Category: Linux

LXD OpenVSwitch and VLANs

LXD is a fantastic container virtualization tool that comes by default with Ubuntu. In one of my applications I needed to have many containers each within it’s own VLAN network.
So I used OpenVSwitch in combination with LXD to achieve this.

There is no inherent facility in LXD to provide VLAN tag numbers to the interface. So it is necessary to use a “Fake bridge”. I managed to do it after reading this article by Scott – VLANs with Open vSwitch Fake Bridges

Let’s say the OpenVSwitch bridge is named vm-bridge and we want to add 10 fake bridges ranging from VLAN 20 to 30. Here’s how I did it:

In LXD you can specify the bridge to which it will connect containers to, so I created 10 containers using a similar loop 😀
Further to bind each container to the fake bridge this step is needed:

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Ubuntu 18.04 add e1000e Intel driver to dkms

e1000e is an Intel NIC driver which often needs to be updated on servers so that the NIC can operate trouble free.

Note: I assume you have DKMS and the necessary kernel headers to compile the drivers already installed. If not use apt / apt-get to install the same.

Here’s a quick guide on how to add the Intel e1000e driver to DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) so that it gets installed / uninstalled automatically with future kernel updates and removals.

Download the driver from Intel website https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15817

As of my writing this article, the e1000e version is 3.4.2.1. On download the tarball I get e1000e-3.4.2.1.tar.gz.

Extract it to /usr/src:

Create a dkms.conf in /usr/src/e1000e-3.4.2.1 with following contents:

Next, we have to tell DKMS that such a module has been added and build it for each of the kernels we have on the system:

Finally, reboot the system and the new module should be live.

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Multi-WAN DNS in pfSense

Update: I later figured out there are many other places pfSense restarts Unbound, so this is simply not worth the effort. I reversed the changes & moved Unbound to another box and using just DNS forwarder on pfSense — which is used by the Unbound server.

Having multiple broadband connections at home, I have a pfSense which takes care of load balancing and firewalling. pfSense is pretty good in almost everything, except one thing that was annoying me a lot — That it restarted the DNS Resolver (Unbound) every time either of my WAN connections restarted (one of my ISPs restarts the connection periodically), and the traffic originating from the box itself cannot be load balanced across multiple connections due to a limitation in FreeBSD’s implementation of pf itself – it is unable to set the correct source address.

It’s quite annoying that – even when you use the forwarding mode of Unbound, your DNS still goes through a single WAN interface. Moreover, Unbound doesn’t seem to do parallel querying across DNS servers. So if you have listed multiple DNS servers as forwarders it will try them one by one as they fail. Suppose, the WAN interface from which DNS traffic is outgoing is running at full capacity – a download or somebody is streaming a video, then your browsing becomes slow as well – but the browsing itself may go through another WAN connection. Notably, for having a stable multi-WAN setup in pfSense – you have to use forwarding mode. The gateway switching for the box itself doesn’t work reliably in my experience, due to which I’ve had to face “host not found” error messages even when one of the connections was up.

Continue reading “Multi-WAN DNS in pfSense” →

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Monitoring your internet connections with OpenWRT and a Telegram Bot

For the past 5 years or so, I have been using a single ISP at home and mobile data for backup when it went down. But since last few months, the ISP service became a bit unreliable – this is more related to the rainy season. Mobile data doesn’t give fiber like constant speeds I get on the wire. It’s very annoying to browse at < 10 Mbps on mobile data when you are used to 100 Mbps on the wire.

I decided to get another fiber pipe from a local ISP. One needs to be very unlucky to have both going down at the same time – I hope that never happens. Now the question is how to monitor the two connections: Why do I need monitoring? – so that I can inform the ISP when it goes down, with the fail-over happening automatically thanks to OpenWRT’s mwan3 package, I won’t ever know when I am using which ISP (unless I am checking the public IP address, of course).

Continue reading “Monitoring your internet connections with OpenWRT and a Telegram Bot” →

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Asterisk PJSIP wizard and phone provisioning

So after setting up Asterisk with a working DAHDI configuration for the PBX project, next was configuration for IP phones using PJSIP and provisioning them.

Asterisk has a built-in module called res_phoneprov which handles HTTP based phone provisioning but that didn’t work for me – I just couldn’t have it generate XML configuration for the phones that we had, i.e. Grandstream GXP1625.

