And Yes, I do use a Dvorak keyboard.
Tag Archives: server
OpenSSI
Well there you go, one of my life goal complete, clustering. I got a hold of two Dell 2650 and wanted to build a nice little cluster for dynamips so I can start testing / practising for my CCNP. I decided to go with OpenSSI, and Debian, because that’s all people have been talking about. Took me awhile to find the correct documentation for Debian Lenny, but once I did it was smooth sailing. The doco’s can be found here .
Once it’s installed it works pretty nicely, you set processes load balance using the cryptic command “loadlevel”, when processors start to use more CPU that get moved to CPU’s.
OpenSSI is very smooth to use with automatic setup of PXE booting and etherboot. Installed GNS3 and processes started to move over to the second server. I did have to set the max memory setting in GNS3 to the size of one IOS RAM requirements so it would spawn multiple dynamips hypervisors.
IPv6 on FreeBSD 7.2 (Tunnel Broker / HE)
So I moved from Gentoo (awesome distro, on a crappy kernel) to FreeBSD (awesome distro on an awesome kernel). So far I’m loving it. I’ve started to move away from bloated software as well like Openfire and basically anything else that runs on JAVA (eww).
At first IPv6 (tunnel with HE) seemed hard to setup on FreeBSD, I done little bits, but fell into a few pit holes along the way. When I look back it seems so simple.
First problem I found was that IPFW was blocking IPv6 traffic. Simple solution is to do,
00400 allow ip6 from any to any
The other issues I found was examples were a bit misleading in guides as to rc.conf setup. This is what I ended up with.
ipv6_enable=”YES”
ipv6_gateway_enable=”YES”
ipv6_router_enable=”YES”
ipv6_router=”/usr/sbin/route6d”
gif_interfaces=”gif0″
gifconfig_gif0=”218.214.124.179 66.220.18.42″
ipv6_ifconfig_gif0=”2001:470:c:411::2 2001:470:c:411::1 prefixlen 128″
ipv6_defaultrouter=”2001:470:c:411::1″
ipv6_ifconfig_vlan2=”2001:470:d:411::1/64″
rtadvd_enable=”YES”
218.214.124.179 was the IP address of where my tunnel came in.
66.220.18.42 is the server IPv4 address.
2001:470:c:411::1 is the server IPv6 address.
2001:470:c:411::2 is the client IPv6 address.
vlan2 is the interface I want IPv6 on.
2001:470:d:411::1 is an address from my routed IPv6 /64
Once you have this, reboot and you should have working IPv6 that announces to your LAN. Surprised me that all the configuration can be done in the one file.
For those interested, here is glasshouse.internaluse.net rc.conf
ateway_enable=”YES”
hostname=”glasshouse.internaluse.net”
keymap=”us.iso”
linux_enable=”YES”
sshd_enable=”YES”
firewall_enable=”YES”
firewall_script=”/usr/local/etc/ipfw.rules”
ifconfig_em0=”up”
cloned_interfaces=”vlan2 vlan3″
ifconfig_vlan2=”inet 172.27.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 vlan 2 vlandev em0″
ifconfig_vlan3=”inet 172.27.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 vlan 3 vlandev em0″
ifconfig_vlan2_alias0=”218.214.200.17 netmask 255.255.255.248″
ppp_enable=”YES”
ppp_mode=”ddial”
ppp_profile=”people”
dhcpd_enable=”YES”
dhcpd_ifaces=”vlan2″
named_enable=”YES”
mysql_enable=”YES”
lighttpd_enable=”YES”
inetd_enable=”YES”
jabberd_enable=”YES”
dovecot_enable=”YES”
saslauthd_enable=”YES”
sendmail_enable=”YES”
ntpd_enabled=”YES”
apcupsd_enable=”YES”
jabber_pymsn_enable=”YES”
transmission_enable=”YES”
transmission_download_dir=”/mnt/storage/incoming”
samba_enable=”YES”
enable_quotas=”YES”
check_quotas=”NO”
ircd_ratbox_enable=”YES”
ipv6_enable=”YES”
ipv6_gateway_enable=”YES”
ipv6_router_enable=”YES”
ipv6_router=”/usr/sbin/route6d”
gif_interfaces=”gif0″
gifconfig_gif0=”218.214.124.179 66.220.18.42″
ipv6_ifconfig_gif0=”2001:470:c:411::2 2001:470:c:411::1 prefixlen 128″
ipv6_defaultrouter=”2001:470:c:411::1″
ipv6_ifconfig_vlan2=”2001:470:d:411::1/64″
rtadvd_enable=”YES”
Upside Down Net
Updated my upside down ternet scripts for my wireless guest network. Now it includes upside down text :> The new script works by redirecting all requests to phproxy (poxy) which then turns images upside down and runs a javascript to upside down the text.
Link to download is here.
Please note that this is heavily based off phproxy and a javascript text flipper. Credits are in files included.
