December 2019 - Woohoo Services Blog!

The Importance of Sharpening Your Knives

Dull Knives

This Thanksgiving was much like many of the past Thanksgivings. We smoke a turkey and have some family over. Not much deviated except for the fact that when it came time to carve the turkey I had some difficulties. My carving skills and understanding of turkey anatomy are fairly basic so I figured I just chose the wrong knife.

I chose another one, same thing. I repeated a few times and eventually cut it up with a pair of heavy duty kitchen scissors. A bit brute force but it worked!

How Did I Get Here?

My knives over the years had dulled. They actually had never been sharpened. My wife graciously gifted a knife sharpener for Christmas and it was night and day. I couldn’t believe I had let the knives get so bad. They were all practically glorified butter knives until sharpening them. They were not always this way but now they all cut everything like hot butter.

Why are you reading a blog about sharpening your kitchen knives?

While sharpening the knives, I drew the correlation to personal growth, career growth and overall being. So many things in our life take a toll. These are not necessarily bad things but they do cause some normal wear and tear on our personal wellbeing. We give without replenishing ourselves and resharpening our knives(skills). They can become dull over time too.

What Does This Mean For Me, The Reader?

Remember, all things in life take maintenance. Friendships become stale over time when one party is constantly trying to connect but the other does not reciprocate. The vast knowledge you acquired decades earlier can seem like it was another lifetime ago. Many time we are all too busy to even notice this happening. We have a funny way of getting wrapped up in life and following it without much intention. We have kids and they become our life and all we have time for, especially during the younger and more difficult years. It can be easy to just take a back seat to life for a while and let it go where it will.

What Can I do?

Set aside some time. For some people that may be 20 mins a week. Others may need some PTO to reflect or a nice vacation. Be intentional with this but do not let it consume you. Determine how much time you are going to spend on “sharpening your knives” and stick to it. Don’t over or under do it.

For each person, “sharpening your knives” may be a something different. It may be reconnecting with a family member and building that relationship. For others it may be refreshing on technical skills for your career.

This may even involve doing a self inventory of things that are taking away from your goals and having some hard conversations with people or bosses. Many times some personal baggage needs to be let go so that you can grow. Dealing with that could be an article in and of itself.

Final Words

I hope this has helped. This time of year many of us get some downtime and it is good to reflect and set the course for the new year. Let this be a conversation starter with your friends/significant others/coworkers or even drop me a line in a comment!

Remote Workers – Does It Really Work?

Summary

I have been a remote worker for the past few years. It is not my first time but certainly the longest stint I have done. I wanted to share a few success tips as well as provide some insights for those thinking about doing it.

If you are on site full time or 100% work remote/work from home, the grass may always seem greener. With everything, sometimes it is but it isn’t always!

Remote Work Benefits

Some of the benefits of working remotely can be easily apparent for anyone that is wishing to do this. The biggest one is lack of commute which decreases wear and tear on your vehicle. It also decreases wear and tear on your body due to lack of stress from driving in traffic.

It is almost like getting a small pay raise without actually getting one.

Another benefit is potentially less distractions. Can’t get any work done because people keep coming up to your desk or cube? You’ll immediately lose that foot traffic working remote.

You can take useful breaks. Need to step away for a few minutes and do something else for a bit. If you’re working from home you can start a load of laundry or do some dishes. You’re getting the downtime from what you were working on and being productive for the home as well. It just requires strong boundaries set to avoid getting distracted by all the things going on at home.

At the end of the day when you are done with work, there is no 30-60 minute commute to finish out the day. If you work from home you are already there. If you co-work, hopefully it is near your home and its a light commute.

Remote Work Downsides

For some it can be difficult adjusting to less social interactions. Water cooler talk or impromptu meetings that randomly happen out in the hall can be missed. You can find that you are the last to know random information because of this. Sometimes out of sight, out of mind.

Without a need to go into the office, personal grooming and schedules can become a blur. Asking yourself questions like “Do I really need to shower today?”.

People can get distracted by many things at home. From door to door sales people to never ending laundry, there is a plethora of things to distract you from your work tasks.

Its a rare edge case but I actually started having issues with my transmission in my truck because of the extremely low mileage on it. It is an adaptive transmission and it was not being driven enough under enough conditions to learn properly. – Link as evidence for those non believers. – https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2016/SB-10081880-5448.pdf.

