(note: all “Stories from the Field” are true, thinly anonymized to protect the -usually- guilty)
Teammate: (goes to a big and important customer)
Customer: I want a software like this and that
Customer: And I want it yesterday
Project Manager: They want it yesterday
Teammate: But I need a bit more time in order to implement some UI checks, so that users don’t make mistakes
Customer: Our users don’t make mistakes, they are permanent employees for so many years, they know their job
Teammate: Hmmmokey
Teammate: (implements software in just a few days)
Teammate: (delivers)
Customer: (installs)
Users: (use the software)
Users: (literally fuck up everything that is possible and some things that are not)
Customer: WHY ARE THE DATA WRONG
Teammate: …but you said…
Customer: you’re not good I want another one
Project Manager: Jim you’re assigned to this
Jim: I will rewrite it from zero and I will implement these UI checks plus many many more
Customer: I WANT IT YESTERDAY
Project Manager: THEY WANT IT YESTERDAY
Jim: (doesn’t give a shit)
Jim: (writes code anywhere, anytime, day, night, while eating, while getting the baby to sleep, while helping his wife with breastfeeding etc etc)
Jim: (delivers)
Customer: Why is this 40MB this is bigger than the previous one I don’t like this
Jim: (loses his shit and starts screaming)
Customer: Jeez why are you so nervous you need to calm down
Customer: (installs)
Users: (use the software)
Users: OH HEY THIS WORKS
Users: IT HAS HELPFUL COLOURS TOO
Users: AND IT HAS EXPLANATIONS FOR EACH FIELD
Users: THIS IS GREAT
Customer: great job Jim, see I told you the first guy was not good
Jim: (silently curses in languages he doesn’t even speak)
Note: to be fair, the “40MB” complaint wasn’t as irrational as it sounds. The software had to be copied to many client computers, some of them in remote parts of the country with slow lines; this was still the days of ISDN. Still, the refactoring was worth it. The added volume was caused by a reporting library (Crystal Reports for .Net) which solved many problems by itself. I now understand the frustration of the customer’s IT as someone had to stay up all night copying. But the pressure from management was so much that at this point the poor guy just said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person. Elias if you ever read this, please accept my apologies 😊
We’ll start from your computer because usually it’s easier to create the account there. Then we’ll continue to your smartphone. But the very first thing you need to do is grab a piece of old fashioned paper.
Step 1: Write a password and a 6 digit code.
Get a paper. Yes the traditional one!
Not necessarily a post-it, but this will do as well
Write 20 or more random numbers and letters, both lower and capital. Something like 6xTzHx41jKQ3yg48FeR9sAb. This will be your password.
You don’t need to remember this.
In the same piece of paper write 6 random numbers. DO NOT USE ANYTHING REAL OR EVEN CLOSE TO IT LIKE YOUR BIRTHDAY OR YOUR POSTCODE OR YOUR PHONE, NOT EVEN CHANGED. This will be your unlock code.
This code will be the one and only thing you need to learn by heart.
Keep this paper safe in your desk at home but NOT in your computer -don’t take a photo of it or write it in a Word file.
Step 2: Create your Bitwarden account
On your computer, go to bitwarden.com and click “Get started”.
Fill in the form, it’s really simple. Use the password you wrote on the paper.
Step 3: Install the browser extension
Still on your computer, open your favourite browser -Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera, whatever- go to the bitwarden extension and install it.
In case you’re using anything else, just google “bitwarden <browser name>” and you’ll find it.
NOTE: As you’ll see, about the only annoying thing with Bitwarden is that if you click outside of it before you save your changes, it closes and loses your input. There’s a solution for this: you can click the “Pop out” button” and then it opens as a separate window. The “Pop up” button is this one:
When the extension is installed, you’ll get the Bitwarden shield icon on the top right corner of your browser. Click it and fill in your email and password.
Once you log in you see your list of passwords. This a called your “vault”. For now, it’s obviously empty.
