Tag: BitWarden

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Server Rebuild With Quadlet

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am continuing my work on my home’s network. Let’s get started!

State of the Homelab

Bitwarden. I self host using Vaultwarden, a 3rd party server. Done properly, it fits nicely in a larger homelab stack, but its OCI container can stand alone in a development environment. Due to skill limitations, I’ve been using it in this configuration. My recent network work has invalidated my manually self-signed certificates, and I’d rather focus my efforts on upgrades instead of re-learning the old system to maintain it.

Today, I am working on my newest server, Joystick (Rocky Linux 9). I compiled some command-by-command notes on using `podman generate systemd` to make self-starting, rootless containers, but just as I was getting the hang of it again, a warning message encouraged me to use a newer technique: Quadlet.

Quadlet

Quadlets? I’ve studied them before, but failed to grasp key concepts. It finally clicked though: they replace not just running `podman generate systemd` once I have a working prototype setup, but also everything I might want to do leading up to that point including defining Podman networks and volumes. Just make your Quadlet definitions once, and the system handles the rest.

The tutorial I found that best matches my use case can be found at mo8it.com [1]. Follow the link under Works Cited for the full text. It’s very detailed; I couldn’t have done a better job myeslf. But it doesn’t cover everything, like how `sudo su user` isn’t a true login for `systemctl –user …`. I had to use a twitchy Cockpit terminal for that (Wayland-Firefox bug).

Caddy

Caddy is the base of my dream homelab tech tree, so I’ll start there. My existing prototype calls for a Podman network, two Podman volumes, and a Caddyfile I’m mounting as a volume from the file system. I threw together caddy.container based on my script, but only the supporting network and volumes showed up. Systemd picked up on “mysleep.container,” an example from RedHat.

As it turned out, caddy.container had missed a capitalization. I found the problem by commenting out lines, reloading, and running `systemctl –user list-unit-files` to see when it didn’t load. Likewise, my Caddyfile volume had a file path bug to squash.

Vaultwarden

Good, that’s started and should be stable. On to Vaultwarden. I updated both ButtonMash and Joystick’s NFS unit files to copy over relevant files, but Joystick’s SELinux didn’t like my user’s fingerprints (owner/group/SELinux data) on the NFS definitions. I cleaned those up with a series of cp and mv commands with sudo and then I could enable the automounts.

Vaultwarden went up with simple enough debugging, but the challenge was in accessing it. I toyed with Cerberus/OPNsense (hardware firewall) DNS overrides until Caddy returned a test message from <domain.lan>:<port#>.

Everything

My next battle was with Joystick’s firewall: I forgot to forward tcp traffic from ports 80 and 443 to 8000 and 44300, respectively. Back on Cerberus, I had to actually figure out the alias system and use that. Firefox needed Caddy’s root certificate. Bouncing back to the network Quadlet, I configured it according to another tutorial doing something very similar to what I want [2]. I configured mine without an external DNS. A final adjustment to my Caddyfile to correct Vaultwarden’s fully qualified domain name, and I was in – padlock and everything.

Takeaways

I come out of this project with an intuition of how to manage Systemd files – especially Quadlet. The Quadlet workflow makes Podman container recipes for Systemd, and a working container will work forever – baring bad updates. I would still recommend prototyping with scripts when stuck though. When a Quadlet fails, there is no obvious error message to look up – it just fails to show up.

Even though it is still new, a lot of my time on Joystick this week was diagnosing my own sloppiness. Reboots helped when I got stuck, and thanks to Quadlet, I didn’t have to worry about spaghetti scripts like how I originally organized ButtonMash and never stabilized this victory I re-achieved today.

Final Question

NextCloud is going to be very similar, which I will make a pod along with MariaDB and Redis containers. But I am still missing one piece: NFS. How do I do that?

I look forward to your answers below or on my Socials.

Works Cited

[1] mo8bit, “Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd,” mo8it.com, Jan. 2-Feb. 19, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://mo8it.com/blog/quadlet/. [accessed: Sept. 13, 2024].

[2] G. Coletto, “How to install multi-container applications with Podman quadlets,” giacomo.coletto.io, May 25, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://giacomo.coletto.io/blog/podman-quadlets/. [accessed: Sept. 13, 2024].

