SoylentNews

The Site Upgrade: I am happy to report things went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, I didn't even notice the upgrade was being rolled out! I was on the site at the time, following along on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and didn't even realize the updates they were discussing were not on some support server... these updates were on the main site! (Given that I have a long background in QA/test, that's high praise indeed!) Many thanks to The Mighty Buzzard, NCommander, a surprise visit in IRC by "NC|FromTheFuture", and the rest of the SN staff waiting at the ready to help out should things go sideways.

IRC Server Updates: As mentioned in the earlier article, we are continuing apace with moving to Gentoo for our base OS across all our servers. Before we update the OS, all of the facilities and services underlying SoylentNews need be ported over. To that end, Deucalion has been working diligently to port our IRC servers to run on Gentoo and to do so in a 'multi-server' arrangement. (Behind the scenes, SoylentNews staff primarily coordinate our efforts using IRC. Should something go wrong, we do have fall-backs in place, but they are much less efficient.) We will keep you informed as to our progress.

Folding@home: Our progress has been slower and competition has been greater as we reach the higher ranks. We are currently still on track to be one of the Top 300 F@H Teams in the World by May 28th, 2017 — barely fifteen months since we started! To put this in perspective, there are over 226,270 teams behind us. Please consider helping us in the fight against many debilitating diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. (Original Announcement.)

Site Suggestions: The prior story brought a wealth of comments. Several suggestions for the site look to be both helpful and reasonably feasible to implement.

One proposed change is to provide a means for a user to set an explicit time (or a reference comment) for which comments newer than that would be flagged as *new*.

Several people shared how they had failed to notice their subscription had expired. One suggestion recommended dimming the "Site News" box which shows the site funding status, based on your current subscription status. Dim the box (user preference) when your subscription is up-to-date; display full-intensity when your subscription has expired (or you are an AC). Another suggested we add a banner at the top of the main page to keep folks appraised as to their subscription status (and a link to re-subscribe).

Separately, when viewing an article which appears in a nexus other than "The Main Page", some of the links on the page are particular to just that nexus, and not the site in general. This story, for example, is in the "Meta" nexus.

Staffing: It is my pleasure to introduce a new member of our staff, Xyem, who came on board on May 16th and has already made contributions to our code base! Please join me in welcoming him aboard.

Funding - In a word: WOW! The actual dollar amounts deposited into our accounts remain to be tabulated, but the current estimated tally, (as shown in the Beg-o-meter on the main page in the "Site News" slashbox) tells the tale. As of the time of writing this story, we have reached our base funding goal!

It bears mentioning that the base funding goal only covers our ongoing operations expenses. We have no prudent reserve should something goes sideways. Further, when SoylentNews started, there were setup expenses that were funded out-of-pocket by our founders. That was over three years ago and they have more than graciously allowed us to continue operating so far without insisting on getting repaid. Sadly, this all went down so long ago I don't recall the exact amount, but I believe it was on the order of $5K, total, that is owed two to people. It would thrill me to no end to know that they have been made whole. It is also important, as a Public Benefit Corporation that we be beholden to noone so that we can continue an an entity that provides a forum where the community can have open discussions on topics of interest. The community submits the stories, writes the comments, and moderates the comments. We are here for you.

It bears mentioning, for those who might not be aware, one is able to subscribe multiple times and/or specify a larger amount on the subscription page than the amounts offered. So far this year, NINE people have subscribed at $100.00 and one especially generous person subscribed at $250.00! Oh, and thanks to this upgrade, we have regained support for subscriptions via Bitcoin!

So, we have a stretch goal of $2000.00 which, if we were able to reach it, would allow us to make a significant step towards making the founders whole and allow SoylentNews to stand on its own.

Funding tl;dr: For tax and accounting purposes, all values are based on actual transactions to our bank account. Entirely separate is what we record internally to the site based on user's interactions with the UI, and there are some historical issues which we are addressing. The amounts appearing the "Site News" slashbox are, therefore, close approximations.

[*] We just discovered a few days ago that PayPal charges different fees depending on your local currency. For example, Alice (in America) subscribes to SoylentNews for one year with the suggested amount of $20.00 US using a credit card drawn on a US bank. Günther (from Germany) also chooses to subscribe for one year and at the suggested amount of $20.00 US. He, too uses his credit card, but it is drawn from an account denominated in Euros. You can see where this is headed, right? It appears there are additional fees charged for the conversion to $USD. See PayPal's merchant fees page for the low-down. Pay special attention to the fact that the additional fees are denominated in the user's local currency, not in $USD.