Click “Settings”, then “Unlock with pin”. Enter the 6 numbers you wrote on the paper and uncheck the “lock with master password…” check box.
Step 4: Store your credentials
If you’ve done so far, great job! Now it’s the time to start storing your passwords, one by one.
Click the shield icon of Bitwarden, then the plus icon on the top right corner.
Start with your email. Enter the name, username and password -the ones you have already. Add also the URL you use to access the site. Then click “Save”.
One by one, add all the sites and other services you have. This will probably take some time; my list has more than 400 entries 😊
Step 5: Try it
So all of this is supposed to help you right? Here’s how it helps you login. Say you want to log in to your email for example.
Click the shield icon of Bitwarden, click “My vault” and click the little arrow of the site. You’ll see that it takes you there.
In your email site, click “Sign in” or “Login” or whatever it has. Right click in the username or password and select Bitwarden > Auto-fill > your site name. Then click Next or Login or whatever it has.
If for whatever reason right click doesn’t find the site, there’s another way that’s not as easy but works every time. From “My vault” click the head icon to copy the username, then paste it in the site, then click the key icon to copy the password, then paste it in the site.
After doing it a few times, you’ll get the hang of it; it will feel very easy very quickly.
Step 6: Change your passwords
Until now you’ve done great, but we’re still using our old passwords. Now it’s the time to make them big and hard 😉
The exact process differs slightly for every site, obviously, but not much. In this example, I’ll use a popular e-shop, Zara UK.
Go to your profile and go to change password:
In the bitwarden “My vault” click the key icon of the site (see above) to copy the existing password. Paste it in the “Current password” box of the web site.
Then go in the bitwarden “My vault” again and click somewhere in the middle of the site name. This will open the entry. Click Edit on the top right corner.
Click the double arrow next to the password and click “yes” in the “overwrite password” question. Slide the length of the password to something over 17, click “regenerate” and then “select”.
Click “Save” to save the new password.
Now go to “My vault” again, click the key icon to copy the new password, go to the web site and paste it twice. Then click “Update password” or whatever button is there.
The first time you do it will be cumbersome, but after the first 2-3 sites, it will feel really easy.
If you’ve reached this far, congratulations 🥳🎉👏 You’ve done the hard work! The last thing to do is install the app on your smartphone so you can use it there too. Let’s go!
Here we get to the fun part -well, if not fun, certainly the easiest and most useful. I’ll give screenshots for iPhone, because that’s what I have, but for Android it’s almost the same.
Step 1: Install the Bitwarden App
Go to your App Store (or Play Store for Android), find Bitwarden and install it.
Step 2: Login
Open the app, click Log In and fill in the email and password (the one you wrote on the paper).
Go to Settings and press “Unlock with PIN code”. Enter the 6 digit number you wrote on the paper and select “No”.
We’re ready to use it!
Step 3: Use it to login to sites
Let’s try to use the browser in our smartphone to login to Zara UK. Navigate to the web site and click Login, or My Account or whatever it has:
Now switch to Bitwarden (you might need to unlock it with your 6 digit code), find the site, press the 3 dots and click Copy Username.
Switch to the browser, tap in the username box and paste the username.
Repeat the same steps for the password and click Log In.
Ta da! We’re in!
That’s all folks
This was what you have to do to get started and work with Bitwarden. It’s not an exhaustive guide, mind you, there are more to it. But it covers the most important part: securely creating, storing and using unique passwords that are impossible to guess.
I hope this works for you. If you have any questions or suggestions, I’ll be more than happy to discuss in the comments!
So the other day I’m troubleshooting a Windows Service that keeps failing on a server, part of a product we’re using in the company. Long story short, that’s what the problem was:
Access to the path 'C:\Program Files\whatever\whatever.log is denied'
I mean, dear programmer, look. You want to write your application’s logs as simple text files. I get it. Text files are simple, reliable (if the file system doesn’t work, you have bigger problems than logging) and they’re shown in virtually every coding tutorial in every programming language. Depending on the case, there might be better ways to do that such as syslog, eventlog and others.