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Rocky Server Stack Deep Dive: 2023 Part 1

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am revisiting my Vaultwarden server to better understand the process. Let’s get started!

Monday Evening (October 9, 2023)

OK, so here’s the deal from memory: I want to put Bitwarden on my tablet. My Bitwarden server is a 3rd party implementation called Vaultwarden. Official Bitwarden clients, such as the one I want to put on my Android tablet, make use of the same encryption scheme as your average browser that relies on a system of certificates going back to a root authority. I made my own authority to get my project working, so my computers will complain by default about the connection being insecure. My desktops have been content warning me every so often, but Android is fresh ground to cover. This past week, I noticed an expired certificate, so it’s time for maintenance.

It’s early in the week, but this has been a historically difficult topic. I’ll be using my December 13, 2021 post as a guide [1].

Monday Night

I’ve assessed this project’s state: “dusty.” Vaultwarden is containerized on ButtonMash in a locked down account configured to allow-lingering (non-root users otherwise get kicked eventually). The last time I touched Vaultwarden was before I learned the virtue of scripting as opposed to copy-pasting complex commands I will need again in months to years. I foresee the next topic in my Relearning Linux series.

My goal for tomorrow is to brush up on my terminology and generate a new certificate authority.

Tuesday Afternoon

While reviewing my above-mentioned post, I remembered Caddy Web Server and looked it up. Its self-signed security certificate functionality was a little much hassle for me to work out around June 6, 2022 [2]. I shelved it pending a better router before further experimenting with Let’s Encrypt for real certificates, which still hasn’t happened.

Also in my June 6, 2022 post, I owed my disappointment to difficulty with the official Caddy tutorials assuming loopback access vs. me running on a headless server being left without clear instructions to find certificate I need to install into my browser on another computer. One idea coming to mind would be to find a browser container to VNC into. But then I’d still be left without the automatic certificate unless I made my own container with Caddy+Firefox+VNC server. An excellent plan Z if I ever heard one because I am not looking to explore that right now, but it isn’t not an option.

VNC: Virtual Network Client, Remote desktop. A desktop environment hosted one place, but rendered and operated from across a network.

For a plan A, I’d like to try the documentation again. Perhaps the documentation will be more clear to my slightly more experienced eyes. For what it’s worth, Caddy is still installed from before.

Tuesday Night

I’ve explored my old Caddy installation, and my limited understanding is starting to return. My big snag was thinking I needed to use the default HTTP ports while running Caddy rootless. Subdomains may have been involved. I’m interested in trying Caddy containerized, where I have a better grasp on managing ports. Furthermore, if domain names are of concern, I believe involving Pi-Hole may be my best bet, and with that I fear this project just became a month long or longer.

Anyway, I’m going to look into Pi-Hole again. I have an instance up and passing domain names, but I’ve not gotten it to filter anything. Hopefully interpreting a host name won’t be too difficult a goal for tomorrow.

In the meantime, I noticed PiHole was complaining about a newer version available. I went to work on it, but the container was configured to be extremely stubborn about staying up. I force-deleted the image, and PiHole redownloaded using the updated container. I’ve left a note with instructions where I expect to find it next time I need to update.

Wednesday Afternoon

To refresh myself, my current goal is get PiHole to direct buttonmash.lan to Caddy on a underprivileged port for use with reverse proxy access within ButtonMash.

I found an unambiguous tutorial affirming my general intuitions with Pi-Hole itself, meaning my problems are with directing requests to Pi-Hole. For this I went to my router, which wanted an update from July, but had trouble downloading. I hit refresh and it found a September update. It installed, and I had to manually reconnect a Wi-Fi connection (OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi).

I’ve blown a good chunk of my afternoon with zero obvious forward progress since the last paragraph. Where to start? I’ve learned nslookup, a tool for testing DNS. I validated that my issue with Pi-Hole is getting traffic to Pi-Hole with it. The real temptation to unleash a horde of profanities was my home router from Tp-Link. The moment I pointed DNS at ButtonMash on 192.168.0.X: “To avoid IP conflict with the front-end-device, your router’s IP address has been changed to 192.168.1.1 . Do you want to continue to visit 192.168.0.1?” That was a chore to undo. I needed a browser on a static IP – meaning my RedLaptop sitting in retirement as a server.

