Posts Tagged ‘virtual machines’

Check if server is Physical Bare Metal or a Virtual Machine and its type

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

check-if-linux-operating-system-is-running-on-physical-bare-metal-or-virtual-machine

In modern times the IT employee system administrator / system engineer / security engineer or a developer who has to develop and test code remotely on UNIX hosts, we have to login to multiple of different servers located in separate data centers around the world situated in Hybrid Operating system environments running multitude of different Linux OSes. Often especially for us sysadmins it is important to know whether the remote machine we have SSHed to is physical server (Bare Metal) or a virtual machines running on top of different kind of Hypervisor node OpenXen / Virtualbox / Virtuosso  / VMWare etc.
 

Then the question comes how to determine whether A remote Installed Linux is Physical or Virtual ?
 

1. Using the dmesg kernel log utility


The good old dmesg that is used to examine and control the kernel ring buffer detects plenty of useful information which gives you the info whether a server is Virtual or Bare Metal. It is present and accessible on every Linux server out there, thus using it is the best and simplest way to determine the OS system node type.

To grep whether a machine is Virtual and the Hypervisor type use:

nginx:~# dmesg | grep "Hypervisor detected"
[0.000000] Hypervisor detected: KVM


As you see above OS installed is using the KVM Virtualization technology.

An empty output of this command means the Remote OS is installed on a physical computer.

2. Detecting the OS platform the systemd way


Systemd along with the multiple over-complication of things that nearly all sysadmins (including me hate) so much introduced something useful in the fact of hostnamectl command
that could give you the info about the OS chassis platform.
 

root@pcfreak:~# hostnamectl status
   Static hostname: pcfreak
         Icon name: computer-desktop
           Chassis: desktop
        Machine ID: 02425d67037b8e67cd98bd2800002671
           Boot ID: 34a83b9a79c346168082f7605c2f557c
  Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
            Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64
      Architecture: x86-64
 

Below is output of a VM running on a Oracle Virtualbox HV.

linux:~# hostnamectl status
Static hostname: ubuntuserver
 Icon name: computer-vm
 Chassis: vm
 Machine ID: 2befe86cf8887ca098f509e457554beb
 Boot ID: 8021c02d65dc46b1885afb25fddcf18c
 Virtualization: oracle
 Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
 Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-78-generic
 Architecture: x86-64

3. Detect concrete container virtualization with systemd-detect-virt 


Another Bare Metal or VM identify tool that was introducted some time ago by freedesktop project is systemd-detect-virt (usually command is part of systemd package).
It is useful to detect the exact virtualization on a systemd running OS systemd-detect-virt is capable to detect many type of Virtualization type that are rare like: IBM zvm S390 Z/VM, bochs, bhyve (a FreeBSD hypervisor), Mac OS's parallels, lxc (linux containers), docker containers, podman etc.

The output from the command is either none (if no virtualization is present or the VM Hypervisor Host type):

server:~# systemd-detect-virt
none

quake:~# systemd-detect-virt
oracle

4. Install and use facter to report per node facts

debian:~# apt-cache show facter|grep -i desc -A2
Description-en: collect and display facts about the system
 Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and
 reports per-node facts, which are collected by the Puppet agent and are made
—
Description-md5: 88cdf9a1db3df211de4539a0570abd0a
Homepage: https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter
Tag: devel::lang:ruby, devel::library, implemented-in::ruby,
root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# apt-cache show facter|grep -i desc -A1
Description-en: collect and display facts about the system
 Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and
—
Description-md5: 88cdf9a1db3df211de4539a0570abd0a
Homepage: https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter


– Install facter on Debian / Ubuntu / deb based Linux

# apt install facter –yes


– Install facter on RedHat / CentOS RPM based distros

# yum install epel-release
…

# yum install facter
…


– Install facter on OpenSuSE / SLES

# zypper install facter
…


Once installed on the system to find out whether the remote Operating System is Virtual:

# facter 2> /dev/null | grep virtual
is_virtual => false
virtual => physical


If the machine is a virtual machine you will get some different output like:

# facter 2> /dev/null | grep virtual
is_virtual => true
virtual => kvm


If you're lazy to grep you can use it with argument.

# facter virtual
physical

6. Use lshw and dmidecode (list hardware configuration tool)


If you don't have the permissions to install facter on the system and you can see whether lshw (list hardware command) is not already present on remote host.

# lshw -class system  
storage-host                  
    description: Computer
    width: 64 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.7 vsyscall32

If the system is virtual you'll get an output similar to:

# lshw -class system  
debianserver 
 description: Computer
 product: VirtualBox
 vendor: innotek GmbH
 version: 1.2
 serial: 0
 width: 64 bits
 capabilities: smbios-2.5 dmi-2.5 vsyscall32
 configuration: family=Virtual Machine uuid=78B58916-4074-42E2-860F-7CAF39F5E6F5


Of course as it provides a verbosity of info on Memory / CPU type / Caches / Cores / Motherboard etc. virtualization used or not can be determined also with dmidecode / hwinfo and other tools that detect the system hardware this is described thoroughfully in my  previous article Get hardware system info on Linux.


7. Detect virtualziation using virt-what or imvirt scripts


imvirt is a little script to determine several virtualization it is pretty similar to virt-what the RedHat own script for platform identification. Even though virt-what is developed for RHEL it is available on other distros, Fedoda, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux (AUR) just like is imvirt.

installing both of them is with the usual apt-get / yum or on Arch Linux with yay package manager (yay -S virt-what) …

Once run the output it produces for physical Dell / HPE / Fujitsu-Siemens Bare Metal servers would be just empty string.