But sure, let’s go with text files. Take the following example somewhere in the middle of a Python tutorial. Look at line 3:
import logging
logging.basicConfig(filename='app.log', filemode='w', format='%(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
logging.warning('This will get logged to a file')
Did you notice? This code writes the log in the same place as the binary. It’s not explicitly mentioned and usually you wouldn’t give it a second thought, right?
To be clear, I don’t want to be hard on the writers of this or any other tutorial; it’s just a basic tutorial, and as such it should highlight the core concept. A professional developer writing an enterprise product should know a bit more!
But the thing is, these examples are everywhere. Take another Java tutorial and look at line 16:
package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import java.util.logging.FileHandler;
import java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter;
import java.io.IOException;
public class SequencedLogFile {
public static final int FILE_SIZE = 1024;
public static void main(String[] args) {
Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(SequencedLogFile.class.getName());
try {
// Create an instance of FileHandler with 5 logging files sequences.
FileHandler handler = new FileHandler("sample.log", FILE_SIZE, 5, true);
handler.setFormatter(new SimpleFormatter());
logger.addHandler(handler);
logger.setUseParentHandlers(false);
} catch (IOException e) {
logger.warning("Failed to initialize logger handler.");
}
logger.info("Logging info message.");
logger.warning("Logging warn message.");
}
}
Or this Dot Net tutorial, which explains how to set up Log4Net (which is great!) and gives this configuration example. Let’s see if you can spot this one. Which line is the problem?
If you answered “7”, congrats, you’re starting to get it. Not using a path -this should be obvious, I know, but it’s easy to forget nevertheless- means writing in the current path, which by default is wherever the binary is.
So this works fine while you’re developing. It works fine when you do your unit tests. It probably works when your testers do the user acceptance testing or whatever QA process you have.
But when your customers install the software, the exe usually goes to C:\Program Files (that’s in Windows; in Linux there are different possibilities as explained here, but let’s say /usr/bin). Normal users do not have permission to write there; an administrator can grant this, but they really really really shouldn’t. You’re not supposed to tamper with the executables! Unless you’re doing some maintenance or an upgrade of course.
So how do you do this correctly?
First of all, it’s a good idea to not reinvent the wheel. There are many, many, MANY libraries to choose from, some of them very mature, like log4net for Dot Net or log4j for Java.
But if you want to keep it very simple, fine. There are basically two ways to do it.
If it’s a UI-based software, that your users will use interactively:
Create a directory under %localappdata% (by default C:\Users\SOMEUSER\AppData\Local) with the brand name of your company and/or product, and write in there.
You can get the localappdata path using the following line in Dot Net:
Take for example the screen-capturing software called Greenshot. These guys do it right:
If it’s a non-interactive software, like a Windows Service:
You can do the same as above, but instead of Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData use Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData, which by default is C:\ProgramData. So your logs will be in C:\ProgramData\MyAmazingCompany\myamazingproduct.log.
Or -not recommended, but not as horrible as writing in Program Files- you can create something custom like C:\MyAmazingCompany\logs. I’ll be honest with you, it’s ugly, but it works.
But in any case, be careful to consider your environment. Is your software supposed to run on Windows, Linux, Mac, everything? A good place to start is here, for Dot Net, but the concept is the same in every language.
And, also important, make your logging configurable! The location should be changeable via a config file. Different systems have different requirements. Someone will need the logs somewhere special for their own reasons.
But whatever you do, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T WRITE WHERE THE BINARY IS. DON’T WRITE IN C:\PROGRAM FILES. IT. DOES. NOT. WORK.
I just published a new version of my open source C# Zoro(*) library in Github and Nuget.org.
Zoro is a data masking/anonymization utility. It fetches data from a database or a CSV file, and creates a CSV file with masked data.
