Passing F5 End Point Inspection On Linux

With the recent increase in home working, corporates have been beefing up their IT security measures. What was once the comparatively small attack vector of a fraction of the workforce occasionally connecting from home now represents a huge gaping hole. The simplest way in which corporates can protect against this enlarged attack surface is to mandate that several key components of connecting user’s systems meet certain criteria. These are usually, but not limited to; having an operating system that is up to date, installing a firewall and activating an anti-virus solution.

This is where the title of this article comes in. These criteria are as you will see, very Windows centric. One can also stretch these to apply to a Mac, but when it comes to Linux these checks become very hazy indeed. For example, what qualifies as a firewall? IP tables on my router? My local machine? Something else? Also the operating system – how can this be checked? There are so many out there and so many are secure, even on old versions thanks to back-ports and patches. A murky world indeed.

Fortunately I can, for one vendor product at least, F5, offer some insight into how to configure your local machine so that their checks will pass and permit remote connections. F5 end point inspection is commonly used in web accessible gateways that go on to permit Citrix style remote desktop access. By definition therefore this will cover the majority of users who work on either remote fixed machines or a VDI type setup.

Operating System

I was unable to get F5 to reject access on account of the operating system or how up to date it was, so I assume that any common Linux distribution that is running a supported version and has been reasonably recently updated for security and other patches will be permitted by the end point inspection process

Firewall

Neither my iptables rules on my local machine nor those present on my routers were sufficient to pass the end point inspection check for a firewall. My gateway router also has various filters based on packet inspection for additional protection but these also seemed to have little effect. The only way I could satisfy this failing test was to activate UncomplicatedFirewall. Now I could have gone to the lengths of figuring out what feature(s) of UFW were cogent to the test but this seemed like too much hassle. I only need SSH access to my local machine from others within my network and this is a simple enough rule to setup in UFW.

Anti Virus

Anti virus in the Linux space is a hotly debated topic and I’m not about to delve deeply into this here. Suffice it to say that most solutions focus heavily on manual or semi-automated scanning for vulnerabilities that are largely Windows centric. In other words, ensuring that no Windows viruses are transmitted to an unwitting user of a Linux mail server. What this means is that, for the most part, the end user of a Linux desktop probably doesn’t need an anti virus solution. Such arguments however are of absolutely no use to passing the “computer says no” bot of the f5 end point inspection tool.

My initial approach was to install ClamAV. This is free and works nicely for my mail server and other similar applications that would do well having some protection in place for Windows users. F5 *did* detect this solution was in place, however it then failed a further check – the one for real time protection. This is quite right – by default ClamAV doesn’t have such protection and indeed servers using it will make a call to invoke the scan on incoming files as applicable. ClamAV does have documentation regards enabling real time protection but unfortunately, despite following this process and seeing it in operation on my machine, the test still wouldn’t pass. Having spent too much time on this approach with no success I looked to other options.

Two commercial offerings stood out as both having free Linux solutions and real time protection – Comodo and Sophos. I tried Comodo first but after a lot of tinkering couldn’t get the real time protection to work. It seemed to require a kernel module which wouldn’t compile for my machine and further research revealed little success or support for Comodo AV on more recent versions of Linux.

Sophos AV was the salvation. Easy to install, runs automatically as a daemon in the background and, thankfully, passed all the F5 tests with flying colours.

Summary

Given that I’ve gone through all the hassle of testing out various approaches to this, the above is all in all a fairly simple set of steps to keep the remote workers among you out of Windows territory despite the prevalence of Microsoft technologies in the corporate world. I’d of course be interested in other approaches Linux users have taken to such requirements because my own research in this space offered up very little in the way of useful material, in fact the closest I got was an article from f5 describing how to install the end point inspection client on your machine, but that is so straight forward that it really doesn’t bear mentioning. What I was really after was the material in this article and that, it would seem, for the time being at least, is nowhere but this page!

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Shell access over FTP

For a variety of reasons many shared web hosts provide only FTP accounts, not SSH shell based access. While I would never recommend such a host to a die hard Linux fan, I have occasionally had the requirement to work with such accounts for friends. Clearly I’m not about to break my workflow and use FTP commands and/or web based MySQL tooling, so how to proceed?

Firstly, bizarrely, many hosts despite not providing SSH access, *do* allow you to have remote MySQL access, so with a local mysql-client library installed and the correct rules in CPanel to permit one of my static IPs access, I can easily run commands on the remote database. I won’t include a tutorial because, if your CPanel has such an option and you’re an avid Linux user, you’ll know what to do.

Getting around FTP is slightly harder to do and there will be some caveats. The main limitation will be that nothing can replace direct shell access; you won’t for example be able to execute processes on the remote host. You will however be able to work with the file system as if you were logged in over SSH. The method we will use here is to mount the remote FTP filesystem to a directory on our local machine and then work with it locally. This means, for example, we can develop live in PhpStorm and have the changes reflected on the remote CPanel administered server – neat!

So, to get this working you need to install curlftpfs. On my debian based system with sudo, apt command is as follows

sudo apt-get install curlftpfs

Once installed you can then mount the file system using the following command – be sure to swap out your hostname, user, password etc.

curlftpfs '<username>:<password>@<hostname>' /home/<local-user>/ftp/

And that’s it! You can then navigate to the directory in question and work on files in there as if they were local to you. When you’re finished you can unmount as follows

umount /home/<local-user>/ftp

Finally a little known fact about many CPanel configurations – they support cron jobs! This means that if, as a one-off, you *do* need to execute something on a remote server to which you do not have shell access, you can drop the executable onto the box via the FTP mounted file system method above, apply the appropriate CHMOD and then schedule your command to run as a timed job in CPanel. If you direct the command output to a log file then you can even tail that log file on your own machine over the mount point to allow you to track progress of the script!