DNS: Domain Name Service. This is the part of the Internet that translates the domain names within URL’s into IP address so your browser can find a requested web page.

I’ve appealed to r/pihole for help [3].

Wednesday Night

I’ve gotten a few bites on Reddit, but my problem isn’t solved yet. I performed an update on my laptop and installed similar tool to nslookup (Debian didn’t come with it) to verify that OpenWRT wasn’t the culprit. I’ve found forum posts

No forward progress today, but I did make some “sideways progress.” At least I knew how to fix the netquake I caused.

My goal for tomorrow: I don’t know. IPv6 has been suggested. I’ll explore that. Maybe I’ll move my OpenWRT router for my upstairs workstation over to assign ButtonMash’s Pi-Hole.

Thursday Afternoon

Good day! Late last night I posted my appeal to r/pihole to r/techsupport’s Discord. While answering the responses I received last night, I ran my nslookup on a 192.168.0.X workstation receiving an IP over DHCP – and I got an unexpected success. Silly me had run my test over my statically addressed laptop. Also, leaving it overnight gave DHCP a chance to refresh. The test still failed upstairs workstation, so pointed OpenWRT at ButtonMash instead of the router for DNS. I’ll still need to cleanup my static IP’s, but I should be good to play with pointing PiHole at Caddy.

My next big task is configuring Caddy.

Thursday Night

My next big task is preparing Vaultwarden for use with Caddy.

Vaultwarden is one of the longest-running and most important services on ButtonMash. It was for Vaultwarden I started learning Podman. It was for Vaultwarden I learned how to allow-lingering on a server account. It was for Vaultwarden I researched NGINX and Let’sEncrypt to serve as a reverse proxy and HTTPS support, but later found Caddy to do the same things with hopefully less hassle. Vaultwarden has been with me so long, it was Bitwarden-rs (or some variant thereof) when I started using it and I didn’t follow the name when it was changed. With Vaultwarden, I’ve grown from dumping a raw command into a terminal to using a script on into turning that script into a rootless systemctl service that will refuse to stay down until stopped properly.

But problematically, Vaultwarden holds port 44300, which I want for Caddy. It’s also been running with an integrated HTTPS support module called ROCKET which the developers strongly discourage for regular deployments. This security certificate’s expiration is what is driving me to make progress like mad this week. I’ve spent the past couple (few?) years learning the building blocks to support Vaultwarden properly along with other services to run along side it. It’s time to grow once again.

I spent an hour or so re-researching how to set Podman up as a systemd service. And then I found a note pointing me towards the exact webpage that helped me conquer it last time. With that, I feel the need for a break and take Friday off. I’ll be back after Sabbath (Saturday night) or on Sunday to write a Takeaway and Final Question. I’ve got to give all this information some time to settle.

Of note: I did come across a Redhat blog post about an auto scale-down feature not present on RHEL 8, but it looks interesting for when I migrate to a newer version of Rocky Linux in seven months when active support ends. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/painless-services-implementing-serverless-rootless-podman-and-systemd

Sunday Morning

This has been a very successful week, but I still have a way to go before I finish my server[’s software] stack: Nextcloud on Android. I researched a couple possible next steps as a possible encore. Caddy would be the next logical step, but Bitwarden has the port I want it listening on. Alternatively: I dug up the name “Unbound,” a self-hosted DNS server to increase privacy from Internet Service Providers, but I’d want more research time.

Takeaway

Again: what a week! I think I have my work lined up for the month. As of Sunday night, my goal for next week is Caddy. With Caddy in place, I’ll have an easier time adding new services while punching fewer holes in ButtonMash server’s firewall.

Final Question

Even now, I’m questioning if I want to migrate Rocky 9 or hold out and hope Rocky 10 shows up before/around Rocky 8’s end of life. Rocky’s upstream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) doesn’t have a clockwork release cycle like Ubuntu, and RHEL 8 appears to be planned for support much longer than Rocky 8. That feature I learned about does sound tempting. Upgrade or hold out?