PayPal does inform us of the actual amount requested, the fees charged, and the net amount we receive. (We get similar info from Stripe, but of course, in a different format.) That information is now stored in our site database. But it wasn't always this way. In the very early days, we were mostly just trying to keep the site from crashing because the code on which this site was based had not been supported in several years and was rife with problems. As things stabilized over the ensuing months and years, we could finally bring our attention to other areas of the code. Since accounting was performed strictly by what happened through our bank account, there was little concern about what was happening internal to the site's inherited accounting code. And wouldn't you know it, the historical data had the gross subscription amount, but failed to accurately account for fees. Net amount was set to be the same as the gross amount. We are in the process of rectifying this, but it will take some time. Hence, the amounts shown in the "Site News" slashbox are an approximation.

To summarize, the site upgrade went smoothly, we have one of the top folding@home sites in the world(!), we are still working to improve the site, the community has been amazing in meeting our ongoing funding needs, and we are hoping we can start repaying our founders.

Original Submission

Recap

For those who weren't here for the original article querying the community (linked above), let me recap the situation. At the time that I wrote that article, SN was mostly standardized on Ubuntu 14.04, with a single CentOS 6.7 box lurking in our midst. In the course of testing updates and other projects, the staff and myself felt that Ubuntu (and Debian) had lost a lot of the advantages that had made it a rock solid choice for the last three years of powering SN, combined with the fact that the upgrade process would not have been trivial due to the systemd migration.

Though greatly disliked by all of us, systemd being part of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Long Term Stable) was not a deal breaker. More importantly was the perception that the release lacked stability and we had a serious sense that the upgrade would be problematic. I felt it was time to reopen the scenario to see if we were better off migrating to a different distro, or abandoning Linux entirely. As such the original article was penned to see what the community's feelings on the subject were. The overwhelming consensus was that I was not alone with my feelings on the latest LTS, and many thought FreeBSD would be a good choice for us. Ultimately, we decided to trial Gentoo over FreeBSD for four reasons

• FreeBSD's upgrade system with ports/core isn't anywhere as robust as I would like
• We would lose Linode's backup services, and be fully dependent on our own self-rolled backup system
• Trying to backport security features is ultimately a losing battle
• Gentoo had overwhelming support from the staff

I'll break these first three item by item

FreeBSD Upgrades

FreeBSD is divided into two parts, the core system which has basic utilities, and the ports collection which has all the add on software like Apache and such. In theory, these two components can be updated independently of each other allowing a stable base while migrating to newer software versions with relative ease. Ports can be installed from binaries, or manually compiled to suit one's taste in a relatively automated fashion bringing together the best of a binary and source based distribution. On paper, it looks perfect.

In further research, I've found that port upgrades are fragile at the best of times. Unlike Debian's APT which has strict package dependence and shared library management, port upgrades are very much upgrade and pray and its possible to hose a system in this way. The situation is similar to using EPEL on CentOS, or using Slackware that port upgrades can leave artifacts, and there's often considerable manual intervention to keep things chugging around. This is compounded by the fact that the version of Kerberos we need is in the ports collection due to incompatibility between MIT Kerberos V (which we use) and Heimdal Kerberos which ships out of the box. For those of you familiar with Active Directory, this is roughly on par with the effort required to rebuild AD from scratch along side a pre-existing forest. This meant unless we rebuilt the entire Kerberos domain (a drastic and painful option to say the least) that we could easily break a node because a ports upgrade went sideways.

Furthermore, mixing binary and source ports also have several ways it can go wrong which is problematic. To ease our system maintenance burden, its long been a goal of the admin team to have rehash and its dependencies built and deployed through package management instead of the rather horrorifying script+rsync that we use now. While we could have technically achieved this with Ubuntu by running our own buildd (or using a PPA), the sheer amount of dependencies combined with the pain of rebuilding the world ultimately doomed this to the "would be nice" pile list of ideas.

On top of this, the split architecture of FreeBSD would also mean that upgrades are no longer "one command and done" as they are with Ubuntu and Debian. Instead it becomes a matter of determining what, if any, core system upgrades are available, deploy them, then deploy/rebuild ports as needed. None of this by itself would be deal-breaking, but when compounded with the other reasons it tipped me away from this option.

Linode Backups

For any production website, having backups is the thing you must have, not the thing you wish you had. With the exception of our development box, all our systems are backed up to off-site storage on a machine called oxygen via rsnapshot nightly (and yes, we do test our backups). However, due to the way SoylentNews is situated, there is the possibility that if an attacker ever successfully breached SN, its possible they may be able to gain access to oxygen, and rm -rf / everything.