# virt-what
#

Or if the system is Virtual Machine, you'll get the type, for example KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) / virtualbox / qemu etc.

#imvirt
Physical

Conclusion


It was explained how to do a simple check whether the server works on a physical hardware or on a virtual Host hypervisor. The most basic and classic way is with dmesg. If no access to dmesg is due to restrictions you can try the other methods for systemd enabled OSes with hostnamectl / systemd-detect-virt. Other means if the tools are installed or you have the permissions to install them is with facter / lshw or with virt-what / imvirt scripts.
There definitely perhaps much more other useful tools to grasp hardware and virtualization information but this basics could be useful enough for shell scripting purposes.
If you know other tools, please share.
 

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Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various | No Comments »

Why du and df reporting different on a filesystem / How to fix inconsistency between used space on FS and disk showing full strangeness

Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

linux-why-du-and-df-shows-different-result-inconsincy-explained-filesystem-full-oddity

If you're a sysadmin on a large server environment such as a couple of hundred of Virtual Machines running Linux OS on either physical host or OpenXen / VmWare hosted guest Virtual Machine, you might end up sometimes at an odd case where some mounted partition mount point reports its file use different when checked with
df cmd than when checked with du command, like for example:
 

root@sqlserver:~# df -hT /var/lib/mysql
Filesystem   Type  Size Used Avail Use% Mounted On
/dev/sdb5      ext4    19G  3,4G    14G  20% /var/lib/mysql

Here the '-T' argument is used to show us the filesystem.

root@sqlserver:~# du -hsc /var/lib/mysql
0K    /var/lib/mysql/
0K    total

1. Simple debug on what might be the root cause for df / du inconsistency reporting

Of course the basic thing to do when in that weird situation is to be totally shocked how this is possible and to investigate a bit what is the biggest first level sub-directories that eat up the space on the mounted location, with du:

# du -hkx –max-depth=1 /var/lib/mysql/|uniq|sort -n
4       /var/lib/mysql/test
8       /var/lib/mysql/ezmlm
8       /var/lib/mysql/micropcfreak
8       /var/lib/mysql/performance_schema
12      /var/lib/mysql/mysqltmp
24      /var/lib/mysql/speedtest
64      /var/lib/mysql/yourls
144     /var/lib/mysql/narf
320     /var/lib/mysql/webchat_plus
424     /var/lib/mysql/goodfaithair
528     /var/lib/mysql/moonman
648     /var/lib/mysql/daniel
852     /var/lib/mysql/lessn
1292    /var/lib/mysql/gallery

The given output is in Kilobytes so it is a little bit hard to read, if you're used to Mbytes instead, do

 # du -hmx –max-depth=1 /var/lib/mysql/|uniq|sort -n|less
…

I've also investigated on the complete /var directory contents sorted by size with:

 # du -akx ./ | sort -n
5152564    ./cache/rsnapshot/hourly.2/localhost
5255788    ./cache/rsnapshot/hourly.2
5287912    ./cache/rsnapshot
7192152    ./cache
…


Even after finding out the bottleneck dirs and trying to clear up a bit, continued facing that inconsistently shown in two commands and if you're likely to be stunned like me and try … to move some files to a different filesystem to free up space or assigned inodes with a hope that shown inconsitency output will be fixed as it might be caused  due to some kernel / FS caching ?? and this will eventually make the mounted FS to refresh …

But unfortunately, if you try it you'll figure out clearing up a couple of Megas or Gigas will make no difference in cmd output.

In my exact case /var/lib/mysql is a separate mounted ext4 filesystem, however same issue was present also on a Network Filesystem (NFS) and thus, my first thought that this is caused by a network failure problem or NFS bug turned to be wrong.

After further short investigation on the inodes on the Filesystem, it was clear enough inodes are available:
 

# df -i /var/lib/mysql
Filesystem       Inodes  IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5      1221600  2562 1219038   1% /var/lib/mysql

So the filled inodes count assumed issue also has been rejected.
P.S. (if you're not well familiar with them read manual, i.e. – man 7 inode).
 

– Remounting the mounted filesystem

To make sure the filesystem shown inconsistency between du and df is not due to some hanging network mount or bug, first logical thing I did is to remount the filesytem showing different in size, in my case this was done with:
 

# mount -o remount,rw -t ext4 /var/lib/mysql

For machines with NFS remote mounted storage locations, used:

# mount -o remount,rw -t nfs /var/www


FS remount did not solved it so I continued to ponder what oddity and of course I thought of a workaround (in case if this issues are caused by kernel bug or OS lib issue) reboot might be the solution, however unfortunately restarting the VMs was not a wanted easy to do solution, thus I continued investigating what is wrong …

Next check of course was to check, what kind of network connections are opened to the affected hosts with:
 

# netstat -tupanl


Did not found anything that might point me to the reported different Megabytes issue, so next step was to check what is the situation with currently opened files by running processes on the weird df / du reported systems with lsof, and boom there I observed oddity such as multiple files

# lsof -nP | grep '(deleted)'

COMMAND   PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE    SIZE NLINK  NODE NAME
mysqld   2588  mysql    4u   REG 253,17      52     0  1495 /var/lib/mysql/tmp/ibY0cXCd (deleted)
mysqld   2588  mysql    5u   REG 253,17    1048     0  1496 /var/lib/mysql/tmp/ibOrELhG (deleted)
mysqld   2588  mysql    6u   REG 253,17       777884290     0  1497 /var/lib/mysql/tmp/ibmDFAW8 (deleted)
mysqld   2588  mysql    7u   REG 253,17       123667875     0 11387 /var/lib/mysql/tmp/ib2CSACB (deleted)
mysqld   2588  mysql   11u   REG 253,17       123852406     0 11388 /var/lib/mysql/tmp/ibQpoZ94 (deleted)
…

