The Daily Admin

Deploy RHEV-H inside a VMware Fusion 8 VM

In order to get RHEV-H working under VMware Fusion 8, you will need to make the following edits to your .vmx configuration file.  Open the .vmx file in your favorite editor and add the following lines:

vhv.enable = true
apic.xapic.enable = FALSE
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068"

This should get your VM booting without any kernel panics, or errors about not finding its disks.

Add disk back into a Linux MDADM software raid

I have a finicky disk on my home server that always drops from its RAID5 sofware raid.  The good thing for me is this RAID is one I use for low importance, bulk data, like OS ISO's and other stuff I can easily re-download if needed.  If you have a disk that keeps dropping from your RAID, I would recommend replacing the disk with one that is not so grumpy, and/or making sure you backups are in good shape.

However, I find that every now and then, usually after a reboot, this grumpy disk will eject itself from my RAID, so I have to re-insert it, and rebuild my array. Here is my "cookbook recipe" that I use to get it back. This post was mostly written for me, since I usually forget what commands I use, so I figured I would dump there for everyone else as well.  Lest get started:

First, I need to find out which disk ejected, so run the mdadm command to get the details:

mdadm --detail /dev/md127

You might see something that looks like this:

I then use fdisk to find the disk that went missing:

 fdisk -cul

Now that I have found my disk, I can reinsert it into the array and let the rebuild begin:

 mdadm --manage /dev/md127 --add /dev/sde1

The disk should be added back to the array, and should now be rebuilding. You can check the status of the rebuild a few different ways. The way I prefer is by watching /proc/mdstat. This command works great:

watch cat /proc/mdstat

You can also get the details by running:

mdadm --detail /dev/md127

There are a couple of ways you can speed up the rebuild process a few different ways. Be sure to check my post on speeding up the rebuild here: Helpful tips to speed up a linux software RAID rebuild

Setup Split tunneling when using OpenVPN

I recently wrote about configuring OpenVPN with PrivateInternetAcess VPN on my home server. During this process, I noticed that I was not able to SSH into the machine, or reach any of the other services I provide from outside my network, or across my WAN connection. What I discovered was that whenever OpenVPN makes its connection, it become the default gateway for all your outbound connections. This becomes a problem when you need to reach the machine from outside of you networks, as any responses sent by your server will ultimately end up going across the VPN as its gateway.

Luckily, Linux is pretty powerful when it comes to networking! We can setup our own routes, and give it rules to follow. What I did was create a route that will return any packets coming from my WAN back out across my WAN, instead of going to the VPN. The cool thing is that all my other packets outbound will go across the VPN which is what I want them to do for safety. MY Bittorrent traffic still goes out my VPN connection.

I followed the guide here to setup routes: http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html The problem is that whenever you use the ip command to create routes, they do not persist across a reboot! So, I used the commands to quickly create my desired routes, and then test them. After setting it all up, I confirmed it was working like I wanted, so my next step was to keep these routes across reboots. Red Hat and CentOS uses script files to setup and tear down routes when it initializes the network. The thing to keep in mind when you create these scripts is that it essentially just runs the "ip route" command and then appends whatever you put in the script.

First, you need to create your route script. It will need to be housed in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory and it should start with the name of route-eth0. Below is a snippet of my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-bond0 file (I am using bonded nics, hence the bond0. If you just have one nic this would be eth0).

192.168.1.0/24 dev bond0 src 192.168.1.2 table novpn

default via 192.168.1.1 table novpn

192.168.1.0/24 dev eth0 src 192.168.1.2

Then you need to create a rules script in the same /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory. It's name should being with rule-eth0. Below is a snippet of what I have in my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/rule-bond0:

from 192.168.1.2 table novpn

In both my examples above, I am using a bonded nic pair which is named bond0. The IP address of my server is 192.168.1.2, and its on the network 192.168.1.0 with a /24. My gateway is at 192.168.1.1.

Once you have those two files created you will need to restart your networking, by running the command:

sudo service network restart

Feel free to download the files I have created and modify them to fit your needs. Here is a link to download them: http://www.gigahype.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/route_and_rules.tar

sudo wget http://www.gigahype.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/route_and_rules.tar

That's it! You now have split tunneling that will let all of your server traffic go outbound on your VPN adapter (tun0). Once there is a request coming from your WAN, the server will reply to that request out the normal gateway to your router and ISP.

