________________________________________
/ Necessity is the plea for every \
| infringement of human freedom. It is |
| the argument of tyrants; it is the |
\ creed of slaves. -- William Pitt, 1783 /
----------------------------------------
\ ,-----._
. \ . ,' `-.__,------._
// \ __\\' `-.
(( _____-'___)) |
`:='/ (alf_/ |
`.=| |=' |
|) O | \
| | /\ \
| / . / \ \
| .-..__ ___ .--' \ |\ \ |
|o o | ``--.___. / `-' \ \\ \ |
`--'' ' .' / / | | | | \
| | / / | | | mmm
| || | | /| |
( .' \ \ || | |
| | \ \ // / /
| | \ \ || |_|
/ | |_/ /_|
/__/
Open a terminal or a command prompt, enter telnet sanyalnet-cloud-vps.freeddns.org and press Enter again quickly. A random fortune cookie message will be returned to you, formatted by cowsay.
Do it again. A different random cowsay formatted fortune cookie will be presented to you.
These are delivered by a little Linux server daemon "cowsayd" I wrote in C for really no good reason in the spirit of fortune and cowsay. Running on my CentOS 7 hobbyist VPS, the publicly accessible daemon serves cookies on the standard TELNET TCP port 23 from the Linux fortune database, which is based on Ken Arnold's BSD implementation.
After a connection is received and accepted, I require some input from the client (just pressing the Enter key suffices) before sending back a cowsay formatted fortune cookie. This is an attempt at gracefully handling the continuous connections from automated bots which are probably looking for a "username:", "login:" or some such prompt and rarely send any inputs. So I hope mostly humans will read what is shown on the screen ("Enter anything to hear the cow speak.") and react correctly to receive a fortune-cowsay message for fun.
The C / C++ program is based off my Brain-damaged http 410 server with the same features as discussed there, but with a couple of important differences:
- This fortune/cowsay server does not need to listen to connections from more than one port, as it servers clients on just one port. Hence, the select() system call and associated family of macros are not needed by the fortune+cowsay server.
- The server works by invoking a shell command that in turn executes fortune and cowsay and returns the output back to the server, which passes it on to the client and closes the connection. The shell command is invoked using popen() which is thread-safe in Linux, and works well for getting a message from fortune/cowsay.
- The use of pthread_attr_setdetachstate with PTHREAD_CREATE_DETACHED is demonstrated. This server spawns a thread to service every connection and the spawned thread exits after servicing a connection. The main thread never waits to join the spawned threads. If we do not create detached threads for this scenario, memory usage will keep increasing every time a thread is spawned since the default attribute of PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE will never release all service thread resources becuase it expecting the main thread to join and ask for the return value.
- Obtaining the client IP address is demonstrated using the inet_ntop() function.
- It logs into the same file as sshd (usually /var/log/secure) in a format designed for abusers to be picked up and banned by fail2ban if installed. fail2ban is configured on my server to also automatically email blocklist.de for more general dissemination of telnet spammers. I also maintain a blocklist file free for public use.
Both fortune and cowsay need be installed and working for this server to deliver the messages. I describe how to install them later in this article (see "How to install Fortune and Cowsay on CentOS 7" below.)
To compile the cowsayd server, we need to include the -lpthread switch on the gcc command line, since it is a multi-threaded server.
Once compiled, copy the binary to the directory /usr/local/bin.
- gcc -o cowsayd -lpthread cowsayd.c
The server is designed to run continuously. Starting it up at boot time is done by a custom init script in the /etc/init.d directory. The server logs to syslog, check /var/log/messages for log output for troubleshooting,
Here is the complete source code of cowsayd.c.
The init script I use to start, restart or stop the cowsayd daemon follows. Copy this to /etc/init.d/ and make it executable using chmod +x /etc/init.d/cowsayd and then chkconfig --add cowsayd to add it to the chkconfig daemon management system. If correctly done, chkconfig --list will show the cowsayd daemon and the runlevels it is enabled for. chkconfig cowsayd on will enable starting up the daemon on reboot.
The /etc/init.d/cowsayd script is below:
HOW TO INSTALL FORTUNE and COWSAY on CentOS 7
_________________________________________/ Did you hear that Captain Crunch, Sugar \
| Bear, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle |
| and Pop were all murdered recently... |
| Police suspect the work of a cereal |
\ killer! /
-----------------------------------------
\ ,-----._
. \ . ,' `-.__,------._
// \ __\\' `-.
(( _____-'___)) |
`:='/ (alf_/ |
`.=| |=' |
|) O | \
| | /\ \
| / . / \ \
| .-..__ ___ .--' \ |\ \ |
|o o | ``--.___. / `-' \ \\ \ |
`--'' ' .' / / | | | | \
| | / / | | | mmm
| || | | /| |
( .' \ \ || | |
| | \ \ // / /
| | \ \ || |_|
/ | |_/ /_|
/__/
The Fortune RPM fortune-mod-1.99.1-17.el7.x86_64.rpm is easily available from the EPEL repository. If you have not added the EPEL repository already follow these steps:
- head over to http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e and download the latest epel-release*.rpm (epel-release-7-8.noarch.rpm at the time of writing).
- Install and enable the EPEL release repository:
- rpm -Uvh epel-release*rpm
With EPEL repository enabled, fortune can be simply installed using:
- yum install fortune-mod
To install cowsay, you need cowsay-3.03-20.el7.noarch.rpm, and optionally cowsay-beefymiracle-1.0-6.fc24.noarch.rpm and cowsay-morecows-1.0-11.4.casjay.el7.x86_64.rpm. The latter two provide various additional cows and other assorted animal art.
With the EPEL repository enabled, cowsay can be easily installed using:
- yum install cowsay
Then yum install the beefymiracle and morecows RPMs - if the links above do not work, use the download link to my google drive at the bottom of this post.
HOW TO ENABLE FORTUNE - COWSAY MESSAGE ON LOGIN
_________________________________________/ We are preparing to think about \
| contemplating preliminary work on plans |
| to develop a schedule for producing the |
| 10th Edition of the Unix Programmers |
\ Manual. -- Andrew Hume /
-----------------------------------------
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`^^^^^'`
To get a mood-lifting fortune-cowsay message every time you log in, create a file /etc/profile.d/custom.sh with the following contents.
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