Notice that There were plenty of '(deleted)' STATE files shown in memory an overall of 438:

# lsof -nP | grep '(deleted)' |wc -l
438


As I've learned a bit online about the problem, I found it is also possible to find deleted unlinked files only without any greps (to list all deleted files in memory files with lsof args only):

# lsof +L1|less


The SIZE field (fourth column)  shows a number of files that are really hard in size and that are kept in open on filesystem and in memory, totally messing up with the filesystem. In my case this is temp files created by MYSQLD daemon but depending on the server provided service this might be apache's www-data, some custom perl / bash script executed via a cron job, stalled rsync jobs etc.
 

2. Check all the list open files with the mysql / root user as part of the the server filesystem inconsistency debugging with:

– Grep opened files on server by user

# lsof |grep mysql
mysqld    1312                       mysql  cwd       DIR               8,21       4096          2 /var/lib/mysql
mysqld    1312                       mysql  rtd       DIR                8,1       4096          2 /
mysqld    1312                       mysql  txt       REG                8,1   20336792   23805048 /usr/sbin/mysqld
mysqld    1312                       mysql  mem       REG               8,21      24576         20 /var/lib/mysql/tc.log
mysqld    1312                       mysql  DEL       REG               0,16                 29467 /[aio]
mysqld    1312                       mysql  mem       REG                8,1      55792   14886933 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.28.so

# lsof | grep root
COMMAND    PID   TID TASKCMD          USER   FD      TYPE             DEVICE   SIZE/OFF       NODE NAME
systemd      1                        root  cwd       DIR                8,1       4096          2 /
systemd      1                        root  rtd       DIR                8,1       4096          2 /
systemd      1                        root  txt       REG                8,1    1489208   14928891 /lib/systemd/systemd
systemd      1                        root  mem       REG                8,1    1579448   14886924 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm-2.28.so
…

Other command that helped to track the discrepancy between df and du different file usage on FS is:
 

# du -hxa  / | egrep '^[[:digit:]]{1,1}G[[:space:]]*'
 

3. Fixing large files kept in memory filesystem problem


What is the real reason for ending up with this file handlers opened by running backgrounded programs on the Linux OS?
It could be multiple  but most likely it is due to exceeded server / client interactions or breaking up RAM or HDD drive with writing plenty of logs on the FS without ending keeping space occupied or Programming library bugs used by hanged service leaving the FH opened on storage.

What is the solution to file system files left in memory problem?

The best solution is to first fix custom script or hanged service and then if possible to simply restart the server to make the kernel / services reload or if this is not possible just restart the problem creation processes.

Once the process is identified like in my case this was MySQL on systemd enabled newer OS distros, just do:

# systemctl restart mysqld.service


or on older init.d system V ones:

# /etc/init.d/service restart


For custom hanged scripts being listed in ps axuwef you can grep the pid and do a kill -HUP (if the script is written in a good way to recognize -HUP and restart the sub-running process properly – BE EXTRA CAREFUL IF YOU'RE RESTARTING BROKEN SCRIPTS as this might cause your running service disruptions …).

# pgrep -l script.sh
7977 script.sh


# kill -HUP PID

Now finally this should either mitigate or at best case completely solve the reported disagreement between df and du, after which the calculated / reported disk space should be back to normal and show up approximately the same (note that size changes a bit as mysql service is writting data) constantly extending the size between the two checks.

# df -hk /var/lib/mysql; du -hskc /var/lib/mysql
Filesystem       Inodes  IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5        19097172 3472744 14631296  20% /var/lib/mysql
3427772    /var/lib/mysql
3427772    total

What we learned?

What I've explained in this article is why and how it comes that 'zoombie' files reside on a filesystem
appearing to be eating disk space on a mounted local or network partition, giving strange inconsistent
reports, leading to system service disruptions and impossibility to have correctly shown information on used
disk space on mounted drive.

I went through with some standard logic on debugging service / filesystem / inode issues up explainat, that led me to the finding about deleted files being kept in filesystem and producing the filesystem strange sized / showing not correct / filled even after it was extended with tune2fs and was supposed to have extra 50GBs.

Finally it was explained shortly how to HUP / restart hanging script / service to fix it.

Some few good readings that helped to fix the issue:

What to do when du and df report different usage is here
df in linux not showing correct free space after file removal is here
Why do “df” and “du” commands show different disk usage?
 

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Posted in Cloud services, Curious Facts, Linux | No Comments »

What is Vertical scaling and Horizontal scaling – Vertical and Horizontal hardware / services scaling

Friday, June 13th, 2014

horizontal-vs-vertical-scaling-vertical-and-horizontal-scaling-explained-diagram

If you're coming from a small or middle-sized company to a corporations like HP or IBM probably you will not a clear defined idea on the 2 types (2 dimensions) of system Scaling (Horizontal and Vertical scaling). I know from my pesronal experience that in small companies – all needed is to guarantee a model for as less probels as possible without too much of defining things and with much less planning. Other thing is being a sysadmin in middle-sized companies, often doesn't give you opportunity to discuss issues to solve with other admins but you have to deal as "one man (machine) for all" and thus often to solve office server and services tasks you do some custom solution.
hence for novice system administrators probably it will be probably unclear what is the difference between Horizontal and Vertical Scaling?