Configure OpenVPN on CentOS using PrivateInternetAccess

I recently decided to start protecting myself against the evil spying of the US Government as well as all of the DMCA hounds that are crawling the internet. I have known about VPN's for quite some time, but I honestly never thought about using one. With all the leaks that Edward Snowden has been publishing, it got me thinking about my own online privacy, and how to best protect myself.

A trusted friend of mine has been using a VPN for several months now, and he gave me a really great recommendation on a VPN provider. PrivateInternetAccess.com is what he recommended to me, and it was a superb choice. Here is their webpage if you would like to check them out: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ They offer a really great and really fast VPN service for about $40 per year (at the time of this writing). They also accept Bitcoin as a payment method, which is great for remaining anonymous. Another reason to choose PIA (as they are often times referred to) is because they offer several egress point all over the Globe. Their service is fast as well. I am routinely seeing 20 to 30 meg speeds when using the US East coast egress points.

Here is a Speedtest.net graph to show a recent test:

Now, let's get started on getting this setup. I will provide step-by-step instructions below, and even provide some pre-built OpenVPN configuration files to make it even easier.

First you will need to signup with PrivateInternetAccess. Follow this link to signup and create your account: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-vpn/ Once you get setup, they will email you with your credentials to use for the service. DON'T LOOSE THESE!

Then, you will need to perform the following to get CentOS or RHEL setup for the service.

1. Install OpenVPN on your machine. I am using CentOS 6.5 64 bit, but the instructions will be similar on other distros.

   sudo yum install openvpn

2. Create a password file that contains your PIA credentials so that OpenVPN can use them to connect. These credentials are the ones the PIA emails to you. This will keep OpenVPN from prompting you for your VPN password when it connects. Set the permissions to 400 and give ownership to root.

    

   echo "YOUR PIA USERNAME" > ~/.pia

   echo "YOUR PIA PASSWORD" >> ~/.pia

   sudo chown root:root ~/.pia && sudo chmod 400 ~/.pia

   sudo mv ~/.pia /root/

    

3. Download the PIA configuration files. I have created the OpenVPN configuration files that will work with PIA already and included them in the command below. These config files are setup for all locations that PIA is currently offering, and I will do my best to keep them up to date.

   wget http://www.gigahype.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/openvpn_configs.tar

4. Untar the config files and move them to the proper OpenVPN directory.

   tar –xvf openvpn_configs.tar

   sudo mv openvpn /etc/

5. Now, we need to create a server.conf file so that OpenVPN will know which of our PIA configs to look to. We do this by creating a symlink to whichever PIA config file we want to use. It's important to note that each of the PIA config files are designed for a certain region. This allows you to pick your egress point by country, state, or larger region. We will do an ls to list the files in the directory so you may choose whichever region you want to use.

   cd /etc/openvpn

   ls –l

   (You can now see all of the regions that I have configured. Pick which one you want to use for the next step)

   sudo ln -s /etc/openvpn/PICKYOURS.ovpn /etc/openvpn/server.conf

6. If you use Google DNS, OpenDNS, or even your ISP's DNS servers you expose yourself to DNS Leakage. DNS leakage occurs because the DNS providers are able to keep a record of all the sites that your computer requests IP's for. I highly recommend you google search the term "DNS Leakage" to get a better idea of it. If you want to mitigate DNS Leakage, PIA provides secure and private DNS servers. This step is totally optional, but I highly recommend doing this if you want to increase your security and anonymity. PIA's DNS servers are: 209.222.18.222 and 209.222.18.218 I will outline outline how to modify your DNS servers below:

    

   sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf ~/resolv.conf.backup

   sudo echo "nameserver 209.222.18.222" > /etc/resolv.conf

   sudo echo "nameserver 209.222.18.218" >> /etc/resolv.conf

    

7. Now we will start the OpenVPN service and then make sure it is connecting to PIA and creating the proper VPN network adapter tun0

   sudo service openvpn start

   ifconfig tun0

   (the ifconfig tun0 command should return the information about the VPN network. It will look something similar to the picture below)

   

8. If you would like to have OpenVPN always start at boot, you can do the following command. This is an optional step.

   sudo chkconfig openvpn on

That's it! If everything went well, you know have OpenVPN fully configured on a headless CentOS machine and have set it up to connect automatically at boot. You can always double check to make sure it is working by looking for the tun0 adapter. If you have access to launch a web browser on the machine, you can point it to www.ipchicken.com and it will show you the external IP address you connected from. If you are going through the VPN adapter, it will be a different IP address than your ISP.