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

Works Cited

[1] Shadow_8472, “Self-Signed Vaultwarden Breakdown,” Dec. 13, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2021/12/13/self-signed-vaultwarden-breakdown/. [Accessed Oct. 16, 2023].

[2] Shadow_8472, “I Switched My Operations to Caddy Web Server,” June 6, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2022/06/06/i-switched-my-operations-to-caddy-web-server/. [Accessed Oct. 16, 2023].

[3] Shadow_8472, et. all, “Tp-Link isn’t sending traffic to containerized Pi-Hole (I think??),”reddit.com,Oct. 11, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/175wp2l/tplink_isnt_sending_traffic_to_containerized/. [Accessed Oct. 16, 2023].

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BitWarden: My New Password Manager

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am switching my password manager from LastPass to Bitwarden. Let’s get started!

Introduction: Password Strength

It’s almost comical when a digital security expert starts a talk in a packed auditorium and asks, “How many of you use the same password everywhere you go?” and half the people raise their hands. A facepalm or two later and the speaker may start comparing it to how that’s like a company keying all their locks to the same key, regardless of department or security level. It’s a stupid, stupid, stupid idea, and I am guilty of doing it up until two or three years ago.

The absolute worst password you can use is one someone else has without permission. The next worst password is one someone else can quickly guess. Web Comic XKCD – Password Strength gives a concise explanation: long, simple passwords are easier to remember and harder to guess than short passwords butchered by special characters.

But you could have the strongest password in the world, and still be vulnerable if you’re using that password for all your accounts. If just one of your sites is compromised, an attacker now has a key ring to go try all the popular sites to try and let himself in, and you will need to spend a long time cleaning up.

Password Managers

But then, convenience. The human mind would rather not remember tens or hundreds of passwords that may be up to date or replaced. That is where a password manager comes in. You log in with your one master password, and it automatically fills in passwords as you go. Set up properly, it’s even faster than entering your one password each time everywhere you go, and a basic setup isn’t all that hard to do.

At this point, a password manager should sound like a major security vulnerability, akin to a nicely organized key cabinet in the lobby, but a properly designed password manager never knows your passwords except when and where they’re needed. Your master password is used to help scramble and unscramble your passwords on your own computers. The rest of the time, it’s a bunch of otherwise meaningless garbage to anyone trying to poke at it.

Furthermore: don’t “log in with <Platform X>”. Ever. Only if there’s no other way, and even then: take pause. Merged accounts are worse than using the same password because they are by definition using the same username as well. A break-in to one is a break-in to all linked accounts.

From LastPass to BitWarden

I am displeased to announce that LastPass today is chasing off a lot of their free users by making them choose between types of devices: desktop/laptop and mobile. I personally only use a tablet for one or two things, like reading my Bible or viewing PDF’s. This won’t affect me but maybe once a month or two when I’m not bothering to walk to a desktop. Still, I don’t like it. It’s not like they’re getting any of my money anyway.

I chose BitWarden because it kept coming up as a good alternative. Not only is it open source, but their code has been audited, and I can self-host it as well: all are highly desirable features whereas LastPass is -at most- only audited.

The actual switch once I had my personal server up was easier than getting the dogs ready for a walk. All my passwords were moved in a single transaction, categories and all.

Personal BitWarden Server

First of all, IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING, JUST SET UP A REGULAR ACCOUNT! That said, I want to challenge myself, and I believe this is reasonably within my grasp. I closely followed sensiCLICK’s Full Guide to Self-Hosting Password Manager Bitwarden on Raspberry Pi on my BlinkiePie, my Pi 3B+ using a fresh, minimal install of a Raspberry OS.

I don’t really have much to say here because I don’t understand a lot of the new stuff I did. There were some instructions that had changed in the months since the video was released, but there were notes in the chapter titles. The tutorial ironically didn’t encourage its viewers to change the default password of ‘raspberry’ as you should. I changed the hostname, gave it a static IP, and not much else. I’ll need to save locking it down for another week when I have more time to propagate BitWarden across the rest of my devices that need it.

Takeaway

Passwords, like locks, are a balance between how badly people want in vs how badly you want to keep them out. Short passwords are easier to enter (if they can be remembered), long passwords keep attackers out longer.

Final Question

How many unique passwords do you use?

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