Django has a `SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER` setting[^1] which controls if
it examines a header, usually provided by upstream proxies, to allow
it to treat requests as "secure" even if the proximal HTTP connection
was not encrypted. This header is usually the `X-Forwarded-Proto`
header, and the Django configuration has large warnings about ensuring
that this setting is not enabled unless `X-Forwarded-Proto` is
explicitly controlled by the proxy, and cannot be supplied by the
end-user.
In the absence of this setting, Django checks the `wsgi.url_scheme`
property of the WSGI environment[^2].
Zulip did not control the value of the `X-Forwarded-Proto` header,
because it did not set the `SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER` setting (though
see below). However, uwsgi has undocumented code which silently
overrides the `wsgi.url_scheme` property based on the
`HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO` property[^3] (and hence the
`X-Forwarded-Proto` header), thus doing the same as enabling the
Django `SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER` setting, but in a way that cannot be
disabled. It also sets `wsgi.url_scheme` to `https` if the
`X-Forwarded-SSL` header is set to `on` or `1`[^4], providing an
alternate route to deceive to Django.
These combine to make Zulip always trust `X-Forwarded-Proto` or
``X-Forwarded-SSL` headers from external sources, and thus able to
trick Django into thinking a request is "secure" when it is not.
However, Zulip is not accessible via unencrypted channels, since it
redirects all `http` requests to `https` at the nginx level; this
mitigates the vulnerability.
Regardless, we harden Zulip against this vulnerability provided by the
undocumented uwsgi feature, by stripping off `X-Forwarded-SSL` headers
before they reach uwsgi, and setting `X-Forwarded-Proto` only if the
request was received directly from a trusted proxy.
Tornado, because it does not use uwsgi, is an entirely separate
codepath. It uses the `proxy_set_header` values from
`puppet/zulip/files/nginx/zulip-include-common/proxy`, which set
`X-Forwarded-Proto` to the scheme that nginx received the request
over. As such, `SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER` was set in Tornado, and only
Tornado; since the header was always set in nginx, this was safe.
However, it was also _incorrect_ in cases where nginx did not do SSL
termination, but an upstream proxy did -- it would mark those requests
as insecure when they were actually secure. We adjust the
`proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto` used to talk to Tornado to
respect the proxy if it is trusted, or the local scheme if not.
[^1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/settings/#secure-proxy-ssl-header
[^2]: https://wsgi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/definitions.html#envvar-wsgi.url_scheme
[^3]: 73efb013e9/core/protocol.c (L558-L561)
[^4]: 73efb013e9/core/protocol.c (L531-L534)
1c76036c61 raised the number of `minfds` in Supervisor from 40k to
1M. If Supervisor cannot guarantee that number of available file
descriptors, it will fail to start; `/etc/security/limits.conf` was
hence adjusted upwards as well. However, on some virtualized
environments, including Proxmox LXC, setting
`/etc/security/limits.conf` may not be enough to raise the
system-level limits. This causes `supervisord` with the larger
`minfds` to fail to start.
The limit of 1000000 was chosen to be arbitrarily high, assuming it
came without cost; it is not expected to ever be reached on any
deployment. 262b19346e already lowered one aspect of that
changeset, upon determining it did come with a cost. Potentially
breaking virtualized deployments during upgrade is another cost of
that change.
Lower the `minfds` it back down to 40k, partially reverting
1c76036c61, but allow adjusting it upwards for extremely large
deployments. We do not expect any except the largest deployments to
ever hit the 40k limit, and a frictionless deployment for the
vanishingly small number of huge deployments is not worth the
potential upgrade hiccups for the much more frequent smaller
deployments.
When upgraded, the `erlang-base` package automatically stops all
services which depend on the Erlang runtime; for Zulip, this is the
`rabbitmq-server` service. This results in an unexpected outage of
Zulip.
Block unattended upgrades of the `erlang-base` package.
a522ad1d9a mistakenly deleted this variable assignment, which made
the `zulip.conf` configuration setting not work -- uwsgi's `lazy_apps`
were not enabled, which are required for rolling restart.
Instead of copying over a mostly-unchanged `postgresql.conf`, we
transition to deploying a `conf.d/zulip.conf` which contains the
only material changes we made to the file, which were previously
appended to the end.
While shipping separate while `postgresql.conf` files for each
supported version is useful if there is large variety in supported
options between versions, there is not no such variation at current,
and the burden of overriding the entire default configuration is that
it must be keep up to date wit the package's version.
Otherwise, this output goes into `/var/spool/mail/postgres`, which is
not terribly helpful. We do not write to `/var/log/zulip` because the
backup runs as the `postgres` user, and `/var/log/zulip` is owned by
zulip and chmod 750.
