your /etc/phpldapadmin/config.php.
  • Search for: " 'login','bind_id' " within the file
  • Our example was "cn=admin,dc=test,dc=com"
• LDAP root account password: Your-LDAP-root-password

and we are done. if you are still not getting authenticated then restart the nscd service as it may happen that connection timeout has happen if its still not working then check into the 

/var/log/authlog

Thanks guys let me know if you still have any questions... 

Authenticate Client Computers Using LDAP on an Ubuntu 12/14.04

Hello Guys 

welcome back again now the final touch to our ldap server and its auth.but before that let me refer to my previous blog explaining the setup of ldap server.

I will assume that you have gone through my previous blog and setup your own LDAp server with basic config so lets move ahead

Install Client Packages

On the client machine, you will needs to install a few packages to make authentication function correctly with an LDAP server.

You can install them from the default Ubuntu repositories with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libpam-ldap nscd

You will be asked a variety of questions similar to the those asked when you were installing the server components.

• LDAP server Uniform Resource Identifier: ldap://LDAP-server-IP-Address
  • Change the initial string from "ldapi:///" to "ldap://" before inputing your server's information
• Distinguished name of the search base:
  • This should match the value you put in your LDAP server's /etc/phpldapadmin/config.phpfile.
  • Search for: " 'server','base',array " within the file.
  • Our example was "dc=test,dc=com"
• LDAP version to use: 3
• Make local root Database admin: Yes
• Does the LDAP database require login? No
• LDAP account for root:
  • This should also match the value in your /etc/phpldapadmin/config.php.
  • Search for: " 'login','bind_id' " within the file
  • Our example was "cn=admin,dc=test,dc=com"
• LDAP root account password: Your-LDAP-root-password

If you make a mistake and need to change a value, you can go through the menu again by issuing this command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure ldap-auth-config

Configure Client Software

We have to adjust a few files to tell our authentication files that they can look to our LDAP server for authentication information.

First, edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file. This will allow us to specify that the LDAP credentials should be modified when users issue authentication change commands.

sudo nano /etc/nsswitch.conf

The three lines we are interested in are the "passwd", "group", and "shadow" definitions. Modify them to look like this:

passwd:         ldap compat
group:          ldap compat
shadow:         ldap compat

Next, we will add a value to our PAM configuration.

PAM, or Pluggable Authentication Modules, is a system that connects applications that can provide authentication to applications that require authentication.

PAM is already implemented on most computers, and works behind the scenes without needing user interaction. When we installed and configured our LDAP PAM module, most of the needed information was added to the configuration files.

Edit the /etc/pam.d/common-session file:

sudo nano /etc/pam.d/common-session

Add a line to the bottom of the configuration that reads:

session required    pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0022

This will create a home directory on the client machine when an LDAP user logs in who does not have a home directory.

We have to restart a service for these changes to be implemented:

sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart

Permissions

During the LDAP server configuration, we created a group called "admin". This was not chosen at random. It coincides with the "admin" group that is created by default on Ubuntu machines.

The LDAP users that you added to the "admin" group will have access to the sudo command.

This is because we have a line that gives members of the "admin" group sudo access within the/etc/sudoers file. Edit the file by issuing this command:

sudo visudo

There is a line that reads:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Entries that begin with a percentage sign (%) specify a group instead of a user. If you wish to disable this functionality, or only grant specific users this functionality, comment out this line:

#%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Log In as an LDAP User

We have now configured our client machine enough to be able to log in as one of our LDAP users. This user does not have to exist on the client machine.

In a new terminal window (it is best to keep your original terminal window logged in, in case of a configuration mistake), ssh into the client machine using an LDAP user's credentials:

ssh LDAP_user@LDAP_client_IP_Address

You should be able to log in as if your user had been created locally. Issue the print working directory command:

pwd

You should see that the home directory you selected for your user on the LDAP server is being used on this machine. It has been created on-demand to serve the LDAP user.

If you log out and log in with a different LDAP user, you can see that there will be two home directory entries:

ls /home

user1  user2

If your user is part of the "admin" group and you didn't disable the ability in the previous section, you will have normal sudo access, otherwise, you will not.

If you issue the passwd command to change your password, you can see that it will be modifying your LDAP credentials:

passwd

Enter login(LDAP) password:

Restricting Access by Group

If you only want members of certain groups to be able to log into this specific machine, you can configure that restriction within the PAM files.

Edit the following file with root privileges:

sudo nano /etc/pam.d/common-auth

At the bottom, we will specify that PAM should look at the security access file to see how to restrict user logins. Add this to the bottom:

auth    required    pam_access.so

Save and close the file.

The file that PAM references for security information when that setting is configured is at/etc/security/access.conf. Open this file now, with root privileges:

sudo nano /etc/security/access.conf

We need to add a rule to the end of the file.

The dash (-) at the beginning of the line means this is a restriction. From the first colon (:) to the next colon, we specify who this rule applies to.

We specify that this applies to all users except root and the group "admin". Groups are given within parentheses.

From the second colon to the end of the line, we will specify under which circumstances the rule should apply. In our case, the restriction will apply in all circumstances but local logins.

-:ALL EXCEPT root (admin):ALL EXCEPT LOCAL

This will allow us to restrict logins to the "admin" group. We can add other groups or change the group.

This will also allow us to log in through the "console access" button on the DigitalOcean console if we somehow lock ourselves out of SSH.

Keep in mind that this will apply to all users, not just LDAP users. So any users you create on the client machine will need to be a member of one of the specified groups