Year: 2010

Wikileaks is, in my humble opinion, a laudable cause. Even if you don’t like Wikileaks because of what they do, there are reasons to defend them at such a time where they’re being attacked by the powers that be.

It is why I decided to also be a mirror of their mass mirroring project for as long as I can hold it. You should too, even if you don’t like them 🙂 At this time there are just over 76 sites, but that’s actually very few mirrors if you’re fighting the almighty owners of ICANN: the USA government.

However their instructions require you to take a huge leap of faith: not only the best way to do this mirror is with rsync via ssh, but also you would have to trust them to manage your Apache installation via a .htaccess file.

This isn’t so good, so here’s how to help them without surrendering everything…

1. Prepare the (ssh) account for user fubarwl (no, not my real user)
   1. I use OpenSSH with fairly restrictive configuration, but still I used a Match User to forbid any kind of forwarding
   2. At ~fubarwl/.ssh/authorized_keys I put no-user-rc at the beginning, just before their ssh-key
   3. I also did a chattr -R +i ~fubarwl
2. Install rssh (useful hints on the setup here)
   1. I don’t use it for anything else, so in it’s config I only enabled rsync support (just uncomment the line with allowrsync)
   2. I created a filesystem on a file with dd if=/dev/zero of=wikileaks.img bs=1M count=4096 and mke2fs wikileaks.img and mount it at a designated path (henceforth CHROOT) with the following options: defaults,loop,nodev,noatime,nodiratime
   3. At this filesystem, I setup the root of rssh’s chroot path.
   4. The chroot helper didn’t do it’s job properly for rsync, so I needed to copy some extra libs into CHROOT/lib: libacl.so.1* , libpopt.so.0* and libattr.so.1*
   5. Also had to copy rsync into CHROOT/usr/bin
   6. Created a CHROOT/home/fubarwl with permissions for that user
   7. Created a CHROOT/etc/passwd with only one entry for that user
3. Now it’s possible to rsync files into that directory, and the remote user has no way (short of a chroot bug) to change his ~foobarwl/.ssh
4. Setup Apache

   <VirtualHost YourSite:80>
           ServerName YourSite
           ServerAdmin YourAdmin
   
           TransferLog logs/http-YourSite-access_log
   
           ErrorLog logs/http-YourSite-error_log
   
           DocumentRoot CHROOT/home/fubarwl
   
           BandWidthModule On
           BandWidth all YourLimit
   
           RewriteEngine On
   
           RewriteRule media/support.html  /support.html [R=301,L]
           RewriteRule media/about.html  /about.html [R=301,L]
   
           <Directory CHROOT/home/fubarwl>
                   AllowOverride None
           </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

5. Tell wikileaks your hostname, user (fubarwl) and path /home/fubarwl