horizontal-vertical-scaling-scale-up-and-scale-out-server-infrastructure-diagram

Vertical Scaling (scale vertically or scale up) :- adding more resources(CPU/RAM/DISK) to your server (database or application server is still remains one).
Vertical Scaling is much more used in small and middle-sized companies and in applications and products of middle-range. Very common example for Virtual Scaling nowdays is to buy an expensive hardware and use it as a Virtual Machine hypervisor (VMWare ESX). Where a database is involved using Vertical Scaling without use of multiple virtual machines might be not the best solution, as even though hardware might suffice (creation of database locks might impose problems). Reasons to scale vertically include increasing IOPS (Input / Ouput Operations), increasing CPU/RAM capacity, and increasing disk capacity.
Because Vertical Scaling usually means upgrade of server hardware – whenever an improved performance is targeted, even though if Virtualization is used, the risk for downtimes with it is much higher than whenever horizontal scaling.

Horizontal Scaling (scale horizontally or scale out):- adding more processing units (phyiscal machine) to your server (infrastructure be it application web/server or database).
Horizontal scaling, means increasing  the number of nodes in the cluster, reduces the responsibilities of each member node by spreading the keyspace wider and providing additional end-points for client connections. The capacity of each individual node does not change, but its load is decreased (because load is distributed between separate server nodes). Reasons to scale horizontally include increasing I/O concurrency, reducing the load on existing nodes, and increasing disk capacity.
Horizontal Scaling has been historically much more used for high level of computing and for application and services. The Internet and particular web services gave a boom of Horizontal Scaling use, most companies nowadays that provide well known web services like Google (Gmail, Youtube), Yahoo, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon etc. are using heavily horizontal scaling. Horizontal Scaling is a must use technology – whenever a high availability of (server) services are required.

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Posted in Curious Facts, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Windows: VMWare Start / Stop from command line stop-vmware.bat / start-vmware.bat script

Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

vmware_start-stop-from-command-line-on-windows-os-bat-script
I'm experimenting with different Virtual Machines these days, because often running VMWare together with other Virtual Machines (like VirtualBox) might be causing crashes or VM instability – hence it is always best to have VMWare completely stopped. Unfortunately VMWare keeps running a number of respawning processes (vmnat.exe, vmnetdhcp.exe, vmware-authd.exe, vmware-usbarbitrator64.exe) which cannot be killed from Task Manager with Process Kill – End Tree option. Thus to make this services stop it is necessery run from cmd.exe (which is Run as Administrator):
 

NET STOP "VMware Workstation Server"
NET STOP "VMware USB Arbitration service"
NET STOP "VMware NAT Service"
NET STOP "VMware DHCP Service"
NET STOP "VMware Authorization Service"

If you will be doing regular START / STOP of VMWare on Windows servers it will be handy to create a little batch script stop-vmware.bat containing:
 

@ECHO OFF
NET STOP "VMware Workstation Server"
NET STOP "VMware USB Arbitration service"
NET STOP "VMware NAT Service"
NET STOP "VMware DHCP Service"
NET STOP "VMware Authorization Service"


Later whether it is necessery to start VMWare from Windows command line execute above services in reverse order (to prevent from getting warnings or errors on vmware dependent services.

NET START "VMware Authorization Service"
NET START "VMware DHCP Service"
NET START "VMware NAT Service"
NET START "VMware USB Arbitration service"
NET START "VMware Workstation Server"

To script it as a start script create file start-vmware.bat with:
 

NET START "VMware Authorization Service"
NET START "VMware DHCP Service"
NET START "VMware NAT Service"
NET START "VMware USB Arbitration service"
NET START "VMware Workstation Server"


Of course it is possible to also stop / start VMWare from GUI's Windows Services interface by righclicking on services with VMWare names and selecting "Start" / "Stop".

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Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Virtual Machines | No Comments »

What is VT-x (Intel Virtualization) and AMD V (AMD Virtualization)

Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

what-is-vt-x-inel-amd-virtualization-amd-v
As I'm lately educating myself in field of Virtualziation and Virtual Machines, the interesting question poped up What is Virtualization on a Hardware Level and what are Intel's and AMD technologies supporting it?

  • Intel Virtualialization (Vt-x)

Is Intel's hardware assistance for processors running virtualization platforms. Intel's Virtualization for short is know as VT-x. Intel VT-x extensions are probably the best recognized extensions, adding migration, priority and memory handling capabilities to a wide range of Intel processors.
Intel VT includes series of extensions for hardware virtualization adding virtualization support to Intel chipsets, so that Virtual Machines could assign specific I/O Devices. Intel VT includes a series of extensions for hardware virtualization Intel Virtualization is better described here.
 

