Administrating the service

Installation (for development/testing)

Create and activate a virtualenv for the installation (here with virtualenvwrapper):

mkvirtualenv nsupdate
workon nsupdate

Clone the repo and cd into:

git clone git@github.com:nsupdate-info/nsupdate.info.git nsupdate
cd nsupdate

Then install the software with requirements to your virtual env:

pip install -r requirements.d/dev.txt
pip install -e .

Configuration

nsupdate.info Service

First, please read the nsupdate/settings/*.py files - they contain a lot of settings you can use to customize your nsupdate.info installation. dev is for a development setup, prod is for a production setup and base has settings that are common for both.

But do not change anything in there, but rather create your own local_settings.py file, import from our settings and override anything you want to change afterwards.:

from nsupdate.settings.dev import *
SECRET_KEY='S3CR3T'

IMPORTANT: you usually need to tell django what settings you want to use.

We won’t document this for every single command in this documentation, but we’ll assume that you either set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable so it points to your settings module or that you give the –settings parameter additionally with all commands that need it:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=local_settings  # this is YOUR settings file
or
django-admin.py --settings=local_settings ...
python manage.py --settings=local_settings ...

Note: if Django can’t import your local_settings module, make sure that your python search path contains the directory that contains local_settings.py:

# we assume here that local_settings.py is in current directory.
# alternatively, you could also give a specific path instead of .
export PYTHONPATH=.:$PYTHONPATH

Initialize the database

To create and initialize the database, use:

python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py migrate

Start the development server

python manage.py runserver

Nameserver

Now as the server is running, you can log in using the database administrator account you created in the syncdb step and use “admin” from the menu to start Django’s admin.

You’ll need to configure at least 1 nameserver / 1 zone to accept dynamic updates, see the “Domains” section in the “user” part of the manual.

Installation (for production)

You usually will use a production webserver like apache or nginx (not Django’s builtin “runserver”).

If you want to use a virtualenv: see the hints for development installation.

If you install from repo code, it is sufficient to use the production requirements file (will install less packages than for development):

pip install -r requirements.d/prod.txt
pip install -e .

Alternatively, you can just install the latest release from pypi:

pip install nsupdate

Configuration

As described for testing/development, but use nsupdate.settings.prod in your local_settings.py file.

Also, you will need to review the settings in the nsupdate.settings.prod module and override everything that is different for your setup into your local_settings.py file.

Note: if you do not setup ALLOWED_HOSTS correctly, your will just see status 400 errors.

WSGI

Module nsupdate.wsgi contains the wsgi “application” object.

Please consult the webserver / django docs how to configure it and how to run django apps (wsgi apps) with the webserver you use.

Django has nice generic documentation about this, see there:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/howto/deployment/

Even if you do not follow or fully read the deployment guide, make sure that you at least read the checklist:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/howto/deployment/checklist/

HTTP Basic Auth

Additionally, you need to make sure that the “authorization” http header needed for HTTP Basic Auth gets through to the nsupdate.info wsgi application. Some web servers may need special settings for this:

WSGIPassAuthorization On  # use this for apache2/mod-wsgi

Static Files

As soon as you switch off DEBUG, Django won’t serve static files any more, thus you need to arrange /static/ file serving by your web server.

We assume here that you configured your web server to serve /static/ URL from /srv/nsupdate.info/htdocs/static/ directory.

Django helps you to put all the static files into that directory, you just need to configure STATIC_ROOT for that:

STATIC_ROOT = '/srv/nsupdate.info/htdocs/static'

And then, run this:

umask 0022  # make sure group and others keep r and x, but not w
python manage.py collectstatic

This will copy all the static files into STATIC_ROOT.

Now, you must set DEBUG=False so it doesn’t leak information from tracebacks to the outside world.

Make sure your static files really work.

PostgreSQL

For production usage and better scalability, you may rather want to use PostgreSQL than SQLite database. Django stores its sessions into the database, so if you get a lot of accesses, sqlite will run into “database is locked” issues.

Here are some notes I made when installing PostgreSQL using Ubuntu 12.04:

First installing and preparing PostgreSQL:

apt-get install postgresql  # I used 9.1
apt-get install libpq-dev  # needed to install psycopg2

# within the virtual env:
pip install psycopg2

sudo -u postgres createdb nsupdate
sudo -u postgres createuser --no-createrole --no-superuser --no-createdb --pwprompt nsupdate
# enter reallysecret password, twice
sudo -u postgres psql -c 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE nsupdate TO nsupdate;'

sudo vim /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf
# by default, postgresql on ubuntu uses only "peer" authentication for unix sockets, add "md5"
# (password hash) authentication, otherwise it might use your login user instead of the configured user:
# local   all             all                                     md5

To make nsupdate.info (Django) use PostgreSQL, put this into YOUR settings:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'nsupdate',  # database name
        'USER': 'nsupdate',
        'PASSWORD': 'reallysecret',
        'HOST': '',  # Empty for localhost through domain sockets or '127.0.0.1' for localhost through TCP.
        'PORT': ''  # Set to empty string for default.
    }
}

Now proceed with syncdb / migrate as shown above.

