nt

nt

"Sudo? More like su_dont_!" A member of the Trash Taxi group of commands.

Reducing the amount of "You Only Live Once" (YOLO) actions in your infrastructure is challenging, because sometimes you need to log into a server to run odd commands. How can you enable engineers to safely use a root shell and, in time, ensure that the machine is definitely restored to a known good state?

nt is a wrapper around bash that you can add to your sudo configuration. Before it spawns a root shell, it will send an HTTP request containing the instance's AWS Identity Document to the garbaged server, which marks the host for later termination.

Building, installing, pre-requisites

You'll need to be running in AWS to get the most out of this. It could be used on other providers, but you'd need to figure out the "remediation" action.

You can use go build and drop the output wherever you wish. Then, add it to your sudo configuration. You'll need to drop a configuration file - /etc/nt.json is where it will expect to find it. The file takes two variables, the garbaged endpoint and the preferred shell to spawn.

{
  "endpoint": "https://taxi.tls.zone"
  "shell": "/bin/bash"
}

At this point, you're ready to run sudo nt and get a shell. If garbaged is set up correctly, nt will make a request and the host will be marked for cleanup.

Contributing

Contributions and modifications welcome.