The new version, 1.0.2, has been converted to DotNet Standard 2.0. The command line utility and the test project have been converted to Dotnet Core 5.0.
There is a known issue, not with the code but with the Nuget package. The description claims, as was intended, that the package contains not only the library but also the exe, which can be used as a standalone command line utility. But due to some wrong path in the Github Action, it doesn’t.
I’ll try to get that fixed in the next weeks. Until then, if you need the exe, please checkout the code and build with Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.
(*) YES NOW I KNOW THIS IS MISSPELLED AND THE CORRECT SPELLING IS ZORRO, I DIDN’T WHEN I STARTED THE LIBRARY, SORRY!
This is one I’m going to need every holiday season 🏖️☀️🏊😊
Every time I go for summer holidays I end up, one way or another, with a bunch of photos. You know, actual photos. The paper type. And lovely -in an old-timey way- as they may be, one cannot easily display it on one’s laptop, phone, tablet etc etc.
Sure, there are ways, but…
So what I do is scan them and upload them to the cloud. But then I have another problem: the date of the photos is not correct, and there’s no GPS location info (the so-called metadata). My cloud photo app doesn’t display it on the right “On this day” day. I also cannot find it by searching for e.g. “Cyprus” (where the photo above was taken, a looong time ago) and it won’t get shown when I create a map of where I’ve been.
First world problems, I know, but still. I googled around and found the solution using exiftool and touch (on linux) or powershell (on windows).
As a prerequisite, you need:
For Linux: install exiftool using sudo apt install exiftool
For Windows: download and install exiftool from here.
Next step is that, every time I have a new batch of scanned photos, I have to decide when and where they were taken. For old photos, this takes some guesswork but that’s ok -it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate.
Then I go to Google Maps and find the place they were taken in. Again, I don’t need it to be 100% correct. In the case of the photo above “somewhere in Larnaca” is good enough -that’s where we went for our customary end-of-highschool 5-day trip. After I find a suitable place I click on it and copy the coordinates.
Note that the these coordinates need an addition. You need to specify if you’re on the northern or southern hemisphere (i.e. above or below the equator) and west or east of the prime meridian (i.e. left or right of Greenwich, England).
In my case, Cyprus is on the northern hemisphere (N) and east of the prime meridian (E), so the correct way to write these coordinates is 34.914722N, 33.638000E. You can paste it in Google Maps to verify if it’s correct:
Now that we have our date (say, 15th of April 1993) and place (say, 34.914722N, 33.638000E) we’re ready. The process is quite simple:
Note that the Northern/Southern and Western/Eastern (N and E in this case) are given separately in the GPSLatitudeRef and GPSLongitudeRef parameters respectively. Also note that, for completeness, I’ve added a height (GPSAltitude) of 10 meters.
Obviously you might change the filter (in my case I tagged all the jpg photos in the folder) but otherwise, that’s it. This is what they look like in my cloud photo app (I use amazon photos):
It used to be capitalism vs. communism, free markets vs. central planning
When people talk about ideologies and political beliefs, the mind usually goes to the left/right political divide, commonly referred to as the “political spectrum“. On one side -and I’m obviously oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity- are the proponents of ideas like central planning, social welfare, big government and redistributive taxation. Names like Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Olof Palme and many others come to mind. On the other side one can find ideas like free markets (and their invisible hand), the law of supply and demand, laissez-faire, entrepreneurship and, generally speaking, as small a government as possible. People mention names like Adam Smith, Keynes, Hayek, Milton Friedman and at the extreme end, Ayn Rand.
In addition to the above, if you follow a more holistic school of thought like e.g. the political compass, you would note that there’s more to politics than the way the state handles people’s money. The social behaviours that are or are not allowed are at least as important, if not more. On one hand you have progressive, permissive societies, like Denmark or the Netherlands, and on the other conservative, authoritarian ones like China or Russia.