Another downside I found is that sometimes my commute is too short. I didn’t have the proper time to decompress between home life to work life and then back to home life. For example if I stop at 5:30PM and the wife and kids come home a few minutes later I find that I’m frantic and still trying to unwind from a busy day. The same is true if its a hectic morning getting the kids off to school and I walk into the co-work space with emails lined up that need responding.

Surviving Remote Work

I personally go to a co-working space. This can help mitigate some of the downsides. The space I go to is fairly economical and many places have plans that start at $99/month depending on your area and needs. It is about 5 miles from my house so the commute isn’t terrible by any means.

In some of the more active ones you can find people in similar industries and chat, network and meet like minded individuals.

It gives you a reason to get up on a schedule, shower, groom and be out and about. I also use my lunch break to use the gym a couple of times a week. I find running errands or actually going out to lunch helps to increase social interactions. Even for those that are anti-social or introverts, daily social interaction is important to help keep the mind sharp! Scientists have actually linked loneliness and Alzheimers – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764000/

Excelling At Remote Work

If you are working remotely you do not just want to survive but you want to make the best of it. Many times when it comes to coworkers that are not remote workers, you can be up against a perception issue. They imagine you are sitting around, doing laundry and watching TV. Particularly if they try to reach you and you are unavailable. One of the best ways to mitigate this can be to be overly responsive via various mediums your organization communicates. Communicate when you’re in for the day, when you take breaks and lunches and when you’re leaving for the day.

Prioritize the mediums they communicate with with. If its phone or IM/slack, make sure to respond immediately if possible even if its to say you’re busy and you’ll respond in a bit. Lean on the over-communication unless asked to dial it back.

Final Words

Working remotely can be a blessing or a curse. It is not always for everyone but hopefully I have shared a few tips to help you survive and excel at it if you find yourself pushed into it or wanting a remote work job.

OpenVPN with Encrypted Private Key – Issue Resolved

Summary

I was working on Azure Client VPN with OpenVPN and in testing I had removed the passphrase on the private key for authentication but wanted to put it back on there and it would not work. Some quick searches did not turn up much other than common complaints of this.

Reason

With certificate based authentication on OpenVPN, the public key and private key are put in the ovpn file. This is not the most secure with an unencrypted private key as anyone can simply obtain the file and connect.

With a passphrase on it, there is less concern over the ovpn being disseminated and the key reused.

Issue

The OpenVPN client logs indicated the following

2019-12-20 12:22:42-0600 [-] OVPN 40_89_167_211_p4967 ERR: ">FATAL:CLIENT_EXCEPTION: connect error: PEM_PASSWORD_FAIL: mbed TLS: error parsing config private key : PK - Private key password can't be empty"
2019-12-20 12:22:42-0600 [MyOMIClient,0,] FROM OMI: u">FATAL:CLIENT_EXCEPTION: connect error: PEM_PASSWORD_FAIL: mbed TLS: error parsing config private key : PK - Private key password can't be empty"
2019-12-20 12:22:42-0600 [HTTPChannel,224,] *** API CALL f=xmlrpc_Poll args=['sess_40_89_167_211_p4967_VuxJ7YkTyUVYXeKV_1', 10] kw={} ret=[{'active': True, 'timestamp': 1576866162, 'type': 'ACTIVE', 'last': None}, {'timestamp': 1576866162, 'type': 'FATAL', 'error': u"CLIENT_EXCEPTION: connect error: PEM_PASSWORD_FAIL: mbed TLS: error parsing config private key : PK - Private key password can't be empty"}]

It seemed like it was just not prompting me to enter the passphrase and using a blank one.

Solution

I came across the following article ( https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn/issues/372 ) which had quite a few tangents on it but most recently someone indicated using OpenVPN Connect 3.1.0 and it worked. I tried that and was surprised, it actually prompts me for the passphrase!

It seems the community version of the OpenVPN GUI client supported this but the OpenVPN Connect lacked the feature until recently. As of the time of this writing 3.1.0 is Beta but seems to work great!

I had tried upgrading from 2.5 to 2.7 without luck. Finally after installing 3.1.0 it worked again.

Azure Client VPN with OpenVPN

Summary

In my article Intro To Azure Active Directory Domain Services we discussed environments with minimal infrastructure. With all of the RDP exploits it is typically best not to expose RDP over the internet. Since Bastion is not yet fully available the next best thing aside from setting up a VPN appliance is to use the Point-to-site functionality of a Virtual Network Gateway.

