mcdruid.co.uk { web: development; }

After a recent OS upgrade I was trying to upload a patch to an issue on drupal.org and encountered a strange error message.

It was very similar to this one on a vanilla Drupal 7 install:

I came across an SSH banner recently that I vehemently disliked, but it reminded me of a similar banner that I'd thought was brilliant.

So here are my best and worst banners...

The worst

This is the banner for an appliance provided by a vendor (that shall remain nameless) in the IT security space.

Technically this is an SSH banner so it's displayed before authentication.

A couple of years ago I was asked to take a look at a Drupal 7 site that was performing poorly where a colleague had spotted a strange function call in an Application Performance Management (APM) system.

The APM traces we were looking at included a __lamda_func under which was a class called Ratel. Under those were some apparent external calls to some dodgy looking domains.

One of my very excellent colleagues had done some digging and found some more details about the domains which confirmed their apparent dodginess.

My colleagues and I in the Drupal Security Team recently became aware of a Zero Day RCE vulnerability in Ghostscript. This was later assigned CVE-2021-3781.

At least one viable Proof of Concept (PoC) was made public not long after the Zero Day which illustrated Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) handling in Imagemagick being used as an attack vector.

This was originally posted on the dev.acquia.com blog.

Easy-to-guess passwords are all too often the means by which intruders gain unauthorised access. It's useful to be able to audit the passwords in use on your site - especially for user accounts with administrative privileges.

This was originally posted on the dev.acquia.com blog.

People tend to choose bad passwords if they are allowed to.

By default Drupal provides some guidance about how to "make your password stronger," but there's no enforcement of any particular password policy out of the box. As usual, there's a module for that. More than one in fact.

Sometimes it's handy to have local DNS entries, for example when you're working on a copy of a site on your local machine - perhaps via a VM, vagrant, lxc or docker. A simple way of doing this is to add entries to your hosts file e.g.:

# local site
127.0.0.1   dev.mcdruid.co.uk

It can be a bit of pain though having to set one - or sometimes more - of these up for every new site you work on.

If you find yourself stuck trying to login to an lxc container because you've forgotten the password, here's a simple fix.

With the container stopped, on the host machine (assuming it's ubuntu - other linux flavours may vary slightly), navigate as root to:

/var/lib/lxc/$container_name/rootfs/etc

Then edit the shadow file (perhaps make a backup first), and remove the hash which corresponds to the user's password, leaving the separating colons in place e.g.:

ubuntu::16372:0:99999:7:::

This is a simple trick which (unless my googlefu simply failed me) I didn't find described anywhere when I had a quick look:

$ drush ev '$file = file_load(21749); var_dump(file_delete($file, TRUE));'
bool(true)

I have an Ultrasport NavRun 500 which is quite a decent GPS watch for running, but has a couple of software limitations - especially from the point of view of a linux (or mac) user. It uses a proprietary tkl file format which doesn't seem to be natively supported by GPSBabel.