So clearly both the economic and the societal dimensions of politics are important. People have not only hotly debated the differences between different forms of government, they have literally given their lives for it.
Today, it’s… a bit different.
It’s not that these differences do not exist, or have been ironed out. There are still people that believe that “workers should own the means of production” (a Marxist thesis), others that “a man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress” (an Ayn Rand thesis) and others of course everything in between.
But everyone that takes even a casual look at talk shows, or the social networks, actually any medium that hosts public discourse will note that the lines are increasingly being drawn in a different way: those that base their opinions on reason -or at least try- and those that advance or fall prey to conspiracy theories and other instances of unfounded beliefs.
I’ve first come to this realization some months ago, when I noted that, during discussions in a social network, I kept agreeing with a left-leaning doctor while being more of a free-market person myself (though I’m nowhere near to being an Ayn Rand fan). At the same time, the doctor kept disagreeing with people that belonged to the same party -or at least were clearly left-leaning. Why? Both of us were defending government policies that, no matter how much you liked or hated the current Greek government, were based on the medical research that was available at the time. The “others” were bashing the actions of the government… because they were followers of a different political party. Whether the actions of the government were right or wrong, it simply didn’t matter. For them, the opposing party will always be wrong.
I’ve since tried to follow this a bit more closely, and by now it’s clear to me. You see distinguished members of the US Republican Party distance themselves or even denounce Donald Trump. You have virologists that present solid, peer reviewed evidence on COVID-19, and others that rely on unscientific gobbledygook, even flat-out schoolboy math errors, just so they can advance that “COVID is mostly harmless” or “it’s no worse than the flu” (which it bloody isn’t).
Are there always two sides of the story?
Look, let’s be honest here: the last man described as “universalist”, an all-knowing polymath, was Henri Poincaré, and he died more than 100 years ago. Since then, all of us have to please our trust somewhere. We have to believe that someone, in certain areas, tells the truth -and build up on that.
But reducing the matter to just “I believe A, you believe B, why is your belief better than mine?” misses a very big point. At the very minimum, there are beliefs that are validated by reality and ones that are not. To take a simple example: many of us regularly use GPS to help us drive through our city. If you believe that earth is flat, it’s… a little strange to be able use the signal from satellites, isn’t it?
Seems legit
So the conclusion I’ve drawn from all this is the following: sometimes I find myself agreeing with people that normally don’t share my political opinions. Conversely, I might disagree with people that do. That’s fine. At the end, we share the most important political thesis of all: there exists an objective reality and the best way to discover it is to use the scientific method. And yes, reality imposes constraints on us, often unpleasant, and until we find a way to work around them, we need to accept them.
Sooo you’re working in an enterprise and have to maintain an internal server. The security audit asks you to ensure all HTTP communications are encrypted, so you need to change to HTTPS. Boy is this SO not obvious. You’d think this should be quite easy by now, but there are A LOT of pitfalls in your way.
If you want the TL;DR version, to skip the explanation and go directly to the instructions, scroll directly to the Mandalorian below. No hard feelings, honest 😊
Mistake #1: Use a self-signed certificate
Many, many, MANY tutorials you’ll find online are written with a developer in mind, leaving the maintainer/admin as an afterthought -if that. So what they care about is having some certificate, any certificate, as long as it works on the developer’s PC.
But what this certificate says is basically “I’m Jim because I say so”.
Do I need to say that it won’t work for other PCs? Yes? Well surprise, it won’t.
Mistake #2: Get a certificate from your PC’s certificate authority
I don’t know how some people don’t understand that this, while being a bit more complex, it’s basically the same as #1. What this certificate says is “I’m Jim because someone else who is also Jim says so”.
Yeah, no, it won’t work.
Mistake #3: Get a certificate from a trusted certificate authority using only a server name (or an alias).
Now we’re getting more serious.
Getting a certificate from a trusted certificate authority (CA for short) is the right thing to do. The certificate you get then says “I’m Jim because someone else who you already trust says so”.