Windows 7 iscsi
I haven’t really looked into iscsi much as it looked slow, and some what useless unless you have lots of servers. While I was playing around with making my own iMac, Hamzah suggested I use gPXE to network boot my iMac. Today I started to play with gPXE and chainloading it on top of PXE worked really well. While digging around in documentation Hamzah, and I took interest in booting Windows using gPXE and iscsi or ATA over ethernet. We both decided to go ahead with iscsi, and by following http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/win7.
A few things caught me out, which slowed me down. The first one was iscsi, make sure this is setup correctly. You don’t get any warnings that iscsi is working or not using gPXE and Windows. Make sure you actually point it to a block device and not to a file like I tried to do 
. Simplest method is to create a LVM volume. My ietd.conf looked like this.
Target iqn.2009-02.net.internaluse.salad:iscsiboot
Lun 0 Path=/dev/data/iscsi,Type=fileio
The other problem I ran into was chainloading gPXE on PXE, once gPXE loads from PXE your BIOS or gPXE will no longer look for a DVD or CD drive making it impossible to install Windows 7. Find an old network card and flash the ROM in that. After that it was fairly easy to install, everything just worked.
I was quite amazed at the speed of the Windows 7 considering it was running of 100mbit iscsi.
Lighttpd 1.5 SVN FastCGi
A few weeks back I moved from lighttpd 1.4 to the SVN version so I could blog from flickr. From what I have seen lighttpd 1.5 is looks quite nice.
I did have one problem though. I couldn’t seem to work out why fastcgi wasn’t compiling. Turns out that fastcgi has been completely removed from lighttpd and being replaced with mod_proxy_core.
Once I found this out, setting up fastcgi to work with lighttpd was a breeze. I installed spawn-fcgi on gentoo, and configured respectively. I then added a few lines into my config that looked something like this. It may vary depending on your fastcgi spawner config.
$PHYSICAL["existing-path"] =~ ".php$" {
proxy-core.balancer = "round-robin"
proxy-core.protocol = "fastcgi"
proxy-core.allow-x-sendfile = "enable"
proxy-core.backends = ( "127.0.0.1:1026" )
proxy-core.max-pool-size = 16
proxy-core.rewrite-request = (
"_pathinfo" => ( ".php(/.*)" => "$1" )
)
}
Rebooted lighttpd and everything was working wonderful.
A few sites that helped me out.
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs:ModProxyCore
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebsd-linux-lighttpd-1-5-fastcgi-configuration.html
Permanent Top
Trying to find out which program on your server keeps on memory leaking is hard sometimes. If it uses up all of your memory, including swap then executing commands is extremely difficult. What I’ve always wanted for emergency sake, is a terminal that sits on my server running top and nothing else. Since my server had a memory problem last night I decided I would have a go at setting it up. I wasn’t all too hard.
In Gentoo, I found the file “/etc/inittab” which takes care of spawning all the login shells on the system. All that I had to do was change one of the lines to look like this. (Note that this is for Gentoo and may not work for any other system).
c6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -n -l /usr/bin/top 38400 tty6 linux
Basically, -n is for no login and -l is to make agetty use /usr/bin/top instead of /bin/login for the program. A quick reboot and on Terminal 6 I had top running.
I don’t know how well top will run if there is no memory left, but it might come in handy in the future.
Hard Drive Down
Just getting a quick post in before the end of the month. As you may notice by the picture, a hard drive in my server failed. Luckily this was a backup drive in a LVM which actually wasn’t being used, so there was no data loss. As you can see the damage to the drive is quite large (the most I’ve ever seen in pulling a drive apart). LVM wasn’t too nice to me though. I was quite disappointed that LVM failed to notify me of the drive failure, and/or recognise that there was a problem and mount things in read only, instead LVM continued on it’s merry way, until I found the source of the “clicking” noise in the computer room. Once I worked out which drive it was I had to remove the inode and get LVM to remove it and carry on.
From this, I think there needs to be some improvements for LVM. LVM should have some sort of error detection on drives and send out alert emails. LVM should also do data redundancy. I know LVM isn’t designed to do either, but it seems logical. I want something like a Drobo, but for free running on Linux or FreeBSD. Something where the hard drives can be what ever size they want with redundancy with error reporting. This is just a dream….
I’m also getting into my Uni work, starting two courses, Foundations of Business Computing and Data Communications. Both seem fairly boring so far but I’ll see how it goes.
WordPress
I thought I’d give wordpress a go now since I have a much more stable server to run it on. So far I’m liking the new interface (I know alot of people that previously used wordpress didn’t like it, however I like it compared to the old).
With a bit of tinkering it was pretty simple. A few plugins didn’t play nice, and mod rewrite was a little harder to do on lighttpd than apache, but with the help of another blog I was on my way to a happy start to wordpress.
I’ve used the wordpress blogger import and it has done a wonderful job so far :> Lets see how this goes (I’m still keeping a copy of my blogs in blogger just for history sake)
ADSL 2+ and Valve
So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right?
Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good.
Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I’ve decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it’s pretty damn good.
Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.
Other than that, I’m starting the last week of school, so I’m basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.