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Encrypted AES VPN tunnel between pfSense 2.3 and Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

I recently retired my Draytek 2830 following a serious security flaw I discovered (that’s another post, stay tuned!) and took the plunge with a rather impressive looking Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.

The other option was a rack mountable TP-Link TL-ER6020 although the maximum NAT throughput was only 180Mbps and it only had 128MB  DDR2 memory and no clear CPU specs, also the web interface looked tired and very restricted. Pound for pound the EdgeRouter was cheaper and has a better spec of anywhere up to and over 600Mbps, 512MB DDR2 memory and Dual‑Core 500 MHz, although it wasn’t rack mountable it was a no brainer with its modern web interface, also did I mention it can process 1 million packets per second?

The EdgeRouter also appeals to my inner nerd  (you can no doubt tell) as you can program it via web interface, command line or console connection and you can remove features you don’t need to boost performance. For example, it may only have 3 gigabit ports, but you can do whatever you like with them! In my case I have it configured as 1 WAN port and the other 2 ports are linked to two seperate LAN’s. I will write a full review when I get chance, but for now just take my word that it is the best router I have ever owned.

Anyway, to business!

Home Network

As before with the Draytek guide my home network is still double NAT’d but there isn’t a speed issue anymore. I do plan to eventually run everything via the EdgeRouter but first I need to install a few additional access points (I’m thinking a couple of airGateway-LR’s hidden in roof spaces will do, powered by PoE obviously!).

In the example below the home network subnet will be 192.168.100.x
and WAN address will be 1.2.3.4

Remote Network

The remote network is the same as before too – a pfSense machine sits at x.1 and deals with traffic to the local network.

In the example below the remote subnet will be 192.168.150.x and WAN address will be 5.6.7.8

Important

  • Each local area network must be on a seperate subnet, otherwise things can quickly get messy and conflict!
  • Make sure you use a secure pre-shared key, anything above 32 characters will do nicely and under no circumstances use the example key!
  • The example details below are fake, replace them with your own details if you want this to work

Configuring pfSense

The guide below lists only the parts you need to change, if the option isn’t listed then leave it as is. Anything to do with double NATing is in red, ignore this if your router is WAN facing.

Fairly straight forward, go to VPN > IPSec > Click Add P1

  • Enter the Remote Gateway as the WAN IP address of the EdgeRouter (or the Superhub in my case) – 1.2.3.4
  • Enter a brieft description in the Description box – VPN to pfSense LAN
  • Select Peer identifer as KeyID tag then enter the WAN address of EdgeRouter (192.168.100.1) else leave as Peer IP address
  • Enter your pre-shared key in the Pre-Shared Key box – testing123
  • Set the DH Group to 14
  • Press Save

That’s your Phase 1 entry configured, now for Phase 2:

Go to VPN > IPSec > Click on Show Phase 2 Entries for Home

  • Enter Remote Network as the home network subnet – 192.168.100.0/24
  • Put a brief description in the Description box – Home
  • Set PSF Key Group to 14
  • Press Save and then hit Apply Changes

Finally, we need to create a firewall rule to allow traffic to pass over the VPN:

  • Go to Firewall > Rules > IPSec and click Add
  • Change Protocol to any
  • Enter a brief description in the Description box – Allow VPN Traffic
  • Press Save any hit Apply Changes

Configuring the EdgeRouter

First of all make sure you are running the latest firmware otherwise options may be missing and this may not go smoothly! Currently (March 2017) I’m running EdgeRouter Lite v1.9.1.

Configuring the EdgeRouter is pretty straight forward, you don’t need to do anything via command line or console (unless you really want to, knock yourself out!) – Go to VPN > IPSec Site-to-Site

  • First tick the box Show advanced options to show the encryption options
  • Under Global Options leave Automatically open firewall and exclude from NAT unless you want greater control over who can connect in
  • Under Site-to-site peers enter the Peer as the home WAN address – 5.6.7.8
  • Put a brief description in the Description box – Remote
  • In local IP enter any
  • For Encryption set AES-256
  • In Pre-shared secret enter the key set previously – testing123
  • Enter the Local subnet as 192.168.100.0/24
  • Enter the Remote subnet as 192.168.150.0/24

All being well you should end up with something like below:

Once everything is saved, head over to the pfSense IPSec Status page and hit connect if it hasn’t already established and  there you have it!

At this point you may be asking why did you uncheck the option to Automatically open firewall…, this is because I like to have greater control over what IP addresses are allowed access to my network.

To substitute this option I created a rule in the NAT section translating UDP port 4500 to the routers local IP address (192.168.100.1). In turn I set the Src Address Group of this rule to a list of predefined IP addresses, thus only allowing access to my networks and blocking the rest of the world.

 

 

 

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How to List the Contents of a Web Directory

Any good web host will secure the contents of website directories which don’t have an index page by not allowing the  files or folders to be listed, instead you’ll get a 403 error page saying access is forbidden. Whilst this is good in practice, sometimes you might actually need to list the contents – and its simple to enable on an Apache web server – add one line to your .htaccess file and you’re done!