Prerequisites

The first pre-requisite for client VPN using a Virtual Network Gateway is to actually provision one. For OpenVPN compatibility it does require at least SKU VpnGw1 and will not work with basic.

It will require 2 subnets, one for the inside leg of the gateway and another for the client-side pool.

The Virtual Network Gateway does want an inside subnet dedicated for use to the Virtual Network Gateway and not shared amongst other devices.

Authentication is handled either via radius or certificate based. If you are reading this article for a minimized infrastructure you probably do not have radius servers.

Provisioning

The provisioning process is fairly simple although it can take 30-60 minutes for the Virtual Network Gateway to fully provision before you can use the Point-to-site configuration. There are a few simple questions.

Virtual Network Gateway - Create — Virtual Network Gateway – Create

That’s really it for the initial provisioning.

Configuration

Some basic Point-to-site configurations need to be set.

The next part is the most difficult part of this. A root and at least one child certificate have to be provisioned. Microsoft has some good documentation on it. To do in Powershell, it does require Windows 10 or Server 2016 or higher.

The name is arbritrary but the “Public certificate data” is the area between the “—BEGIN CERTIFICATE—” section and the “—END CERTIFICATE”

The following Microsoft article describes and outlines the process much better than I can do so I will just share it here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vpn-gateway/vpn-gateway-certificates-point-to-site

Client Configuration

Again – Microsoft does a really good job on instructions for configuring the client so I will just share this link – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vpn-gateway/vpn-gateway-howto-openvpn-clients

Final Words

It can be a pain for those of us not familiar with certificates and command line tools like openssl. The idea is that you have a root certificate authority that then issues individual certificates per user or group of users. If that key becomes compromised you can then revoke the individual certificate or untrust the entire certificate authority. I like the idea of creating a CA chain per organization you grant access to.

In this article we walked through creating the resources required and configuring. We did rely heavily upon the Microsoft documentation but it was fairly complete and well shown.

Make sure you distribute your ovpn files with encrypted private keys! – OpenVPN with Encrypted Private Key – Issue Resolved

Intro To Azure Active Directory Domain Services

Summary

Recently I got the pleasure to stand up Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS) for a client. It has some specific use cases and limitations but can be great for your environment.

This article walks you through the background, some of the limitations and also how to provision.

What is Azure Active Directory Domain Services?

This is a natural question. At a high level, let’s talk about the use case for it. In a small cloud environment with a minimal number of VMs, standing up redundant Domain Controllers can chew up a bit of your budget. From there you have to manage and monitor the domain controllers.

AADDS is a managed platform for this. On the back end it appears to be appliances that provide most of the functionality of Active Directory but with some limitations. It also offers a one way sync from Azure Active Directory (AAD) to AADDS. This allows you to use Azure Active Directory credentials to login to VMs.

Use Case

As touched on above, most administrators want a central credential repository for their cloud VMs. If they are used to Active Directory on prem but want to tie this to Azure AD, AADDS makes sense, particularly in small environments where there may not be a full budget to host, manage and maintain full domain controllers with adequate redundancy.

Limitations

There are some notable limitations so if you are looking for the full flexibility of native Domain Controllers, AADDS is not that.

One Way Replication

Replication only occurrs from AAD to AADDS. You can make changes in AADDS via normal Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) or other tools but they do not replicate back to AAD. AAD can however overwrite these changes.

Azure Active Directory does support AD Connect to connect to on prem domain controllers but it is not compatible with AADDS at this time.

No Custom Attributes

It does not support extending the schema or adding extra custom attributes

External Guests

While external guest accounts will replicate into AADDS, their password and hashes are inaccessible so you will not be able to login under these accounts. An AAD account local to tenant AD will have to be provisioned.

Lack of Control

When you create or change AAD attributes, you have no control over the replication interval. The initial sync may take an hour or two. The provisioning of AADDS takes quite a bit of time as well. In practice, on a smaller environment, replication does seem to happen within 5-15 minutes.

Provisioning

The first step is to select this from the Market and click create

On the basics tab, pay particular attention to the DNS Domain name. Best practices for domain naming has changed over the years. These settings cannot be changed after implementing.