So if you get a certificate that verifies you’re, say, server web-ch-zh.xyz123.com or mysite.xyz123.com is good enough. Right?
Ummm…
IT DEPENDS.
If you run a website (e.g. https://www.xyz123.com) and want your HTTPS URL to work without giving a certificate warning that’s fine. You don’t need to do anything else. That’s why most tutorials that avoid the self-signed certificate mine stop here.
But remember, our scenario is that we’re working for an enterprise (a big company) and we’re maintaining an internal server. What that usually -not always, but a lot of the time- means is that communication to our server happens using different hostnames.
Let me give you my own example:
I run a service called Joint Information Module or JIM for short -that’s a totallyreal service name [1].
Another application uses the REST API of the service using the server name (ch-zh-jim-01) without the domain name (mycompany.local).
The service uses a queuing software that is installed on the same server. We want to use the same certificate for this as well. The JIM service accesses the queues via https://localhost (and a port number).
Now, if the certificate you got says “ch-zh-jim-01.mycompany.local ” and you try to access the server via https://ch-zh-jim-01, https://jim.mycompany.com, https://localhost or https://127.0.0.1, you’ll get a certificate error much like the following:
Also, the REST API won’t work. The caller will throw an exception, e.g. java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException in Java or System.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationException in DotNet. You can avoid this by forcing your code to not care about invalid certificates but this is a) lazy b) bad c) reaaaaaaaaaaly bad, seriously man, don’t do this unless the API you’re connecting to is completely out of your control (e.g. it belongs to a government).
The correct way
So you need a certificate that is trusted and valid for all the names that will be used to communicate with your server. How do you do that? SIMPLEZ!
Generate a CSR (a certificate signing request, which is a small file you send to the CA) with the alternative names (SANs) you need. That’s what I’ll cover here.
Send it to a trusted CA
either the one your own company operates or
a commercial one (which you have to pay), say Digicert.
Get the signed certificate and install it on your software.
Important note: the CA you send the CSR to must support SANs. Not every CA supports this, for their own reasons. Make sure you read their FAQ or ask their helpdesk. Let’s Encrypt, a free and very popular CA, supports them.
Here I’ll show how you can generate a CSR, both in the “Microsoft World” (i.e. on a Windows machine) and in the “Java World” (i.e. on any machine that has Java installed).
A. Using Windows
Note that this is the GUI way to do this. There’s also a command line tool for this, certreq. I won’t cover it here as this post is already quite long, but you can read a nice guide here and Microsoft’s reference here. One thing to note though is that it’s a bit cumbersome to include SANs with this method.
Open C:\windows\System32\certlm.msc (“Local Computer Certificates”).
Expand “Personal” and right click on “Certificates”. Select “All tasks” > “Advanced Operations” > “Create Custom Request”.
In the “Before you begin” page, click Next.
In the “Select Certificate Enrollment Policy” page, click “Proceed without enrollment policy” and then Next.
In the “Custom Request” page, leave the defaults (CNG key / PKCS #10) and click Next.
In the “Certificate Information” page, click on Details, then on Properties.
In the “General” tab:
In the “Friendly Name” field write a short name for your certificate (that has nothing to do with the server). E.g. cert-jim-05-2021.
In the “Description” field, write a description, duh 😊
In the “Subject” tab:
Under “Subject Name” make sure the “Type” is set to “Full DN” and in the Value field paste the following (without the quotes): “CN=ch-zh-jim-01.mycompany.local, OU=IT, O=mycompany, L=Zurich, ST=ZH, C=CH” and click “Add”. Here:
Instead of “ch-zh-jim-01.mycompany.local” enter your full server name, complete with domain name. You can get it by typing ipconfig /all in a command prompt (combine Host Name and Primary Dns Suffix).
Instead of “IT” and “mycompany” enter your department and company name respectively.
