Category Archives: Network

Network update

Following the server update,  I thought it was time to update the network.

Historic view of the network:

  1. Earliest network, circa 1998 – 9600 bps ntlworld modem dial-up
  2. First cable modem,  circa 2000, from memory, 1Mbps speed.   As I was working from home, I installed a firewall (3M), switch (10 Mbps), a WiFi access point and Ethernet to a couple of computers.
  3. The speed increased as various upgrades from ntl were provided.  At some point it exceeded 10 Mbps,  at which point, I relied on an ntlworld cable modem also acting as router and WiFi access point.  Time passes…
  4. Circa 2014, Virgin Media hub 2 had endless problems.   Reverted to cable modem sans router/wi-fi, with separate router,  being a Western Digital MyNet 600.  Cisco AP added.  Ethernet to garage and shed.  100 Mbps switches throughout.
  5. Updated server.  Update Virgin media service to 200 Mbps.  Hence the need to update my network infrastructure as the WD router was 100 Mbps only.

So this is the starting point for the new infrastructure:

  • VM modem providing 200 Mbps, not acting as router or access point
  • Single Ethernet cable to garage hosting my sparkling new server
  • Cisco AP, and Western Digital AP re-usable
  • 1 Gbps 48 port switch in the house

I installed pfsense on my server in the garage to handle firewall/router activities.

I bought a netgear 8-port managed switch,  and used the cable to the garage as a trunk to carry the WAN connection on a VLAN.  That means if I do a speed test from the house to Ookla, for example,  the WAN traffic traverses the cable to the garage twice,  once on a VLAN destined for pfsense running as a virtual machine on my server,  and once one the way back to the client device running the speed test (Windows 10 PC in the house).  I suppose this might eventually become a bottleneck, but at the moment it is not.

I also reconfigured the Cisco AP to support VLANs,  and provided additional VLANs from the router to support secure and guest traffic via two SSIDs.  Guest network managed by rules in the pfsense firewall to prevent access to the secure network.

I re-used the WD MyNet by installing OpenWRT v18.  This allows a similar setup to the Cisco AP,  except that its switch doesn’t allow a single port to support both tagged and untagged traffic.

I also set up OpenVPN on pfsense to support remote access to the network.

The final result:
200 Mbp+ observed on Ookla from house PC.
1 Gbps between all wired devices (except MyNet).
Cisco AP and MyNet both supporting two networks for secure and guest access.

 

My wordpress sites were hacked :0(

I serve a couple of wordpress sites.   These were hacked on Sunday (2018-08-12).

The symptoms of the hack were:

  • <head> element of page is dynamically altered to include a call to polonofiex.ga/sim.js
  • this script redirects the browser window to an adware site, and creates a cookie to avoid reentering the adware site for some period of time.
  • polonofiex.ga/sim.js is the result of a call to src.eeduelements.com/get.php.   I surmise the indirection is so that different sites can be used to host the “sim.js” code.
  • The src.eeduelements.com/get.php reference is inserted through a corrupted jQuery.js: cdn.eeduelements.com/jquery.js?ver=1.0.9
  • You can find this in your theme header.php files.

I cleaned one of the sites (the much more complex one) by blowing away the directories,  unpacking a clean wordpress,  overwriting with selected files from a copy of the old tree for media.  Re-installing the plugins.  Installed wordfence to beef up security.  Note, I left the database in place.

I cleaned the simpler site by installing wordfence and running a scan.   This repaired a core file (header.php) infected with the jquery change.  I deleted and re-installed my theme.   Time will tell whether the infection re-appears,  but I’m hoping wordfence will help.

Server Upgrade

One of the things it appears I do from time to time is to upgrade my server infrastructure.

The motivation to do this is in part to replace a noisy and power-hungry server (Dell Poweredge 2950,  which sounds like a cross between a jet engine and a washing machine) with something better.  It is also in part to increase my storage beyond its current 4TB.  And finally in part to play with shiny new toys.

In the past, cost has been a major concern as these projects were essentially done on my pocket money using eBay purchases.  Having more-or-less retired,  but also doing some consultancy on the side,  I decided to route some of  this income into the new server project and not to constrain myself to second-hand hardware.

The hardware of this upgrade is essentially identical to that Brian Moses’ 2017 server build. I used 6 8TB WD red drives,  which are designed for 24/7 operation in servers.   Total cost around £3500.

For software, I started with FreeNas runniing from a usb thumb (if you’ve got tiny thumbs) drive.

The new server supports IPMI.  The manufacturer of the board (SuperMicro) provides an IPMI program that runs on my windows 10 machine.  The killer feature is the kvm connection,  which provides a window showing what’s showing on the host machine VGA adapter, and accepts input.  It also supports virtual storage,  which is how the installation DVD image is connected.