  • AMD-V (AMD virtualization)


Is a set of hardware extensions for the X86 processor architecture. Advanced Micro Dynamics (AMD) designed the extensions to perform repetitive tasks normally performed by software and improve resource use and virtual machine (VM) performance. Early virtualization efforts relied on software emulation to replace hardware functionality. But software emulation can be a slow and inefficient process. Because many virtualization tasks were handled through software, VM behavior and resource control were often poor, resulting in unacceptable VM performance on the server. AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology was first announced in 2004 and added to AMD's Pacifica 64-bit x86 processor designs. By 2006, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors appeared with AMD-V technology, and today, the technology is available on Turion 64 X2, second- and third-generation Opteron, Phenom and Phenom II processors. Just like with Intel Virtualization AMD-V Technology enables extra hardware support for assignment of specifics I/O on per virtualized OS. AMD V Virtualization is described more thoroughly here

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Install VMWare tools on Debian and Ubuntu Linux – Enable VMWare Fullscreen and copy paste between OS host and Virtual machine

Wednesday, May 28th, 2014

install-vmware-tools-on-debian-gnu-linux-and-ubuntu-howto

If you need to use Virtual Machine to run some testing on heterogenous Operating Systems and you have chosen VMWare as a Virtual Machine. You will soon notice some of Virtual Machines functionality like copy between host operating system and Virtual Machine, true fullscreen mode and most importantly Copy paste between your host operating system and VMWare is not working. I'm not too much into Virtualization these days so for me it was truely shocking that a proprietary software like VMWare, claimed to be the best and most efficient Virtual Machine nowadays is not supporting copy / paste, fullscreen and copy between host and guest OS.  For those arguing why I'm using VMWare at all as it is proprietary and there is already free software Virtual Machines like QEMU and Oracle's VirtualBox its simply because now I have the chance to install and use VMWare 9 Enterprise on my work place at HP with a free Corporate license – in other words I'm using VMWare just for the sake of educating myself and would always recommend VirtualBox for those looking for good substitute free alternative to VMWare.

Before trying out VMWare, I tried Virtualbox to emulate Linux on my HP work PC running Windows with VirtualBox I was having issues with keyboard not working (because of lack of support of USB, no full screen support and lack of copy / paste between OS-es), I've just recently understood this is not because Virtualbox is bad Virtualization solution but because I forgot to install VirtualBox Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack which allows support for USB, enables copy paste and full screen support. The equivalent to Virtualbox Oracle VM VirtualBox in VMWare world is called VMWare-Tools and once the guest operating system is installed inside VMWare VM, its necessary to install vmware-tools to enable better screen resolution and copy paste.
 

In Windows Virtual Machine installation of vmware-tools is pretty straight forward you go through VMWare's menus

VM -> Install Vmware-tools

install-vmware-tools-on-linux-guest-host-os-debian-redhat-screenshot

follow the instructions and you're done, however as always installing VMWare-tools on Linux is little bit more complicated you need to run few commands from Linux installed inside the Virtual Machine to install vmware-tools. Here is how vmware-tools is installed on Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint and rest of Debian based operating systems:

  1. Install Build essentials and gcc You need to have this installed some developer tools as well as GCC compiler in order for the vmware-tools to compile a special Linux kernel module which enables extra support (integration) between the VMWare VM and the installed inside VM Linux distro

apt-get install --yes build-essential gcc
...

2. Install appropriate Linux headers corresponding to current Linux OS installed kernel

apt-get install --yes linux-headers-$(uname -r)
....

3. Mount CD (Virtual) Content to obtain the vmware-tools version for your Linux

Be sure to have first checked from VMWare menus on menus VM -> Intall Vmware Tools
This step is a little bit strange but just do it without too much questioning …


mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/
umount /media/cdrom0/
mount /media/cdrom
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom/
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/

Note that /dev/sr0, might already be mounted and sometimes it might be necessary to unmount it first (don't remember exactly if I unmounted it or not)

4. Copy and Untar VMwareTools-9.2.0-799703.tar.gz

cp -rpf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.2.0-799703.tar.gz /tmp/
cd /tmp/
tar -zxvvf VMwareTools-9.2.0-799703.tar.gz
...

5. Run vmware-tools installer

cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl

You will be asked multiple questions you can safely press enter to answer with default settings to all settings, hopefully if all runs okay this will make VMWare Tools installed
 

Creating a new VMware Tools installer database using the tar4 format.
Installing VMware Tools.
In which directory do you want to install the binary files?
[/usr/bin]
What is the directory that contains the init directories (rc0.d/ to rc6.d/)?
[/etc]
What is the directory that contains the init scripts?
[/etc/init.d]
In which directory do you want to install the daemon files?
[/usr/sbin]
In which directory do you want to install the library files?
[/usr/lib/vmware-tools]
The path "/usr/lib/vmware-tools" does not exist currently. This program is
going to create it, including needed parent directories. Is this what you want?
[yes]
In which directory do you want to install the documentation files?
[/usr/share/doc/vmware-tools]
The path "/usr/share/doc/vmware-tools" does not exist currently. This program
is going to create it, including needed parent directories. Is this what you
want? [yes]
The installation of VMware Tools 9.2.0 build-799703 for Linux completed
successfully. You can decide to remove this software from your system at any
time by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl".
Before running VMware Tools for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl". Do you want
this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
Initializing…
Making sure services for VMware Tools are stopped.
Stopping VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Guest operating system daemon: done
Unmounting HGFS shares: done
Guest filesystem driver: done
[EXPERIMENTAL] The VMware FileSystem Sync Driver (vmsync) is a new feature that creates backups of virtual machines. Please refer to the VMware Knowledge Base for more details on this capability. Do you wish to enable this feature?
[no]
Before you can compile modules, you need to have the following installed…
make
gcc
kernel headers of the running kernel
Searching for GCC…
Detected GCC binary at "/usr/bin/gcc-4.6".
The path "/usr/bin/gcc-4.6" appears to be a valid path to the gcc binary.
Would you like to change it? [no]
Searching for a valid kernel header path…
Detected the kernel headers at "/lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/build/include".
The path "/lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/build/include" appears to be a valid path
to the 3.2.0-4-amd64 kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [no]
The vmblock enables dragging or copying files between host and guest in a
Fusion or Workstation virtual environment. Do you wish to enable this feature?
[no] yes
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only'

