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Today I got somewhat adventureous and decided to try the vger/inetd/nginx trick on alpineLinux, too. Of course, I got reminded quite soon, that alpineLinux is built on musl and busybox rather than glibc and GNU userland. But I do like the fact that I can have a Linux system without python and perl and translations and a whole lot of other geek and automatic things. YMMV.
I'll list the commands below. I'm not sure, if everything is right. Replacing /etc/nginx/nginx.conf wholesale is not elegant --- but this is a "does it work?" experiment.
Install some more packages. This list is probably incomplete:
# as root apk add git clang gcc g++ libstdc++6 libc6-compat libbsd-dev linux-headers
clone the vger git repo and compile the code:
# as user git clone https://tildegit.org/solene/vger.git cd vger make CC=clang
This produces three warnings, the severity of them is unclear to me.
Add a user under which vger shall run (this might be irrelevant after all, possibly changing user is completely ignored):
# as root adduser -S -s /bin/false vger
Create a minimal gemini capsule:
# as root mkdir -p /var/gemini cat <<EOF > /var/gemini/index.gmi # vger on alpineLinux Just to say: yes, I can! ~ew EOF chown -R vger: /var/gemini
Install vger
# as root cp /home/user/vger/vger /usr/local/bin/vger chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/vger mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man8 cp /home/user/vger/vger.8 /usr/local/man/man8/ chmod 0644 /usr/local/man/man8/vger.8
Install and configure inetd to listen on port 11965 and call vger on requests, start inetd:
# as root apk add busybox-extras cat <<EOF >>/etc/inetd.conf 11965 stream tcp nowait vger /usr/local/bin/vger vger -d /var/gemini EOF openrc --service inetd start
At this point one can ask netcat to reqeust the page:
# as user printf "gemini://127.0.0.1/index.gmi\r\n" | nc 127.0.0.1 11965 20 text/gemini; # vger on alpinelinux Just to say: yes, I can! ~ew
Very nice! Inetd/vger do their trick!
Create a cert (no garantees that this is really good, it just happen to work):
# I did this as root mkdir cert cd cert/ openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout key-ceres:1965.rsa -out cert-ceres:1965.pem -days 3655 -nodes -subj "/CN=alpine.standalone" cp cert-ceres\:1965.pem /etc/ssl/ chmod 0644 /etc/ssl/cert-ceres\:1965.pem cp key-ceres\:1965.rsa /etc/ssl/private/ chmod 0640 /etc/ssl/private/key-ceres\:1965.rsa
Configure nginx to accept TLS requests and forward the plain text request to inetd.
apk add nginx nginx-mod-stream
cd /etc/nginx/
cp nginx.conf nginx.conf.dist
cat <<EOF > /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# 2021-10-23 ew
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
include /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/*.conf;
load_module "modules/ngx_stream_module.so";
worker_rlimit_nofile 1024;
events {
worker_connections 5;
}
stream {
log_format basic '$remote_addr $upstream_addr [$time_local] '
'$protocol $status $bytes_sent $bytes_received '
'$session_time';
access_log /var/log/nginx/gemini-access.log basic;
error_log /var/log/nginx/gemini-error.log;
upstream backend {
hash $remote_addr consistent;
server 127.0.0.1:11965;
}
server {
listen 1965 ssl;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/cert-ceres:1965.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/key-ceres:1965.rsa;
proxy_pass backend;
}
}
EOF
openrc --service nginx start
As mentioned, this is not elegant. The default nginx.conf is distributed over several files, and I'm sure the configuration can be fit into this structure. But that is not the point here.
I checked with netstat whether everyone involved is listening. And yes, they are:
alpine:~# netstat -l Active Internet connections (only servers) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:ssh 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:11965 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:1965 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 :::ssh :::* LISTEN Active UNIX domain sockets (only servers) Proto RefCnt Flags Type State I-Node Path unix 2 [ ACC ] SEQPACKET LISTENING 487 /run/udev/control
So, I point a client on my Debian GNU/Linux workstation to the gemini capsule:
gcat gemini://192.168.10.206/index.gmi 20 text/gemini; # vger on alpinelinux Just to say: yes, I can! ~ew
And yes indeed, the text appears as hoped for. Not bad for half an afternoon of fiddling!
There might be dragons!
~ew