Reverse engineering the “AADLoginForLinux” in order to tweak proactive user configuration

Introduction

Last summer I posted about taking a look under the hood of the Azure Active Directory integration for a Linux Virtual Machine. For today, let’s take it a bit further… What if we would want to pre-provision a set of UIDs (User IDs) & GIDs (Group IDs) on a range of virtual machines for cross machine consistency. Let’s say, we would want to make use of an NFS drive and use the same UID/GID across all those boxes. Can we do that with the AAD extension? If so, how can we do it? Let’s hope we can… Otherwise it’ll become a rather short blog post.

 

Disclaimer

This post is based upon my personal experience reverse engineering how this extension works. This is by no means a support statement. If you’re a technical nut (like myself) and want to know how you can tweak this at your own doing… Then this post is for you. 😉

What the proxy?!? How to use a proxy with the typical Azure tools…

Introduction

Proxy servers are a very common thing in a lot of enterprises. They are used so that people cannot directly access the internet, and additional management capabilities to the flow (logging, authentication, …). Now that sounds very dandy, though what about those non-browser-based tools? How can we ensure that tools like Azure CLI, Azure Powershell & AzCopy work with our “beloved” enterprise proxy? That’ll be the topic for today!

Test Setup

What will we be doing today? I’ve setup a proxy server in my own lab… Basically deployed a Squid proxy by means of a container.

Next up, I’m going to use the three earlier mentioned tools on both Linux (WSL) & Windows, and see what needs to be done to get things working. In the following screenshots you’ll typically see a “split screen”, where left is a “tcpdump” on the box running the proxy server and right will be the commands on the box running the tools. If you see a lot of mumbo jumbo (network packets) on the left, that’ll mean that the proxy server was being used. Ready?!? Cool, let’s go!