No X install found.
Creating a new initrd boot image for the kernel.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64
Checking acpi hot plug done
Starting VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Switching to guest configuration: done
VM communication interface: done
VM communication interface socket family: done
File system sync driver: done
Guest operating system daemon: done
The configuration of VMware Tools 8.6.10 build-913593 for Linux for this
running kernel completed successfully.
You must restart your X session before any mouse or graphics changes take
effect.
You can now run VMware Tools by invoking "/usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd" from the
command line or by invoking "/usr/bin/vmware-toolbox" from the command line
during an X server session.
To enable advanced X features (e.g., guest resolution fit, drag and drop, and
file and text copy/paste), you will need to do one (or more) of the following:
1. Manually start /usr/bin/vmware-user
2. Log out and log back into your desktop session; and,
3. Restart your X session.
Enjoy,
–the VMware team
Found VMware Tools CDROM mounted at /mnt. Ejecting device /dev/sr0 …

.To make sure vmware-tools compiled modules are loaded into Linux kernel inside VM, restart the Virtual Machine. Once Linux boots again and you login to gnome-terminal to check what is vmware-tools status (e.g. if properly loaded) run:

service vmware-tools status
vmtoolsd is running

install-vmware-tools-on-debian-gnu-linux-and-ubuntu-virtual-machine-screenshot

This method of installing works on Debian 7 (Wheezy) but same steps should work on any Ubuntu and rest of Debian derivatives. For Redhat (RPM) based Linux distributions to install vmware-tools after mounting cdrom drive following above instructions you will have an rpm package instead of .tar.gz archive so all you have to do is install the rpm, e.g. launch smth. like:

rpm -Uhv /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.2.0-799703.i386.rpm
Cheers 😉

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Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Windows | No Comments »

How to find and kill Abusers on OpenVZ Linux hosted Virtual Machines (Few bash scripts to protect OpenVZ CentOS server from script kiddies and easify the daily admin job)

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

OpenVZ Logo - Anti Denial Of Service shell scripts

These days, I’m managing a number of OpenVZ Virtual Machine host servers. Therefore constantly I’m facing a lot of problems with users who run shit scripts inside their Linux Virtual Machines.

Commonly user Virtual Servers are used as a launchpad to attack hosts do illegal hacking activities or simply DDoS a host..
The virtual machines users (which by the way run on top of the CentOS OpenVZ Linux) are used to launch a Denial service scripts like kaiten.pl, trinoo, shaft, tfn etc.

As a consequence of their malicious activities, oftenly the Data Centers which colocates the servers are either null routing our server IPs until we suspend the Abusive users, or the servers go simply down because of a server overload or a kernel bug hit as a result of the heavy TCP/IP network traffic or CPU/mem overhead.

Therefore to mitigate this abusive attacks, I’ve written few bash shell scripts which, saves us a lot of manual check ups and prevents in most cases abusers to run the common DoS and “hacking” script shits which are now in the wild.

The first script I’ve written is kill_abusers.sh , what the script does is to automatically look up for a number of listed processes and kills them while logging in /var/log/abusers.log about the abusive VM user procs names killed.

I’ve set this script to run 4 times an hour and it currently saves us a lot of nerves and useless ticket communication with Data Centers (DCs), not to mention that reboot requests (about hanged up servers) has reduced significantly.
Therefore though the scripts simplicity it in general makes the servers run a way more stable than before.

Here is OpenVZ kill/suspend Abusers procs script kill_abusers.sh ready for download

Another script which later on, I’ve written is doing something similar and still different, it does scan the server hard disk using locate and find commands and tries to identify users which has script kiddies programs in their Virtual machines and therefore are most probably crackers.
The scripts looks up for abusive network scanners, DoS scripts, metasploit framework, ircds etc.

After it registers through scanning the server hdd, it lists only files which are preliminary set in the script to be dangerous, and therefore there execution inside the user VM should not be.

search_for_abusers.sh then logs in a files it’s activity as well as the OpenVZ virtual machines user IDs who owns hack related files. Right after it uses nail mailing command to send email to a specified admin email and reports the possible abusers whose VM accounts might need to either be deleted or suspended.

search_for_abusers can be download here

Honestly I truly liked my search_for_abusers.sh script as it became quite nice and I coded it quite quickly.
I’m intending now to put the Search for abusers script on a cronjob on the servers to check periodically and report the IDs of OpenVZ VM Users which are trying illegal activities on the servers.

I guess now our beloved Virtual Machine user script kiddies are in a real trouble ;P
 

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Posted in System Administration | 30 Comments »

How to configure and enable Xen Linux dedicated server’s Virtual machines Internet to work / Enable multipe real IPs and one MAC only in (SolusVM) through NAT routed and iptables

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

Xen Linux Virtual Machine Logo

I’ve been hired as a consultant recently to solve a small task on a newly bought Xen based dedicated server.
The server had installed on itself SolusVM

The server was a good hard-iron machine running with CentOS Linux with enabled Xen virtualization support.
The Data Center (DC) has provided the client with 4 IP public addresses, whether the machine was assigned to possess only one MAC address!

The original idea was the dedicated server is supposed to use 4 of the IP addresses assigned by the DC whether only one of the IPs has an external internet connected ethernet interface with assigned MAC address.

In that case using Xen’s bridging capabilities was pretty much impossible and therefore Xen’s routing mode has to be used, plus an Iptables Network Address Translation or an IP MASQUERADE .