Since backups may now taken on arbitrary hosts, we need a blackbox
monitor that _some_ backup was produced.
Add a Prometheus exporter which calls `wal-g backup-list` and reports
statistics about the backups.
This could be extended to include `wal-g wal-verify`, but that
requires a connection to the PostgreSQL server.
Taking backups on the database primary adds additional disk load,
which can impact the performance of the application.
Switch to taking backups on replicas, if they exist. Some deployments
may have multiple replicas, and taking backups on all of them is
wasteful and potentially confusing; add a flag to inhibit taking
nightly snapshots on the host.
If the deployment is a single instance of PostgreSQL, with no
replicas, it takes backups as before, modulo the extra flag to allow
skipping taking them.
7c023042cf moved the logrotate configuration to being a templated
file, from a static file, but missed that the static file was still
referenced from `zulip_ops::app_frontend`; it only updated
`zulip::profile::app_frontend`. This caused errors in applying puppet
on any `zulip_ops::app_frontend` host.
Prior to 7c023042cf, the Puppet role was identical between those two
classes; deduplicate the rule by moving the updated template
definition into `zulip::app_frontend_base` which is common to those
two classes and not used in any other classes.
Since logrotate runs in a daily cron, this practically means "daily,
but only if it's larger than 500M." For large installs with large
traffic, this is effectively daily for 10 days; for small installs, it
is an unknown amount of time.
Switch to daily logfiles, defaulting to 14 days to match nginx; this
can be overridden using a zulip.conf setting. This makes it easier to
ensure that access logs are only kept for a bounded period of time.
Following zulip/python-zulip-api/pull/758/, we're no longer using
python-zephyr, and don't need to build it from source. Additionally,
we no longer need to build a forked Zephyr package, since ZLoadSession
and ZDumpSession were merged in
e6a545e759.
To not change the `supervisor.conf` file, which requires a restart of
supervisor (and thus all services running under it, which is extremely
disruptive) we carefully leave the contents unchanged for most
installs, and append a new piece to the file, only for the zmirror
configuration, using `concat`.
We see connection timeouts and other access issues when run exactly on
the hour, either due to load on their servers from similar cron jobs,
or from operational processes of theirs.
Move to on the :17s to avoid these access issues.
Increasing worker_connections has a memory cost, unlike the rest of
the changes in 1c76036c61d8; setting it to 1 million caused nginx to
consume several GB of memory.
Reduce the default down to 10k, and allow deploys to configure it up
if necessary. `worker_rlimit_nofile` is left at 1M, since it has no
impact on memory consumption.
There is no reason that the base node access method should be run
under supervisor, which exists primarily to give access to the `zulip`
user to restart its managed services. This access is unnecessary for
Teleport, and also causes unwanted restarts of Teleport services when
the `supervisor` base configuration changes. Additionally,
supervisor does not support the in-place upgrade process that Teleport
uses, as it replaces its core process with a new one.
Switch to installing a systemd configuration file (as generated by
`teleport install systemd`) for each part of Teleport, customized to
pass a `--config` path. As such, we explicitly disable the `teleport`
service provided by the package.
The supervisor process is shut down by dint of no longer installing
the file, which purges it from the managed directory, and reloads
Supervisor to pick up the removed service.
Zulip already has integrations for server-side Sentry integration;
however, it has historically used the Zulip-specific `blueslip`
library for monitoring browser-side errors. However, the latter sends
errors to email, as well optionally to an internal `#errors` stream.
While this is sufficient for low volumes of users, and useful in that
it does not rely on outside services, at higher volumes it is very
difficult to do any analysis or filtering of the errors. Client-side
errors are exceptionally noisy, with many false positives due to
browser extensions or similar, so determining real real errors from a
stream of un-grouped emails or messages in a stream is quite
difficult.
Add a client-side Javascript sentry integration. To provide useful
backtraces, this requires extending the pre-deploy hooks to upload the
source-maps to Sentry. Additional keys are added to the non-public
API of `page_params` to control the DSN, realm identifier, and sample
rates.
The current threshold of 40k descriptors was set in 2016, chosen to be
"at least 40x our current scale." At present, that only provides a
50% safety margin. Increase to 1 million to provide the same 40x
buffer as previously.
The highest value currently allowed by the kernels in
production (linux 5.3.0) is 1048576. This is set as the hard limit.
The 1 million limit is likely far above what the system can handle for
other reasons (memory, cpu, etc). While this removes a potential
safeguard on overload due to too many connections, due to the longpoll
architecture we would generally prefer to service more connections at
lower quality (due to CPU limitations) rather than randomly reject
additional connections.
Relevant prior commits:
- 836f313e69
- f2f97dd335
- ec23996538
- 8806ec698a
- e4fce10f46
Tim Abbott
Anders Kaseorg
Alex Vandiver