Much later I discovered that all the features supported over IPMI are also available on a browser gui at the BMC IP address,  so IPMI is not strictly needed.   I didn’t know this at the time of the install,  so it changes nothing.

The FreeNas version 11.1 software installed flawlessly and effortlessly allowed me to create nfs and samba shares.  My old NAS was a FreeNas 11.1 virtual machine on my old server.  ZFS send/recv allowed me to  move my major datasets.   The discs of the old VMs were logical volumes managed by Linux lvm on the poweredge.  I created snapshots of the running lvm (lvcreate –snapshot), and copied them to the new server,  where they are zvols by piping the output of dd into ssh running dd to write the device.   Worked flawlessly.

Along the way I replaced my 100Mbps ethernet switch near the server with 1Gbps so that the old and new servers could exchange data at this speed, and did indeed observe transfers going at this speed.   I also discovered that the wiring to the servers (in the garage) from the house was perfectly capable of supporting 1Gbps.   So if I’d done this £25 upgrade years ago,  I could have had 10x throughput to my file server from the house.   Oh well,  at least I discovered this now.

The new hardware is hopelessly over specified when it comes to networking.   It has two 10GB and two 1GB Ethernet ports.   I use just one of these at 1 GB.   I did look at a lower-cost Xeon single board computer, but decided to follow exactly Brian’s configuration, which was known to work.  If I upgrade to 10GB in the future, perhaps to add a compute server, at least this hardware will support it.

The big question  for me was whether FreeNas could support the virtual machines I want to run,  or whether I needed to create a separate hardware host for these.  I hoped the former, because I didn’t want to shell out any more money for a virtual machine host.

FreeNas 11.1 supports virtual machines using bhyve.  Support is rudamentary – for example,  there is no pause, save or restore.   You can only specify a vnc console for a UEFI VM, which is a pain because there is no way to debug a bios booted VM.   This constraint created a problem for me because all my running VMs were bios mbr boots.   Needless to say,  the images ported over didn’t do anything useful.

I followed the instructions by Oded Lazar to move my network infrastrucuture server (Fedora 22, bind, dns, ldap, openssh) to UEFI, and had it running effortlessly.

I then tried to move my freepbx image, and found no obvious way to port this to UEFI.  So I rebuilt a UEFI-booted VM using the latest freepbx 64 bit image.   All kinds of things appeared to be going wrong.  A fresh install showed (on the Freepbx control panel) that it couldn’t talk to the Asterisk server.   I installed three different recent releases,  and they all showed something similar.

I had no confidence in the new freepbx installation.  I don’t know if this was a problem with freepbx itself, or some kind of interaction with the bhyve environment.  A later install of the same software on a virtual machine under QEMU worked fine. Anyhow,  it made the decision for me to ditch FreeNas as a VM host.   So the next question was whether to keep freenas and add a compute server,  or to replace freenas.   Having spent enough on this project,  I decided to replace freenas.

Because the OS is running from a USB flash drive,  it is trivial to pull it and keep it safe.   So I installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS onto a flash drive and used this to host the new machine.

It is easy to find instructions on how to support ZFS.  The man pages are comprehensive, and I’ve a reasonable amount of experience using it.   I don’t need the shiny FreeNas user-interface because once set up,  my configuration of shares is not going to change very much.

I did install zfs-auto-snapshot,  which does exactly what it sounds like.

I installed virt-manager, kvm-qemu and set up bridged networking.  The images copied from the old server ran without a hitch.

Ubuntu was running from the flash.  The next job was to get the server booting and running from zfs.  This took some messing around.   But I eventually have it.  See Phillip Heckel’s description.

Summary of process to get native boot from zfs.
Using gdisk, Repartition disks so that there is a 1M partition of type EF02 (“Bios boot partition”)
Create zfs pool p3
Create p3/root, not mounted.   (p3 is my pool name, you can guess what p1 and p2 were).
Create p3/root/ubuntu,  canmount=yes,  mountpoint=none,  manually mount it at /root.
(this was where I had an issue with various instructions.  It seems that mountpoint none is
required for the initramfs to work.  I didn’t bother to research further.)
create p3/boot mounted at /boot.
copy everything from running system root to /root, excluding dev,sys,proc,boot which are mounted –bind.
Chroot /root
update-initramfs
update-grub
for each disk in the zfs array: grub-install /dev/sd<x> –modules=”zfs part_gpt”   (this modules parameter is probably unnecessary)

That’s it.  If the root file systems gets toasted somehow,  I can boot ubuntu off a flash drive and use zfs tools to roll back to one of the snapshots.