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Custom WordPress Theme Flagged As Requiring Upgrade

A strange thing happened the other day. I built a basic custom theme for WordPress, gave it a name, version and deployed it locally. Immediately my updates page was complaining that 1.0.0 was out of date and that I should install 2.0.1

Hovering over the link to the update gave me a clue as to what was going on. The *directory* name into which my custom plugin was installed is picked up by WordPress as the theme name slug and passed to the WordPress.org API to check for updates along with the version I specified in the theme files.

That means that even on an intranet, unless you block WordPress.org API calls, you mustn’t have any collisions in the theme names with the repository. This also means that if you come up with a completely novel and custom name for a theme that currently isn’t in the repository, the day a developer releases one with the same name and your version differs, your custom, private theme will be flagged as out of date.

I’m not suggesting that this behaviour is wrong on the part of WordPress, I’m not really sure they could do anything else, I just wanted to flag it up as something you may come across. If anyone has any API hooks that can be used in a theme functions.php to block checks then this may well be a solution – feel free to post a comment!

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WordPress Plugin Updates

I’ve just pushed out updates with both my Last FM and Calendar plugins for WordPress.

Calendar is still going strong after all these years and has recently received a security audit and associated fixes as well as some useful fixes and tweaks as reported by users in the forums. As such this is well worth grabbing.

Last FM is less of an update, more of a health check. This continues to work well with the latest version of WordPress and so with no reported issues in the user forums and other commentary areas, this just receives a update to its tested up to tag compliant with WordPress 5.1

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Eastern European Road Trip Completion

It’s been such an incredible adventure and such a strange feeling to be back that I think we’ll be waiting a week or so to re-adjust to life in a more stationary setting before sharing stories or posting anything significant.

Suffice it to say at this stage that the trip has been deeply enlightening, a true journey of discovery and has changed us both as people for the better.

If you missed anything on our travels or indeed the entire thing, the tracker will be permanently archived here

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Eastern European Road Trip Begins

It’s been a long time in the planning but it’s finally upon us! Shweta and I are off for a month around Eastern Europe, taking our own car over 6,000 miles, visiting in excess of 12 countries and reaching as far East as the Black Sea coast of Romania and Bulgaria.

As you would expect there is a little technology backing us up along the way and so if you click on the tyre tracks on the right or follow this tracker link, you’ll be taken to a dedicated trip page where you can follow our progress and share in some of the travel excitement.

We hope you enjoy our updates and we look forward to meeting up with friends upon our return to tell our travel stories!

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Akismet Invalid Key

I upgraded the Akismet anti-spam plugin on my site earlier only to be greeted with a message stating “your akismet key is invalid”. Turns out that despite having my personal key since early 2006, I had to re-request the key on the Akismet site. I noticed when I did this that I was encouraged to pay a subscription fee of my choosing.

While I do completely understand the need to monetise services like this, I really didn’t like the underhand way in which I was forced onto that page. Plugin upgrades shouldn’t render a previously issued key invalid and certainly shouldn’t force you onto a site where payment is solicited to proceed (even if you can side-step this). As a plugin author, if I published a plugin into the WordPress repository that did this kind of thing I’d likely have my entry deactivated for violation of terms of service – smacks of double standards to me

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Hashing phpBB Passwords

At some point in the future I’ll be writing a more comprehensive article on linking external applications authentication to the phpBB user system, but in the meantime, if you just want to hash passwords or compare hashes then the following code is really useful

define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = './';
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, '.'), 1);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.' . $phpEx);

$password = 'password';
$hash = phpbb_hash($password);

if (phpbb_check_hash($password, $hash)) {
echo '"Hash "'.$hash.'" matches password "'.$password.'"';
}

It allows you to run a separate php file which utilises phpBB functions to hash passwords; call it from a shell script, use it to login to servers etc.

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Renaming WordPress index.php

Now as any developer who’s dabbled with WordPress knows, it’s easy to change the root directory location of WordPress so that directory structure wise different CMS systems can play nicely alongside one another.

What about, however, the situation where two CMS systems both require a root file of index.php? Well there you have a problem because if you change the name of the WordPress index file, which on the face of it seems easiest, you break the search feature (and possibly other things I’ve not found yet).

Fortunately I found a simple 3 step method which requires modifying only 1 line in 1 core file, which compared to other CMS systems, is not that many.

  1. Firstly you’ll want to follow the instructions on the link at the start of the article to move your WordPress root away from the root of your site so that it can co-exist with your other app. Then, instead of creating a file named index.php in your website root, you create wordpress.php or another name of your choosing
  2. Secondly, in the .htaccess file you created as part of the aforementioned guide, replace instances of index.php with wordpress.php or whatever name you chose
  3. Now, for the final bit of magic, locate the following file wp-includes/class-wp-rewrite.php and replace

    public $index = 'index.php';

    with

    public $index = 'wordpress.php';

    taking care to use your alternative file name if it differs

That’s a wrap as they say! You should find that WordPress works fine, including the search feature, all the while leaving index.php free for use by another CMS. Do let me know in comments how you get along with this if you try it.

Oh and remember, if you upgrade WordPress, which will happen every now and again, do check to make sure your core file change gets put back – I hate to change core, but as index.php is hard-coded, it’s the only way.

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Last FM 1.0.1 Released

I’ve just pushed out a quick update to Last FM for WordPress. As well as validating compatibility with recent changes to WordPress core, the release comes with a number of useful bug fixes and features, including a rather nice one that permits the display of album covers alongside the track listing. Hope you enjoy the release!

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