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Red Hat Summit 2021



Red Hat Summit 2021 is expanding to fit your open source journey by featuring an all-new flexible approach. We design them to be more accessible than ever before. These events will provide a mix of innovation, collaboration, and learning opportunities.

What you can expect

On April 27–28, Red Hat Summit 2021 kicks off by sharing content convenient for all attendees. We aim on North America and Latin America (NA/LATAM). Also targeted are Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific (APAC). Our no-cost sessions are aired live. Afterward we make them available as part of our on-demand options immediately.

Read here all about this event.

Open-Future is a Red Hat container platform specialist.


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Red Hat Insights Integration



Integrating your monitoring system with Red Hat Insights

We live in a world where we both need to focus on adapting new IT solutions and increasing operational efficiency. This is why we need to start working smarter and more proactively. The Red Hat Insights Integration can be configured and maintained by Open-Future.

With every Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription, you get free access to Red Hat Insights. This is an advanced analytics service. It greatly helps increase operational efficiency with very little effort. This blog entry is about how you can connect Red Hat Insights Integration work with your existing operational processes. It explains on how to help you work more proactively.

Read the whole article here.

Here you can find information about our solutions.


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Zabbix 5.4.0alpha1



We are pleased to announce that as of today of Zabbix 5.4.0alpha1 is available.

Zabbix is known for its enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution. They also release the software under the GPL. This means that it is free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial use. A complete text of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.txt.

This document contains the release notes for Zabbix 5.4.0alpha1. Download it from download.

Please click here to find all details.

Click here for our official Zabbix training.


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Digital Puppet Camps



Digital Puppet Camps

Last year, we resurrected the Digital Puppet Camps in the virtual world. We are thrilled to see how many of you participated as speakers and attendees. Like many of you, I miss the serendipity and spontaneity of the hallway track at an in-person event. I’m heartened to see the connections made in our Puppet Community Slack channel as you collaborated on the different solutions you had developed to solve common problems.

It was also great to see how many new folks joined us who had never before attended a Puppet Camp. Including those who would not have been able to travel to an event under normal circumstances. Making the Camps digital broadened and enriched our community in unexpected ways.

Call for Papers open now

I’m excited to announce that our call for papers for 2021’s first two Puppet Camps is now open. To kick off 2021, we’re trying something a little different. Instead of holding Camps by region, we will be dedicating each Camp to a single topic.

Our first Puppet Camp will be on 25 March and the theme is getting compliance under control. 2021 will be the year that everyone finally gets a handle on compliance!

With new year’s resolutions in mind, we will dedicate our second camp on 15 April on how to become a better Puppet developer.

Register now!

You can find all required information to register here.


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Red Hat Reports a Flow in Sudo



Description

Red Hat reports a flow in sudo. They found a heap-based buffer overflow in the way sudo parses command line arguments. This flaw is exploitable by any local user. Counts for normal users and system users, sudo-ers and non-sudo-ers, without authentication. Meaning: the attacker does not need to know the user’s password. Successful exploitation of this flaw could lead to privilege escalation. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

Read here the complete article.


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Zabbix Getting your notifications via Signal



Recently, Whatsapp pushed their new privacy policy where they announced to share more data with Facebook, causing an exodus to other platforms, where Signal is one of the more popular ones, among Telegram. Both are great alternatives, but I prefer Signal due to the open-source part, end to end encryption, and last but not least: their business model (living on donations instead of selling your data) and not to forget: we can use Zabbix getting your notifications via Signal.

Typically, Zabbix is sending notifications to whatever medium you’ve chosen if a problem is detected. We all know the Email messages, the various webhook integrations with Slack/MS Teams/ Jira, etc, perhaps even some text message integrations and such. Now, if we’re migrating to Signal, we suddenly have access to the Signal API and can utilize it to receive Zabbix notifications. Nice!

There is only one drawback. You need a separate phone number to register against Signal. Don’t use your own phone number – unless you want to lose the ability to use Signal ;(

There are various ways to get a phone number for this purpose:

  • Use the phone number of your current SMS gateway
  • Use the company phone number (a lot of cloud PBX are providing the option to receive the verification email)
  • Purchase a prepaid phone number.
  • Use a service like Twilio

You just need to receive one text message, the rest of the communications will go via the internet

Time to get rid of Whatsapp and move to Signal! But… How to use Signal to get your notifications?