For this reason alone, we used two separate sets of backups in case of system failure or node compromise. As mentioned many times before, SN is hosted on a number of VPSes by Linode who I continue to highly recommend for anyone's VPS needs. One very useful and handy feature of Linode is that they offer snapshotting and node backups as part of their hosting services for reasonable prices, and critical system boxes are backed up with them as a second-level of defense. Unfortunately, Linode's backup services require that their system understand the underlying filesystem format used by the OS so they can snapshot it easily. As of writing, they do not support FreeBSD's UFS or ZFS. A migration would mean we'd have to sink additional costs in a new backup system to supplement oxygen.

Backporting Security Features is a Losing Battle

I'm going to get flamed for this reason, but recent events have sort of drilled this home for me, both at SoylentNews and as my work as a freelancer. During the last round of security updates, I've been fighting to get several of CentOS's security issues fixed. Red Hat (and CentOS) offer ten year support for their products but in many ways it is the wrong approach to system stability and security. A real-world issue I ran into with CentOS's support is that they ship rather old issues of dovecot, a relatively popular IMAP server.

Now, in theory, as long as security patches are backported, this shouldn't be a problem. In practice however, it means you're essentially tethered to the security features as offered at the time of the release. For example, a good number of our users are likely familiar with the Logjam attack. The mitigation for Logjam is to regenerate DH parameters to larger sizes, and change to a non-common prime. Relatively straightforward, right?

Well, not so much. Dovecot 2.0 (which is what CentOS 6.7 ships with) doesn't allow for setting of custom DH parameters, or even tweaking anything beyond the most basic TLS settings. To a lesser extent, we also had this problem with Postfix (we can't disable client side negotiation). The solution in both cases is to upgrade. That would be great, if we could in-place upgrade CentOS, or reliably upgrade the RPMs without hosing YUM at a later date. In practice, we've been forced into doing a number of arcane hacks to get most of the survey tools to report anything better than a "C" grade, with the situation worsening as time goes on. Before people say "well that's a problem with dovecot", and not CentOS, you can't get OCSP stapling (which is an important security feature to help fix SSL's revocation system) with Apache out of the box. You need to either patch Apache 2.2 in place, or upgrade to 2.4.

This problem also has shown its head on Ubuntu. To Canonical's credit, their security team actually has gone through the work of mainlining newer security features in popular products; Ubuntu 14.04's Apache 2.2 supports OCSP stapling because they patch Apache in their binaries. However this practice only goes so far. Deploying CAA records to SoylentNews in the last round of tweaks was an exercise in frustration because only the most recent versions of BIND knows how to handle the CAA record type. Once again, we're in serious voodoo territory if we tried to upgrade BIND outside of a distro release.

This brings me to my final point: trying to follow industry best-practices falls apart if you can't easily update your stack. Release based distros at best (with Ubuntu) update once every six months, or once every year or so for longer term support from other distros. That's a very long time in the security world. Furthermore, each major upgrade is an event and a large time sink in and of itself. As such I've (grudgingly) come to the conclusion that if you actually want to have real security, you need to update frequently. Furthermore, by having smaller upgrades at a given time instead of them in one large pile, you have a better chance of not getting overwhelmed at those release points.

Why Gentoo

Gentoo ultimately won by being both rolling-release based, and source based. It meant that we could easily upgrade the entire stack (including rehash's special dependencies) as a single emerge world, and then deploy. It also edged out the other options by not forcing systemd on us (and OpenRC is an absolute pleasure to debug and maintain in comparison). We've also discussed the issue at length and have determined how we're going to approach the rather daunting task ahead of us.

The Steps Ahead

The first step, which was already completed, was to migrate our development system over to Gentoo to get an idea of how much pain we're going to be in. This was accomplished by booting the system in rescue mode, moving "/" (i.e. the root of our filesystem) to "/old-rootfs", extracting a stage3, cooking the kernel, and rebooting. audioguy and TheMightyBuzzard worked out the correct set of USE flags for our environment, and I used the serial console to do the actual changeover. Aside from Varnish breaking, the migration was actually relatively smooth if time consuming. Right now, we're still wrestling with varnish, but after kicking MySQL cluster's init scripts and copying configs, it sputtered to life and dev.soylentnews.org popped back onto the internet.

The next steps is to create ebuilds for hesinfo (a Hesiod support tool that Gentoo doesn't ship in their hesiod package), and then to create a custom stage3 with our kernel config and base system with catalyst. We're going to work out the set of packages we need and configure lithium to work as a binary package source for portage. In effect, every package we need will be compiled once on lithium, then published via a private portage repository. Other machines will simply be able to emerge world and download the pre-tested and compiled binaries in one fell swoop keeping the software stack across SoylentNews consistent across the organization. As an added bonus, we can now easily migrate our custom set of compilation scripts to ebuilds and have sane package and dependency tracking for the entire site infrastructure.