Customization of the Web UI

You likely will need to customize the Web UI a bit, here is how.

Overriding the builtin templates

If you want to add/modify footers or headers or if you need to add stuff into the HEAD element of the html, you can override some includes we made to support this usecase.

Create an custom template directory (not within the repository / code directory) and add it to your settings, e.g.:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/srv/nsupdate.info/templates', )

Below that template directory, you can override the builtin templates by just using the same relative name, e.g.:

  • includes/base_footer.html (footer of all web UI views)
  • main/includes/home_bottom.html (bottom of main view)
  • (there are more of these, just look into the code’s template dirs)

Best way to start is likely to copy the original file from the template directories located below the code directory into YOUR custom template directory and then slightly modify it.

As the templates might be cached in memory, you may need to restart your wsgi process to have them reloaded.

Note: it is advised that you keep local customizations to a minimum as if you override builtin templates with your customized copies, you will have to keep your copies in sync with future changes we make to the builtin ones.

Custom templates

If you need to add some simple views, just showing some simple templates (like e.g. if you have some footer links that link to these views to show some site- specific content, some legalese, ...), do it like that:

  • have a footer and a custom template directory like described in previous section

  • add files like main/custom/foo.html to that directory:

    {% extends "base.html" %}
    {% load bootstrap %}
    {% block content %}
    This is content rendered from template "foo.html".
    {% endblock %}
    
  • link to the view made from that template like this:

    <a href="{% url 'custom' template='foo.html' %}">
        link to custom foo.html view
    </a>
    

Maintenance

Regular jobs

You need to run some commands regularly, we show how to do that on Linux (or other POSIX OSes) using user cronjobs (use crontab -e to edit it). Make sure it runs as the same user as the nsupdate.info wsgi application:

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=local_settings
# reinitialize the test user:
50 2 * * * django-admin.py testuser
# reset the fault counters:
55 2 * * * django-admin.py faults --flag-abuse=20 --reset-client --notify-user
# clear expired sessions from the database, use your correct settings module:
0  3 * * 1 django-admin.py clearsessions
# clear outdated registrations:
0  3 * * 2 django-admin.py cleanupregistration

Dealing with abuse

In the regular jobs example in the previous section, –flag-abuse=20 means that it’ll set the abuse flag if the client fault counter is over 20 (and, for these cases, it’ll also reset the fault counter back to 0).

–reset-client additionally sets all client fault counters back to 0, so all counts are just “per day”.

–notify-user will send an email notification to the creator of the host if we set the abuse flag for it. The email will contain instructions for the user about how to fix the problem.

So, if you run this daily, it means that more than 20 client faults per day are considered abuse (e.g. if someone runs a stupid cronjob to update the IP instead of a well-behaved update client).

Hosts with the abuse flag set won’t accept updates, but the user will be able to see the abuse flag (as ABUSE on the web interface and also their update client should show it somehow), fix the problem on the client side and reset the abuse flag via the web interface. If the problem was not really fixed, then it will set the abuse flag again the next day.

This procedure should make sure that users of the service run sane and correctly working update clients while being able to fix issues on their own without needing help from service administration.

For really bad cases of intentional or ongoing abuse, there is also a abuse_blocked flag that can only be set or reset manually by service administration (using django admin interface). While abuse_blocked is set, the service won’t accept updates for this host. The user can see the ABUSE-BLOCKED status on the web interface, but can not change the flag.

Database contents

Users who are in the “staff” group (like the one initially created when creating the database) can access the admin interface (see “Admin” in the same menu as “Logout”).

But be careful, the Django admin lets you do all sorts of stuff, admins are allowed to shoot themselves. Only give Django admin access (“staff” group membership) to highly trusted admins of the service.

Software updates / upgrades

Please read the changelog before doing any upgrades, it might contain important hints.

After upgrading the code, you’ll usually need to run:

python manage.py migrate

This fixes your database schema so it is compatible with the new code.

Maybe you also need the next command (we bundle .mo files, but if you run into troubles with them, try this):

python manage.py compilemessages

Of course, you’ll also need to restart the django/wsgi processes, so the new code gets loaded.