Signal-cli

Although we could built everything from scratch, talking to the API of Signal, there is a nice implementation available in order to talk to Signal within a few minutes: Signal-cli

Although this github page is very comprehensive in order to get Signal-cli installed, but of course it is not doing anything with Zabbix.

Configuration tasks

For this guide, we’re using:

  • Centos 8
  • Zabbix 5.2

signal-cli installation

First, lets install the Signal-cli utility, and in order to do so we need to resolve the dependency of Java by installing the openjdk application:

dnf -y install java-11-openjdk-devel.x86_64

After this installation, we should be good to continue with the installation of signal-cli. According to their installation guide, this should be sufficient:

export VERSION="0.7.3"
wget https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/releases/download/v"${VERSION}"/signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz
sudo tar xf signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz -C /opt
sudo ln -sf /opt/signal-cli-"${VERSION}"/bin/signal-cli /usr/local/bin/

At the time of writing, the most recent version is 0.7.3, and that’s what we’re installing here. If in the future a new version is released, of course you should install that!

If everything went as expected, we should be able to register ourself to Signal.

signal-cli registration

Since we want to execute these commands by Zabbix, we must make sure the registration is done with the correct user on the Zabbix server, otherwise you will get the following error message:

Unregistered user error

(ERROR App – User +19293771253 is not registered.)

In order to prevent this error, lets do the authentication against Signal as Zabbix user:

Important: The USERNAME (your phone number) must include the country calling code, i.e. the number must start with a “+” sign and you must replace everything between the  < > in the following examples with your own values

runuser -l zabbix -c 'signal-cli -u <NUMBER> register'

Now, check for incoming test messages on this phone number. Within seconds you should receive a 6 digit code in the following format: xxx-xxx

Once you’ve received the text, it’s time to complete the registration:

runuser -l zabbix -c 'signal-cli -u <NUMBER> verify <CODE>'

Since we’re running these commands as a different user, we won’t see the output of them. Let’s just test!

Sending messages from the command line is straight forward:

runuser -l zabbix -c 'signal-cli -u <NUMBER> send -m <MESSAGE> <RECEIVER NUMBER>'

You will see the message id as output. Simply ignore it, since it’s not relevant at this point.

Within seconds:

It works! Great.

So now we’ve got this part covered, time to get the AlertScript set up, before heading to the frontend.

Zabbix AlertScript setup

Ok, so now we’ve got the registration done, we need to make sure Zabbix can utilise it. In order to do so, we use a very old method. Although it would’ve made more sense to use the webhook option, that means I had to built the communication with Signal from scratch.

So AlertScripts it is. In your terminal/SSH session with the Zabbix server open a new file with this command: vi /usr/lib/zabbix/alertscripts/signal.sh and insert the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
signal-cli -u '+19293771253' send -m "$1" $2

 That’s right. just 2 lines. After saving the file, change the owner and set the permissions:

chown zabbix:zabbix /usr/lib/zabbix/alertscripts/signal.sh
chmod 7000 /usr/lib/zabbix/alertscripts/signal.sh

and it’s time to move to our frontend.

Zabbix mediatype configuration

In the frontend, go to Administration -> Mediatypes and create a new mediatype:

Signal Mediatype
Name: Signal
Type: Script
Script name: signal.sh
Script parameters:
    {ALERT.MESSAGE}
    {ALERT.SENDTO}

don’t forget to configure some Message templates as well (second tab in the Mediatype configuration). You can just use the defaults if you click on ‘add’

Zabbix media configuration

Next step. Navigate to Administration -> Users (or just open your own user profile) and create a new media:

new-media
Type: Signal
Sendto: <your number>
When active / severity as per needs

Important: The USERNAME (your phone number) must include the country calling code, i.e. the number must start with a “+” sign

We’re almost there, just some configuration on the actions

Zabbix action configuration

This step is only needed if you are sending notifications right now via a specific mediatype. If you configured the ‘send only to’ option to ‘- All -‘ there is nothing to change, and it will work straight away!

Otherwise, navigate to Configuration -> Actions and find the action you want to change, and in the Operations, Recovery operations and Update operations change the ‘send only to’ option to ‘Signal’

Save your action and it’s time to test – Generate some problem to confirm the implementation actually works.

Wrap up

That’s it. By now you should have a working implementation where Zabbix is sending notifications to Signal. The setup was extremely straight forward and easy to configure. Nevertheless, if you need help getting this going, we (Opensource ICT Solutions) offer consultancy services as well, and are more than happy to help you out!