The server on which I had configured PBX was multi-homed, as in it was part of multiple networks. But there was no reason to run the service on all interfaces except the VLAN on which we were going to connect the phones.

Continue reading “Asterisk PJSIP wizard and phone provisioning” →

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Asterisk PBX with Reliance PRI Line using Digium TE131F

So I got an opportunity to set up Asterisk PBX with a Reliance Communications E1 line. I have worked with Asterisk PBX, but without PSTN interfacing. This post is about what all stuff I have done to get a Reliance E1 line with Digium TE131F card.

Having explored a lot of other distributions like Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, Sabayon, etc. since I ventured into Linux world and learning the internals of Linux and how different components are stitched together I settled on Ubuntu. It’s my favorite these days because  everything seems to work out of the box… except when it doesn’t, then you have PPAs. 😛 For this project I have installed Ubuntu 16.04 server edition.

Continue reading “Asterisk PBX with Reliance PRI Line using Digium TE131F” →

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ZFS convert stripe to striped-mirror

OpenZFS LogoI’m a huge fan of ZFS because of its performance and other features like snapshots, transparent compression. In fact I had switched to FreeBSD for servers just because it had native ZFS support. But as of Ubuntu 16.04, ZFS is officially supported for non-root partitions.

Now I’m migrating a FreeBSD server to Ubuntu 16.04 with ZFS for data storage – this is happening because I need support for some special hardware which has drivers only for Linux and I do not have a spare server machine of same capacity in terms of memory/disk/processor.

My case –
Here’s the zpool layout on my existing FreeBSD server:

Each of those disks are 1TB in size and the layout here is something known as RAID 10, or striped mirroring. Striped mirroring can be extended to more than four disks but in my case, I have two pairs of disks. Each pair is mirrored and the each such mirror is striped, illustrated as in the image below:

Image taken from techtarget.com, their trademark/copyright holds.

The advantage of this layout is that you get read speed of four disks, and write speed of two disks and a failure tolerance of two disks (but in different mirrors) at the same time.

I have a spare 1TB disk which I can use for preparing a new server using a low-end machine for migration. I remove one of the disks from the live server so the pool there runs in a degraded state. The removed disk is used in the new server. So I create this zpool in Ubuntu:

The pool created here is a plain simple stripe. To convert this into a striped-mirror, the zpool attach command has to be used:

With this, the pool now becomes a striped mirror:

Perfect! 😀

 

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SystemD FastCGI multiple processes

Of late, many mainstream distributions have been switching to SystemD as their init system. This includes Debian (since Debian 8) and Ubuntu (since Ubuntu 15.04). In the traditional SysV init system we used to have stuff like spawn-fcgi or custom scripts for starting a FastCGI process and having the web server connect to it over Unix or TCP sockets. Such kind of usage decreased when PHP FPM was introduced since it’s safe enough to assume that 90% (probably more) of the FastCGI deployments are just launching PHP interpreters using whatever mechanism is there (spawn-fcgi or custom scripts). PHP FPM does this for you now and it’s pretty good at it.

FastCGI is just a protocol, it can be used by any application. For custom applications which do not support starting their own FastCGI processes and listening on a socket we have to use external mechanisms. SystemD has a couple of good features which can help reduce the amount of custom work needed in terms of process monitoring, socket paths, file ownership, etc.

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Group based HTTP basic authentication using Nginx and MySQL with help of Lua

Recently I moved from Apache to Nginx on one of my servers due to increase in traffic. But I was using HTTP Basic authentication with group based authorization on Apache in this manner:

However, there’s no AuthGroupFile  in nginx. But LUA, a programming language is supported in nginx. So here’s how I used LUA and MySQL for achieving this:

Now the real magic comes in the authenticate.lua  script, I’m posting the code below which is available in Github as well:

The group authentication script looks for users and groups in a table called http_users. Since this is a script you can modify the way users are searched for in the database or change the database altogether!
The lua modules required to run this script are: resty.mysql, resty.session, resty.string and cjson. Though the passwords are stored in the database as a SHA224 hash, the comparison of the password is done by the database itself. I did not convert the password to hash before sending it to database, so you may want to review this in case you are using remote database. I’m using local database over Unix socket so it doesn’t matter much.

The table and triggers I have for the same:

The triggers are required to convert the INSERT  or UPDATE statements into SHA224. I’m using MySQL’s SET data type to ensure that the group value is fixed. The same values can be used by Nginx in $user_group  variable before specifying the access_by_lua_file  directive.

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