Azure AD Domain Services - Basics — *Azure AD Domain Services* – Basics

For reference here is the output of the “Help me choose the DNS name”. Also – here is another Microsoft article on best practices – https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/34981.active-directory-best-practices-for-internal-domain-and-network-names.aspx

On the networking tab it will by default create a new Virtual Network and Subnet. You can choose an existing virtual network which is highly likely. It does however, indicate you should use a not in use subnet for this. I have not found much information on that but it may have to do with the Network Security Group it creates and applies.

Azure AD Domain Services - Networking — *Azure AD Domain Services –* Networking

On the next screen you will elect who can manage this environment. Users in this group will function as the “Domain Admins” you are used to in Active Directory.

Azure AD Domain Services - Administration — *Azure AD Domain Services – Administration*

Next we can choose which objects to synchronize but typically it will be all objects. If you think you may want to scope it though, choose that first as you can go from scoped to all but have to recreate to reverse.

Azure AD Domain Services - Synchronization — *Azure AD Domain Services – Synchronization*

Finally, we review the config but pay note to this. In order for this all to work, your AAD hashes have to be stored in the AADDS.

Azure AD Domain Services - Review & Create — *Azure AD Domain Services – Review & Create*

Final Words

In this article we gave a brief overview of Azure Active Directory Domain Services and some use cases. We also went over some limitations and cases where it would not be a good fit. Finally we walked through the actual deployment.

Parsing CSV Files with Golang

Summary

I love coming across problems that require me to learn something new. I have written a few posts about Go (or Golang) such as Using Recursion on Golang to Solve a Problem and Unit Testing Golang on App Engine. Go is one of my favorite utility languages.

Earlier this year, my wife decided to start her own hair salon and do booth rental (Pretty Hare Salon). We set up square for appointment setting and credit cards. It has nice reporting features but there is literally no forecasting. Forecasting helps us determine pricing and when to increase or decrease marketing/advertisement.

Parameters of the Problem

To work around this lack of forecasting, I found an export feature that exports appointments in csv. Unfortunately it does not list the pricing associated with it. At the time, I implemented something in perl but decided to rewrite in Golang. The application inputs two CSV files (1 – appointments and 2 – pricing) and calculates weekly totals based on that.

Helper Function

Error checking and reporting requirements are fairly minimal for this so I use a helper function that is fairly basic.

func CheckErr(err error) {
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Loading CSVs

In order to load the CSV into a variable, I opted to use os.Open() which takes the file path. I pass these in through command-line arguments using os.Args. os.Open returns a pointer to a file.

args := os.Args

	appointmentsFile := args[1]
	pricesFiles := args[2]

	af, err := os.Open(appointmentsFile)
	CheckErr(err)

	pf, err := os.Open(pricesFiles)
	CheckErr(err)

I then open the files return by these with cvs.NewReader

appointments := csv.NewReader(af)
prices := csv.NewReader(pf)

NewReader() expects an io.Reader but *os.File implements a reader so we are good.

These readers return a 2 dimensional slice with the left most dimension being the line number and second dimension being the field.

For the price records I read it in entirety. It is not very long.

priceRecords, err = prices.ReadAll()
CheckErr(err)

Iterating the CSV Line by Line

The Appointment file is the full history and we do not need all the data in it. It can get very large over time so it is best not to completely load it into memory. We also will have logic to ignore anything older than 2 weeks as this is a forecast and we do not care about historicals.

for {
	appointment, err := appointments.Read()
	if err == io.EOF {
		break
	}
	// Business logic in here
}

The appointment array in this can then be read as a single dimension. Something similar to what is below exists in the for loop previously shown.

if appointment[2] == "accepted" {
	// More business logic here
}

Looking Up Data

The pricing information which we fully loaded into the two dimensional slice can be iterated as follows

for _, price := range priceRecords {
	if price[0] == service {
		return strconv.ParseFloat(price[8][1:], 64)
	}
}

return 0, errors.New("Could not find service - " + service)

The “service” variable is the service we are looking up. In the price slice, the first or 0 position is the actual service name we are looking up and position 8 is the actual price.

The price field (8) has a dollar sign so I just used string slicing to omit the first character which is the dollar sign so I could parse the float like this

price[8][1:]

The pricing file is highly controlled so I have very little error checking here.

Final Words

In this article we discussed opening and iterating through CSV files using two methods. One involves fully loading the file into memory and the other involves iterating line by line. At this point you should have a good idea of which method to use and when.