I'm having an issue with ELog 2.9.2 revision 2455 where it crashes consistently with:

*** glibc detected *** /usr/local/sbin/elogd: malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000014977210 ***

The instructions for securing elogd using an SSL proxy are incomplete.
http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#secure
http://midas.psi.ch/elogs/contributions/11

If you follow these instructions, elogd will still listen for and accept non-SSL connections on it's own TCP port bypassing the SSL proxy.

(True, the elogd TCP port number is somewhat secret, so there is some security-by-obscurity here).

To secure the elogd TCP port against connections that bypass the SSL proxy, elogd has to be started
with the "-n localhost" command line options.

To add this option, one has to edit /etc/init.d/elogd. I do not know if this change will be lost when the elog rpm package is updated.

It would be better if this option could have been specified through elogd.conf.

The "-n" command line option is not documented here
http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#config
but is visible if you run "elogd -h".

P.S. Even with "-n localhost", users of the local machine can bypass the SSL proxy.

K.O.

> The instructions for securing elogd using an SSL proxy are incomplete.
> http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#secure
> http://midas.psi.ch/elogs/contributions/11
> 
> If you follow these instructions, elogd will still listen for and accept non-SSL connections on it's own TCP port bypassing the SSL proxy.
> 
> (True, the elogd TCP port number is somewhat secret, so there is some security-by-obscurity here).
> 
> To secure the elogd TCP port against connections that bypass the SSL proxy, elogd has to be started
> with the "-n localhost" command line options.
> 
> To add this option, one has to edit /etc/init.d/elogd. I do not know if this change will be lost when the elog rpm package is updated.
> 
> It would be better if this option could have been specified through elogd.conf.
> 
> The "-n" command line option is not documented here
> http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#config
> but is visible if you run "elogd -h".
> 
> P.S. Even with "-n localhost", users of the local machine can bypass the SSL proxy.
> 
> K.O.

I added the option "interface" to the config file. So you could do

[global]
...
interface = localhost


It was not there originally since most people who care about security use a firewall. The firewall (either locally or one another machine), opens only port 443 for the secure connection and 
not the non-secure one (typically 80 or 8080). This way this has not been an issue in the past. As you guessed correctly the -n option would be overwritten by an rpm package update, so 
that's why I added the "interface" option.

Hi there,

Here's a bit of a special scenario. There's no server-side check the user is logged in upon posting, but it rather seems the server relies on the post data sent from the form.

An example of this can be triggered on a write restricted elog, by hitting on New and logging out in another tab. Then posting, from the first tab, will post as if the user was logged on. Hitting back and posting again also works.

Cheers

Yes the credentials are stored in the form where you enter your text. This has following reason: In a shared environment (several people sitting around a computer) we want to identify who submits an elog entry, but not bother the person to enter his/her password every few minutes. So in our experiment I set the time-out to 15 min, meaning after 15 minutes of inactivity a user gets logged out. If the user accesses ELOG every ten minutes or so, he/she stays logged in for a whole shift, which is what you want. Now the problem is that one starts an elog entry, waits twenty minutes, then wants to submit it, but you are bought back to the login screen and your entry is gone. Therefore I store the credentials (encrypted) in the form, so that the form can even be submitted after 20 minutes. Users at our lab are pretty happy with this solution.

In fact there is no way you can 100% ensure that the logged in user submits an entry without asking for his/her password during the submit. Even if the time span above is only very short, it still can happen that someone starts an entry, leaves the room, and someone else submits it. So people got used to the good practice not to leave any unfinished elog entry open when they go or leave the browser (to another tab for example). If I would implement to password request during the submit, there would be two problems: 1) Users will heavily complain and 2) I have to store the form data temporary (together with some optional attachments) on the server side, start a password query, and only if that succeeds submit the entry. This is somehow complicated to implement since I cannot use the normal elog database. Then I have to care about dangling entries (like if the password was wrong I should delete the temporary data???) and so on.

I plan for the future a kind of "draft" mode, where entries can be stored as "drafts" (like in most email systems). You get an auto-save every few minutes, and can work on the draft before actually submitting it. In that case your password query could be implemented more easily. But implementing the draft mode needs a change of the database system, so I have to find time to do that.

Best regards,

Stefan 

 Hi,

My email configuration is a little complicated as all emails must be relayed to a central server with TLS authentication. 

So far I've been unable to get the ELOG to work with email, after numerous attempts .  I have got exim4 working on this machine but I don't understand how the elog sends emails well enough, to configure it to recognise and use exim4.  Setting localhost/ my domain/ IP  (and variations) under 'smtp host' doesn't work. (cannot connect to server)

The most interesting error I have been able to get is:

"AUTH command used when not advertised"

or

"Unrecognized authentication type"

Any advice?

Not much. ELOG uses plain SMTP to port 25, but does not support TLS internally. From your error messages above it looks like exim4 (which I never used) uses a different authentication scheme than ELOG supports. ELOG dos a "AUTH LOGIN" which is described for example here:

http://www.fehcom.de/qmail/smtpauth.html

Maybe you can try authentication completely off (remove "SMTP username" from elogd.cfg) ?

/Stefan

Hello,

I am currently using ELOG as a daily logbook for work performed for customers.  This is a critical tool and process for 1. Showing customers work history 2. having a searchable knowledge base for future reference.  

Currently, I will create a new log entry, assign the customer using a custom ROPTION in my elog.conf.  This process all works fine, mostly, except I run into the following obstacles (that are all human related.)

1. Many days, there are no log entries to be created for a PARTICULAR customer, and other days there are no long entries to be created for ANY customer.

2. Many days when there is a log entry to be created, it's created by me much later then when the work was performed.  For example, I do a bunch of work Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't have time to enter all my entries until Thursday.  

2A. In this case, I have to manually go back and edit the log entries with text-editor to adjust the times, dates, and such.

2B. In this case, I have log files with a file-name of THURSDAY (042513a.log) for work entries done on Tues and Wed, so I have to go back and rename the log files for consistency sake (mv 042513a.log 042313a.log).  ** I know this is not a requirement of the program, but I like to have the log filenames consistent with the dates contained in them.

All these I admit are human error -- but as a small business owner, I just can't always get to the log entries every day.

To overcome this, the manual solution would: at the beginning of each day, create a new log entry -- regardless of work to be performed and updated later.  This would serve as sort of a place holder.

However, I can't commit myself to always create a log entry for every day either.  Again, human error.

Is what I would like to be able to do is create a new log entry, every single day, automatically.  I would then have a growing log dir of daily log entries (files) for ever day of the week, most blank but some would then contain data that I enter later-- either at the end-of-day or on a day I have downtime and can commit to administrative work.

My thought is I could probably schedule a cron job do to this, but i'm not completely sure how I would go about auto-populating the incremental ID's, dates, etc.  Second, I don't know if there is a way to do this within ELOG itself, or if there is a built-in mechanism that already covers this.

Has anyone run into this, or solved this problem, or can someone kindly point me in the right direction or how I can implement the daily auto creation of logs?

Thank you very much in advance!