In overall the server would have contained 3 virtual machines inside the Xen installed with 3 copies of:

  • Microsoft Windows 2008

The scenario I had to deal with is pretty much explained in Xen’s Networking wiki Two Way Routed Network

In this article I will describe as thoroughfully as I can how I configured the server to be able to use the 3 qemu virtual machines (running inside the Xen) with their respective real interner visible public IP addresses.

1. Enable Proxyarp for the eth0 interface

To enable proxyarp for eth0 on boot time and in real time on the server issue the commands:

[root@centos ~]# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/proxy_arp[root@centos ~]# echo 'net.ipv4.conf.all.proxy_arp = 1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

2. Enable IP packet forwarding for eth interfaces

This is important pre-requirement in order to make the iptables NAT to work.

[root@centos ~]# echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
[root@centos ~]# echo 'net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

If you get errors during execution of /etc/init.d/xendomains , like for example:

[root@centos ~]# /etc/init.d/xendomains restart
/etc/xen/scripts/network-route: line 29: /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/proxy_arp: No such file or directory
/etc/xen/scripts/network-route: line 29: /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/proxy_arp: No such file or directory

in order to get rid of the message you will have to edit /etc/xen/scripts/network-route and comment out the lines:

echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/${netdev}/proxy_arp
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/proxy_arp
e.g.
#echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/${netdev}/proxy_arp
#echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/proxy_arp

3. Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp, disable ethernet bridging and enable eth0 routing (route mode) and NAT for Xen’s routed mode

Make absolutely sure that in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp the lines related to bridging are commented.
The lines you need to comment out are:

(network-script network-bridge)
(vif-script vif-bridge)

make them look like:

#(network-script network-bridge)
#(vif-script vif-bridge)br />

Now as bridging is disabled let’s enable Xen routed network traffic as an bridged networking alternative.

Find the commented (network-script network-route) and (vif-script vif-route) lines and uncomment them:

#(network-script network-route)
#(vif-script vif-route)

The above commented lines should become:

(network-script network-route)
(vif-script vif-route)

Next step is to enable NAT for routed traffic in Xen (necessery to make routed mode work).
Below commented two lines in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp, should be uncommented e.g.:

#(network-script network-nat)
#(vif-script vif-nat)

Should become:

(network-script network-nat)
(vif-script vif-nat)

4. Restart Xen control daemon and reload installed Xen’s Virtual Machines installed domains

To do so invoke the commands:

[root@centos ~]# /etc/init.d/xend
[root@centos ~]# /etc/init.d/xendomains restart

This two commands will probably take about 7 to 10 minutes (at least they took this serious amount of time in my case).
If you think this time is too much to speed-up the procedure of restarting Xen and qemu attached virtual machines, restart the whole Linux server, e.g.:

[root@centos ~]# restart

5. Configure iptables NAT rules on the CentOS host

After the server boots up, you will have to initiate the following ifconfig & iptables rules in order to make the Iptables NAT to work out:

echo > > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tap1.0/proxy_arp
/sbin/ifconfig eth0:1 11.22.33.44 netmask 255.255.252.0
/sbin/ifconfig eth0:2 22.33.44.55 netmask 255.255.252.0
/sbin/ifconfig eth0:3 33.44.55.66 netmask 255.255.252.0

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 11.22.33.44 -i eth0 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.2
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 22.33.44.55 -i eth0 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.3
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 33.44.55.66 -i eth0 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.4
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.2 -o eth0 -j SNAT --to-source 11.22.33.44
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.3 -o eth0 -j SNAT --to-source 22.33.44.55
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.4 -o eth0 -j SNAT --to-source 33.44.55.66

In the above ifconfig and iptables rules the IP addresses:

11.22.33.44, 22.33.44.55, 33.44.55.66 are real IP addresses visible from the Internet.
In the above rules eth0:1, eth0:2 and eth0:3 are virtual ips assigned to the main eth0 interface.

This ifconfig and iptables setup assumes that the 3 Windows virtual machines running inside the Xen dedicated server will be configured to use (local) private network IP addresses:

192.168.1.2, 192.168.1.3 and 192.168.1.4

You will have also to substitute the 11.22.33.44, 22.33.44.55 and 33.44.55.66 with your real IP addreses.

To store the iptables rules permanently on the fedora you can use the iptables-save command:

[root@centos ~]# /sbin/iptables-save

However I personally did not use this approach to save my inserserted iptable rules for later boots but I use my small script set_ips.sh to add virtual interfaces and iptables rules via the /etc/rc.local invokation:

If you like the way I have integrated my virtual eths initiation and iptables kernel firewall inclusion, download my script and set it to run in /etc/rc.local, like so:

[root@centos ~]# cd /usr/sbin
[root@centos sbin]# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/set_ips.sh
...
[root@centos ~]# chmod +x /usr/sbin/set_ips.sh
[root@centos ~]# mv set_ips.sh /usr/sbin
[root@centos ~]# echo '/usr/sbin/set_ips.sh' >> /etc/rc.local

Note that you will have to modify my set_ips.sh script to substitute the 11.22.33.44, 22.33.44.55 and 33.44.55.66 with your real IP address.

So far so good, one might think that all this should be enough for the Virtual Machines Windows hosts to be able to connect to the Internet and Internet requests to the virtual machines to arrive, but no it’s not!!

6. Debugging Limited Connectivity Windows LAN troubles on the Xen dedicated server

Even though the iptables rules were correct and the vif route and vif nat was enabled inside the Xen node, as well as everything was correctly configured in the Windows 2008 host Virtual machines, the virtual machines’s LAN cards were not able to connect properly to connect to the internet and the Windows LAN interface kept constantly showing Limited Connectivity! , neither a ping was available to the gateway configured for the Windows VM host (which in my case was: 192.168.1.1).