How it’s done

Options +Indexes

Notes

  • If you have access you can edit your web server configuration and make it global
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Add a NAS drive to your Livedrive account for free

I used to be a customer of popular cloud backup service Livedrive. The upload and download speeds were nothing to shout about and one annoyance was having to pay extra to add a NAS drive to your account, but there is a workaround!

How so?

All you need to do is add a symbolic link to your NAS drive from your computer. Think of a symbolic link as a fancy shortcut, the only difference being it masks the destination instead of taking you straight there – you’ll see what I mean when you read on.

Imagine you have a Windows computer with your NAS drive with the root of the drive already mapped to Z:, you have a folder on your NAS called MyFiles and would be able to browse to Z:\MyFiles to see whatever is stored there. Next imagine we have a folder called C:\Backup which is already uploading to your Livedrive account, using  the following command we will make C:\Backup\MyFiles lead to your NAS and in turn be included with your Livedrive backup.

mklink /d "C:\Backup\MyFiles" "Z:\MyFiles"

For me, this worked absolutely fine and I had a couple of TB uploaded without ever being caught out. I’ve since jumped ship to Amazon Drive, whilst it is more expensive per year I’ve got it running from multiple computers and the upload and download speed always tops out my connection, so I can’t complain!

Notes

  • Use the above guide at your own risk – I won’t be held liable if anything happens to your Livedrive account, files or anything else because of this!
  • This doesn’t work with Dropbox or Google Drive  – sorry
  • You only need to run the command once, after that the link will be remembered
  • To remove the link just delete it as you would any other  file or folder
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Turnigy 1:16 Nitro RC Cars

I recently bought 2 Turnigy Nitro RC cars to have a little fun with, whilst being fully aware of them having a problem with the starter mechanism I hoped that HobbyKing would have resolved them by now, but unfortunately not.

I bought a Truggy for £50 and a Buggy for £70 and managed to start them both twice before the pull starter began to slip. I took the buggy engine apart and found no obvious problems, but there was a lot of oily residue covering pretty much everything, even the pull starters chord and this seemed to be the reason it was slipping.

Searching online at the HobbyKing website I  found various posts about replacing different engine parts but the most promising said that a Graupner 92600.117A back plate was the ultimate solution and stops the oily residue from the fuel seeping everywhere.

All in all it looks like a design flaw with the engine, but two new back plates are on their way from Germany, £30 inc postage and should be here in a few weeks.

Turnigy Buggy & Truggy

Update 16/08/2015 –

The new back plates fits nicely and the engines have both turned over flawlessly since. The pictures below show briefly how it was done to the buggy engine, the same steps were repeated for the truggy engine too.

A video will be attached soon showing the cars in action.

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Unstick a LinkStation Disk Backup

Imagine this… you have two decent network attach storage boxes which regularly backup one to the other using a built in Disk Backup tool –  Brilliant huh, sounds almost like a nerdy dream! Now imagine part way through a backup you get a power cut or you just trip over the power cable ripping the plug out the wall… not to worry, things will pick up where they left off… unless those decent boxes are Buffalo LinkStations!

I first discovered this flaw a few weeks back when one of my nightly backups seemed to be taking longer than usual. I gave the box about a day or so to try and fix itself but it still kept saying that the disk backup was in progress and in the admin interface and I was unable to cancel or remove the backup, so it was pretty much stuck as you can see below:

stuck-backup

I headed to the official Buffalo support website which seemed to have a fix for this common problem – See for yourself below:

buffalo-stuck-disk-backup
Okay so you have to restore the box to factory defaults… no thanks! I can only assume that because the HS-DHGL is one of their older discontinued products they just can’t be bothered to make a firmware update as it’s not worth their time or effort, but the other option is to use SSH to edit a file which will force the backup to complete.

Getting Unstuck

The following guide will assume you have already enabled SSH and are logged in ready to go, if you haven’t yet enabled SSH see this post here.

  • First of all we need to locate the backup configuration file and this depends on the job number specified on the admin interface, in my case it was number 1 so we need to type in the following command to open the file in a text editor: 
    • "vi /etc/melco/backup1"
  • You will now see the configuration file open, hit I (for indigo) on your keyboard to allow inserting of new text and change the line status=running to status=done
  • Hit the Escape key and then type :wq to save your changes and quit
  • Head back to the admin interface to the Disk Backup section and you’ll now see the backup showing as complete as seen below:
    job-complete
  • That’s it – The backup is unstuck, and we haven’t had to restore anything to factory defaults!

Notes

  • This has been tried and tested on the following models/firmware: HS-DHGL/v2.1
  • Finally, if you could let me know if you encounter any problems or can confirm if this works for other models I’d be grateful
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Windows 10 Automatic Login at Boot or Switch of User

There may come a time in your nerdy life where you want your computer to automatically log in at boot or whenever anybody signs out, this can be especially useful if you are running software that needs a user to be constantly logged in.

For example, I run CCTV software on my computer via a user called Console, the software displays live camera feeds on a second screen at my desk, the same signal is fed via a splitter through network cables eventually reaching various screens dotted around my house.