Instead of “Zurich”, “ZH” and “CH” enter the city, state (or Kanton or Bundesland or region or whatever) and country respectively.
Under “Alternative Name”:
Change the type to “IP Address (v4)” and in the Value field type “127.0.0.1”. Click “Add”.
Change the type to “DNS” and in the Value field type the following, clicking “Add” every time:
localhost
ch-zh-jim-01 (i.e. the server name without the default domain)
jim.mycompany.com (i.e. the alias that will be normally used)
(add as many names as needed)
Important note: all names you enter there must be resolvable (i.e. there’s a DNS entry for the name) by the CA that will generate your certificate. Otherwise there’s no way they can confirm you’re telling the truth and the request will most likely be rejected.
It should end up looking like this:
In the “Extensions” tab, expand “Extended Key Usage (application policies)”. Select “Server Authentication” and “Client Authentication” and click “Add”.
In the “Private Key” tab, expand “Key Options”.
Set the “Key Size” to 2048 (recommended) or higher.
Check the “Mark private key exportable” check box.
(optional, but HIGHLY recommended) Check the “Strong private key protection” check box. This will make the process ask for a certificate password. Avoid only if your software doesn’t support this (although if it does, you really should question if you should be using it!).
At the end, click OK, then Next. Provide a password (make sure you keep it somewhere safe NOT ON A TEXT FILE ON YOUR DESKTOP, YOU KNOW THAT RIGHT???) and save the CSR file. That’s what you have to send to your CA, according to their instuctions.
B. Using Java
Here the process is sooo much simpler:
Open a command prompt (I’m assuming your Java/bin is in the system path; if not, cd to the bin directory of your Java installation). You should have enough permissions to write to your Java security dir; in Windows, that means that you need an administrative command prompt.
Create the certificate. Type the following, in one line, but given here splitted for clarity. Replace as explained below.
“cert-jim-05-2021”, both in the filename and the alias, with your certificate name (which is the short name for your certificate; this has nothing to do with the server itself).
“ch-zh-jim-01.mycompany.local” with the full DNS name of your server.
“IT” and “mycompany” with your department and company name respectively.
“Zurich”, “ZH” and “CH” with your city, state (or Kanton or Bundesland or region or whatever) and country respectively.
“ch-zh-jim-01” with your server name (without the domain name).
“jim.mycompany.com” with the DNS alias you’re using. You can add as many as needed, e.g. “DNS:jim.mycompany.com,DNS:jim-server.mycompany.com,DNS:jim.mycompany.gr,DNS:jim.mycompany.ch”
Important note: all names you enter there must be resolvable (i.e. there’s a DNS entry for the name) by the CA that will generate your certificate. Otherwise there’s no way they can confirm you’re telling the truth and the request will most likely be rejected.
“changeit” is the default password of the Java certificate store (JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts). It should be replaced by the actual password of the certificate store you’re using. But 99.999% of all java installations never get this changed 😊 so if you don’t know otherwise, leave it as it is.
“MYSUPERSECRETPASSWORD” is a password for the certificate. Make sure you keep it somewhere safe NOT ON A TEXT FILE ON YOUR DESKTOP, YOU KNOW THAT RIGHT???
That’s it. The CSR is saved in the path you specified (in the “-file” option). That’s what you have to send to your CA, according to their instuctions.
A good part of my job has to do with enterprise messaging. When a piece of data -a message- needs to be sent from, say, an invoicing system to an accounting system and then to a customer relationship system and then to the customer portal… it has to navigate treacherous waters.
Avast ye bilge-sucking scurvy dogs! A JSON message from accounting says they hornswaggled 1000 doubloons! Aarrr!!!
So we need to make sure that whatever happens, say if a system is overloaded while receiving the message, the message will not be lost.
A key component in this is message queues (MQ), like RabbitMQ. An MQ plays the middleman; it receives a message from a system and stores it reliably until the next system has confirmed that it picked it up.