Since most of the site infrastructure is fully redundant, we don't expect too much downtime or breakage as we begin migrating other boxes from Ubuntu. As usual, we'll keep the community apprised of our status, as well as if we need to schedule actual site downtime during this period. While some of us might thing we're insane, I will just note for the record we took a similarly drastic step of migrating to a IPv6-only backend two years ago in the name of administration sanity, and serving SN needs best. As always, I'll be reading and commenting below.

~ NCommander

CAA Records

CAA records define which certificate authorities (CAs) are allowed to sign your domains. They essentially act as a CA whitelist, and the most recent revisions of the Certificate Authority/Browser Baseline Requirements mandates that CAs check for CAA records and respect them. In line with this policy, we've white-listed Let's Encrypt and Gandi's CAs to issue certificates for SoylentNews for the time being as these are the two CAs currently in use here.

In a fun bit of fail, this is the second time I've tried to deploy CAA, and fortunately managed to succeed this go around. The problem stems from the fact that many versions of BIND except the very latest don't recognize the "CAA" record type, and cause the zone file to not process correctly if it's present. As we're still using an older version of BIND as our master server, I had to manually create TYPE257 records as seen below:

soylentnews.org. 3586 IN TYPE257 \# 16 0005697373756567616E64692E6E6574
soylentnews.org. 3586 IN TYPE257 \# 22 000569737375656C657473656E63727970742E6F7267
soylentnews.org. 3586 IN TYPE257 \# 35 0005696F6465666D61696C746F3A61646D696E40736F796C656E746E 6577732E6F7267
soylentnews.org. 3586 IN TYPE257 \# 12 0009697373756577696C643B

Both htbridge.com and ssllabs.com show that the CAA records are properly encoded, and show an additional green bar that they're in place.

Postfix LogJam

Almost two years ago, the Logjam attack on the DH key exchange was discovered and publicized. As part of our general hardening of SoylentNews, we regenerated all the DH parameters to prevent logjam from being a viable attack vector. Unfortunately, we overlooked the mail STARTTLS services on mail.soylentnews.org, and only caught it when I was checking various security things. The DH parameter files have been regenerated. Under normal circumstances, Logjam can't be exploited unless the underlying SSL cipher is relatively weak. As part of previous hardening, we kicked SSLv3 and many insecure ciphers to the curb, but unfortunately RSA_CBC_IDEA was accidentally left in place as a valid protocol for STARTTLS transport. Based on my understanding of the logjam attack, 1024-bit ciphers like RSA_CBC_IDEA are still difficult to exploit, and its likely only a nation state could successfully have breached it.

Given only SN staff have mail accounts, and that users are encouraged to change their passwords after creating an account, I think its safe to assume that we're relatively OK as far as data security and integrity go since email in general at best is opportunistically encrypted, and should always be assumed to be monitor-able (via a STRIPTLS attack). That being said, if you haven't changed your password from account creation though, it's likely a good idea to do so now.

We discovered our IMAP server has been serving a self-signed certificate during this check as well. We'll be replacing this with a properly signed certificate within the near future. I have other things on this topic that will be noted in a future post, so keep a look out for that.

Disabling HTTP Methods

A routine check of the site's security headers showed that we were accepting HTTP TRACE and other methods we don't need on production. The configuration for nginx has been modified to put a bullet in this behavior. We're still checking to make sure we got this everywhere, but we should be good on at least the production servers for now. This has bumped the site security rating up to an A on the HTBridge; we're still missing the referral security header, but we need to check to make sure there's no user impact before deploying it.

3DES Put Out To Pasture

As always in the world of encryption, various algorithms eventually become insecure and weakened as cryptanalysis gets more and more advanced. A few months ago, the SWEET32 attack against 3DES was discovered which drastically weakens the security of 3DES via the birthday paradox problem. In practice, SWEET32 requires a second exploit to even be usable as SoylentNews only allowed 3DES connections as a last resort if AES wasn't supported. As every major browser has supported AES for years, we decided to put 3DES out to pasture and have removed it from the allowed list of ciphers for SN.

Not too much to note in this round of administration games, but we're working to make overhaul changes to the stack to allow the potential for HPKP key pinning in the near future, as well as deploying TLSA/DANE support for both HTTPS and SMTP on SN. As part of this process, we'll also be enabling HSTS across subdomains, and reissuing our SSL certificates to enable OCSP Must-Staple. We'll keep you guys updated as we move towards that goal!

~ NCommander