The setup requires my Console user to be constantly logged in, be it when the system boots or after I have finished checking my emails or being nerdy.

It is fairly straight forward to get going, in my case on Windows 10 Pro I ran the built-in netplwiz(.exe) utility and added one string value to the registry.

Part 1: Configuring automatic login at boot

  1. Run netplwiz(.exe) and uncheck the box saying Users must enter a username and password to use this computer.
  2. Press OK then enter the username and password you want the computer to automatically login as and press OK again

That’s the first part completed, so now whenever you boot your computer it will automatically sign in as the user account you have set.

Part 2: Configure automatic login when signing out/switching user

The next part involves adding a regsitry key with a string value, once this was done I found it worked straight away without having to reboot my machine.

  1. Open regedit(.exe) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

    Right click on Winlogon and select New > String Value

  2. For the value name enter ForceAutoLogon, double click the line you just added and enter the  value date to 1

That’s it! Now when you sign out it will automatically sign back in to the user account set in first step.

Notes

  • If you want to log in as a different user, hold the shift key whilst locking your account, you’ll then see the normal Windows login screen
  • You can do step 1 via the registry if you want, but why over complicate things!
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Webmin 1.610 on CentOS 5.8 (x86)

The following commands can be used to install Webmin 1.610 on CentOS 5.8. Make sure you’re logged in as root and then follow the steps below.

Select a temporary directory to save the download to. We will only use the downloaded file once so it’s pointless keeping it.. free up space and put it in /tmp!

cd /tmp

Begin the download of Webmin using wget:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.610-1.noarch.rpm

Install Webmin by unpacking the archive:

rpm -Uvh webmin-1.610-1.noarch.rpm

Done! You can now login to your fresh installation of Webmin by heading to http://hostname-or-ipaddress:10000 using the root username and password.

Notes

  • If you don’t have a server to try this on I’d recommend DigitalOcean hands down – virtual servers start from $5 a month
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Fix TRENDnet TV-IP310pi Corroded PoE Connector

Following Storm Doris back in February 2017, one of my cameras at the back of my house stopped working. Part of the roof had been blown off (only a plastic cover, thankfully nothing more serious) which exposed the cable and allowed things to get a little damp.

On closer inspection the 3 far pins in the connector had corroded as seen below, click any picture below to see a bigger version:

I’m presuming the corrosion had been going on some time and the storm was the icing on the cake. I tried a mixture of WD40 contact cleaner followed by a strong acid based electrical cleaner and the pins had cleaned up nicely but it still wasn’t working.

I was really trying to avoid was chopping the connector off completely as after all it is over £100 worth of camera, but that happened…

As you can see from above I opted for jelly crimps (scotch locks) as these are waterproof, the alternative was either a  surface mounted punch-down box or RJ45 coupler both which would have corroded over time and eventually left me with a broken camera again.

After making sure everything was working I wrapped the jellys in a fair amount of electric tape followed by a healthy dose of vaseline.

I would have exposed more of the camera cable which would have made things look neater and given me more room to position each jelly connector but ultimately I wanted to cut as little as possible, and the fact it was now working again was a good enough excuse to leave it alone!

Colour Combinations

It came as no suprise that the camera didn’t use standard 568B colours but here is the combination I used:

Key: 568B Standard Cable / TRENDnet Cable

  • Orange White – Orange
  • Orange – Yellow
  • Green White – Green
  • Blue – Grey
  • Blue White – Purple
  • Green – Blue
  • Brown White – Brown
  • Brown – White

I found the colours by refering to this guide here. I did manage to get the green and green white cables mixed up, however this hasn’t affected the camera in any way that I can tell. If it does ever cause a problem I will swap the cables around at the patch panel to avoid having to tamper any further.

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WordPress & Spam: Key’s Solution

Recently I began to see an increase in malicious login attempts to my servers from bots (ie. automated attempts to login via FTP, POP/IMAP, SSH and so on) which gave me an idea for a new side-project on NerdTools known as the Bad Bots Intrusion & Spam Detection database.

After a few hours of developing a database was generating before my eyes of all the bad bots and their failed attempts, which then got me thinking, aside from using the database with a firewall can this be intergrated with WordPress to stop spam before its even posted?

A few more hours developing and I have now created two plugins which are listed in the WordPress extension directory. One is called NerdTools Bad Bots Spam Reporter which cleverly and annonymously reports the IP address of an author whenever a comment is classed as spam, and the other is called NerdTools Bad Bots Spam Defender which again annonymously screens every authors IP address against the database and if a match is found it won’t allow the comment to be saved.

Going a little deeper into the reporting plugin; when a comment is classed as spam the authors IP address is reported to the database but it won’t be entered straight away, our system will wait and see if any patterns form, if so it will then be entered and further comments will not be allowed.

It may seem madness having two seperate plugins to work as one but I didn’t want to force people into reporting comments if they don’t want to and vice versa with the defending plugin.

In terms of infrastructure the database is hosted on a high performance SSD server which has memcache enabled. Future plans include clustered servers for even greater performance.

Not bad for a few hours work!