Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM

Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by eddd-ddde on Monday August 28, 2023 @01:54PM (#37297950)

I find interesting the last example with find and ldap queries. I'm not too familiar with ldap, but i do use find frequently. Could you expand on the example and what happens and why it's bad?

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by bravetraveler on Monday August 28, 2023 @02:00PM (#37298043)

Certainly! In this case, they were interested in files that were too permissive.

I don't have a good example of the command, but it was basically looking for 'worldly' permissions that were too open. It's important to note the users/groups could be discarded/ignored.

They were using 'find ... -exec ls -ld {} \;', which does an LDAP lookup on each result.

They could have made the process far more efficient with either the native '-ls' argument built into find, or adding '-n' to the exec'd 'ls'

Either would skip the domain. At a certain number of results/files the expense is too high, causing the job to time out

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by eddd-ddde on Monday August 28, 2023 @03:16PM (#37299102)

Conincidentaly I just found a book in the office on understanding and deploying ldap directory services, seems like today is gonna be spent reading!

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by bravetraveler on Monday August 28, 2023 @09:29PM (#37302456)

Best of luck to you! I've been around them for over a decade now, and still can't commit the various services to memory.

I like to call what I do "taking the coward's way out" -- using FreeIPA

My team setup the infrastructure in question and I've been too slow to learn it. FreeIPA is nice for quick/easy deployments.

I'm not sure how well it "scales", but it's great for getting comfortable with the "Domain Language" (sorry, pun)

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by res0nat0r on Monday August 28, 2023 @05:28PM (#37300624)

I think correctly configuring nscd should prevent this, ie it should cache some of these name lookups for a period of time. As long as it is properly setup for LDAP to hook into it.

https://linux.die.net/man/8/nscd

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by bravetraveler on Monday August 28, 2023 @05:46PM (#37300801)

I suspect you're right, I'm not as familiar with our configuration (or the service) as I'd like to be

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Re:Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM by TheNewsIsHere on Thursday August 31, 2023 @04:07AM (#37333937)

Sounds like a spectacular self-DDoS on your LDAP infrastructure if that thing ever got deployed too widely and ran at the same time everywhere.

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