You see the error with Limited connectivity inside the Windows on below’s screenshot:

Limited Connectivty Windows error Lan Interface, status screenshot

Here is also a screenshot of my VNC connection to the Virtual machine with the correct IP settings – (TCP/IPv4) Properties Window:

Windows Xen Network Connections Windows VNC TCP/IPv4 Properties Window

This kind of Limited Connectivity VM Windows error was really strange and hard to diagnose, thus I started investigating what is wrong with this whole situation and why is not able the Virtualized Windows to connect properly to the Internet, through the Iptables NAT inbound and outbound traffic redirection.

To diagnose the problem, I started up with listing the exact network interfaces showing to be on the Xen Dedicated server:


[root@centos ~]# /sbin/ifconfig |grep -i 'Link encap' -A 1
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:99:9C:08:3A
inet addr:111.22.33.55 Bcast:111.22.33.255
Mask:255.255.252.0
--
eth0:1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:99:9C:08:3A
inet addr:11.22.33.44 Bcast:11.22.33.255
Mask:255.255.252.0
--
eth0:2 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:99:9C:08:3A
inet addr:22.33.44.55 Bcast:22.33.44.255
Mask:255.255.252.0
--
eth0:3 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:99:9C:08:3A
inet addr:33.44.55.66 Bcast:33.44.55.255
Mask:255.255.252.0
--
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
--
tap1.0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr FA:07:EF:CA:13:31
--
vifvm101.0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr FE:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
inet addr:111.22.33.55 Bcast:111.22.33.55
Mask:255.255.255.255

I started debugging the issue, using the expelling logic.
In the output concerning my interfaces via ifconfig on eth0, I have my primary server IP address 111.22.33.55 , this one is working for sure as I was currently connected to the server through it.

The other virtual IP addresses assigned on the virtual network interfaces eth0:1, eth0:2 and eth0:3 were also assigned correctly as I was able to ping this ips from my Desktop machine from the Internet.

The lo , interface was also properly configured as I could ping without a problem the loopback ip – 127.0.0.1

The rest of the interfaces displayed by my ifconfig output were: tap1.0, vifvm101.0

After a bit of ressearch, I’ve figured out that they’re virtual interfaces and they belong to the Xen domains which are running qemu virtual machines with the Windows host.

I used tcpdump to debug what kind of traffic does flow through the tap1.0 and vifvm101.0 interfaces, like so

[root@centos ~]# tcpdump -i vifvm101.0
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on vifvm101.0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
^C
0 packets captured
0 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel
[root@centos ~]# tcpdump -i tap1.0
cpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on tap1.0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
^C
08:55:52.490249 IP 229.197.34.95.customer.cdi.no.15685 > 192.168.1.2.12857: UDP, length 42

I’ve figured out as it’s also observable in above’s two tcpdump commands output, that nothing flows through the vifvm101.0 interface, and that there was some traffic passing by tap1.0 interface.

7. Solving the Limited Connectivy Windows Internet network connection problems

As below’s ifconfig output reveals, there is no IP address assigned to tap1.0 interface, using some guidelines and suggestions from guys in irc.freenode.net’s #netfilter irc channel, I’ve decided to give a go to set up an IP address of 192.168.1.1 to tap1.0 .

I choose Emulated Windows 2008 hosts

To assign the 192.168.1.1 to tap1.0, I issued:

[root@centos ~]# /sbin/ifconfig tap1.0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
To test if there is difference I logged in to the Virtual Machine host with gtkvncviewer (which by the way is a very nice VNC client for Gnome) and noticed there was an established connection to the internet inside the Virtual Machine 😉

I issued a ping to google which was also returned and opened a browser to really test if everything is fine with the Internet.
Thanks God! I could browse and everything was fine 😉

8. Making tap1.0 192.168.1.1 (VM hosts gateway to be set automatically, each time server reboots)

After rebooting the server the tap1.0 assignmend of 192.168.1.1 disappeared thus I had to make the 192.168.1.1, be assigned automatically each time the CentoS server boots.

To give it a try, I decided to place /sbin/ifconfig tap1.0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 into /etc/rc.local, but this worked not as the tap1.0 interface got initialized a while after all the xendomains gets initialized.

I tried few times to set some kind of sleep time interval with the sleep , right before the /sbin/ifconfig tap1.0 … ip initialization but this did not worked out, so I finally completely abandoned this methodology and make the tap1.0 get initialized with an IP through a cron daemon.
For that purpose I’ve created a script to be invoked, every two minutes via cron which checked if the tap1.0 interface is up and if not issues the ifconfig command to initialize the interface and assign the 192.168.1.1 IP to it.

Here is my set_tap_1_iface.sh shell script

To set it up on your host in /usr/sbin issue:

[root@centos ~]# cd /usr/sbin/
[root@centos sbin]# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/set_tap_1_iface.sh
...
In order to set it on cron to make the tap1.0 initialization automatically every two minutes use the cmd:

[root@centos ~]# crontab -u root -e

After the cronedit opens up, place the set_tap_1_iface.sh cron invokation rules:

*/2 * * * * /usr/sbin/set_tap_1_iface.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

and save.

That’s all now your Xen dedicated and the installed virtual machines with their public internet IPs will work 😉
If this article helped you to configure your NAT routing in Xen drop me a thanks message, buy me a beer or hire me! Cheers 😉

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Posted in Linux, System Administration | 3 Comments »