My daily duties includes setting up, configuring and maintaining a few RabbitMQ instances. It works great! Honestly, so far -for loads up to a couple of 100s of messages per second- I haven’t even had the need to do any serious tuning.
But one thing that annoys me on Windows is that, after installation, the location of everything except the binaries -configuration, data, logs- is under the profile dir of the user (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\RabbitMQ) that did the installation, even if the service runs as LocalSystem. Not very good, is it?
Therefore I’ve created this script to help me. The easiest way to use it is run it before you install RabbitMQ. Change the directories in this part and run it from an admin powershell:
Then just reboot and run the installation normally; when it starts, RabbitMQ will use the directories you specified.
You can also do it after installation, if you have a running instance and want to move it. In this case do the following (you can find these steps also in the script):
Stop the RabbitMQ service.
From Task Manager, kill the epmd.exe process if present.
Go to the existing base dir (usually C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\RabbitMQ) and move it somewhere else (say, C:\temp).
Run this script (don’t forget to change the paths).
Reboot the machine
Run the “RabbitMQ Service (re)install” (from Start Menu).
Copy the contents of the old log dir to $LogLocation.
Copy the contents of the old db dir to $DbLocation.
Copy the files on the root of the old base dir (e.g. advanced.config, enabled_plugins) to $BaseLocation.
Start the RabbitMQ service.
Here’s the script. Have fun 🙂
#
# Source: DotJim blog (http://dandraka.com)
# Jim Andrakakis, March 2021
#
# What this script does is:
# 1. Creates the directories where the configuration, queue data and logs will be stored.
# 2. Downloads a sample configuration file (it's necessary to have one).
# 3. Sets the necessary environment variables.
# If you're doing this before installation:
# Just run it, reboot and then install RabbitMQ.
# If you're doing this after installation, i.e. if you have a
# running service and want to move its files:
# 1. Stop the RabbitMQ service
# 2. From Task Manager, kill the epmd.exe process if present
# 3. Go to the existing base dir (usually C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\RabbitMQ)
# and move it somewhere else (say, C:\temp).
# 4. Run this script.
# 5. Reboot the machine
# 6. Run the "RabbitMQ Service (re)install" (from Start Menu)
# 7. Copy the contents of the old log dir to $LogLocation.
# 8. Copy the contents of the old db dir to $DbLocation.
# 9. Copy the files on the root of the old base dir (e.g. advanced.config, enabled_plugins)
# to $BaseLocation.
# 10. Start the RabbitMQ service.
# ========== Customize here ==========
$BaseLocation = "C:\mqroot\conf"
$DbLocation = "C:\mqroot\db"
$LogLocation = "C:\mqroot\log"
# ====================================
$exampleConfUrl = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/master/deps/rabbit/docs/rabbitmq.conf.example"
Clear-Host
$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"
$dirList = @($BaseLocation, $DbLocation, $LogLocation)
foreach($dir in $dirList) {
if (-not (Test-Path -Path $dir)) {
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $dir
}
}
# If this fails (e.g. because there's a firewall) you have to download the file
# from $exampleConfUrl manually and copy it to $BaseLocation\rabbitmq.conf
try {
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $exampleConfUrl -OutFile ([System.IO.Path]::Combine($BaseLocation, "rabbitmq.conf"))
}
catch {
Write-Host "(!) Download of conf file failed. Please download the file manually and copy it to $BaseLocation\rabbitmq.conf"
Write-Host "(!) Url: $exampleConfUrl"
}
&setx /M RABBITMQ_BASE $BaseLocation
&setx /M RABBITMQ_CONFIG_FILE "$BaseLocation\rabbitmq"
&setx /M RABBITMQ_MNESIA_BASE $DbLocation
&setx /M RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE $LogLocation
Write-Host "Finished. Now you can install RabbitMQ."
Software, Greece, Switzerland. And coffee. LOTS of coffee !
Dot Jim 