Please see my post on how to configure Transmission Bittorrent client to always send its traffic through the VPN connection to avoid being snooped on. You can find it here:

VMWare Player in Fedora 18

If you are having problems with getting VMware Player to install into your Fedora 18 system, take a look at the instructions below to get it installed and running.

First, we need to make sure we have everything up to date on the system and that we are running the most recent kernel. Run the following command:

sudo yum update

After that has finished updating your system, it will be a good idea to reboot to make sure you boot with the most up to date kernel.

Next, we need to make sure we have all the required packages that VMWare needs.  We will need to install some of the kernel building packages in the repos, as well as a few other tools for building kernel modules.

sudo yum install kernel-* make gcc gcc-c++

Now, we have everything we need to install VMWare Player. Go to www.vmware.com/go/get-player   to download the installer file for system.  There are versions available for 32bit and 64 bit systems, so be sure to grab the right one. Once you have the file, you will need to make it executable by doing the following:

chmod 775 VMware-Player-*

Finally, you are ready to run the installer file.  Just be sure to sudo the command, as it will need root priveleges to install everything:

sudo ./VMware-Player-*

Then, it's just a matter of following the on-screen prompts of the VMWare installer. If you have any problems or hang-ups, feel free to leave a comment below, and I will to reply with any help! 

Teamviewer 8 and Fedora 18

Do you have a problem getting TeamViewer 8 to start at boot time in Fedora 18 and Fedora 17?

The issue comes from TeamViewer improperly placing the necessary SystemD component to have systemd start the service at boot.  Its a simple fix! Just follow the commands below to correct!

sudo cp -r /opt/teamviewer8/tv_bin/script/teamviewerd.service /lib/systemd/system/

sudo systemctl enable teamviewerd.service

Stop virt-manager from prompting for password

On a RHEL5, RHEL6 and any other RHEL variant, you might run into the annoying password prompt when you try to run virt-manager as a normal user.  Normally, you will see this prompt pop up when you are logged into the Desktop Environment as a normal user, and then try to launch virt-manager from your "Applications --> System Tools" menu, or you might even see it when you run virt-manager from the shell as a normal user.

This is done for good reason, system security.  But, when you are the primary workstation user, and you use Virtual Machines on a daily basis, you are like me and probably getting annoyed by entering your sudo or root password when you launch the virt-manager.  HAVE NO FEAR! There is a perfectly acceptable way of managing this.  We are going to take advantage of PolicyKit to manage what the normal user can run. In this case, we are going to create a policy that allows any user that is a member of the "virtman" group the ability to launch virt-manager without being prompted for authentication.  This makes is easy to give this ability to other users of the machine by simply adding them to the virtman group that we will create.

Here we go.  Follow these steps to get it setup:

1. Create the virtman group on your machine.   You can do this however your comfortable, or you can simply use the command below: (Notice we made the group a system group for cleanliness)

sudo groupadd -r virtman

2. Add whatever users you want to this system group: (in this example we are adding the user JohnDoe to the group virtman)

sudo usermod -a -G virtman JohnDoe

3. Now, we need to create our PolicyKit policy that will allow the users of virtman to run virt-manager.  You can do this in a number of ways. The contents of the file will need to include the following:

[Allow group virtman libvirt management permissions]
Identity=unix-group:virtman
Action=org.libvirt.unix.manage
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

Paste the above lines into a newly created file at this path:  /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/50-org.virtman-libvirt-local-access.pkla

You can use which ever editor you prefer, just so long as you place the file in the path I noted above, and that it has the contents as described.

But, if your like me, feel free to wget a copy of the file that I have hosted on this server.  You can grab the file, and place it in the right directory using this command:

sudo wget -P /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/50-org.virtman-libvirt-local-access.pkla http://www.gigahype.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/50-org.virtman-libvirt-local-access.pkla

Voila! you are finished!  You can test the results by simply starting virt-manager from your applications menu or the command line and it should no longer prompt for password for anyone that is a member of the virtman group!

Bash Navigating Shortcuts

Here are few great shortcuts that will make navigating in BASH a bit easier.  This also works in many other shells, as I am often in Korn Shell in our AIX and HP-UX machines.

I learned a few shortcuts a while ago from this website, as well as this one.

These were taking from the “Command Line Editing” in the bash manual. The bash manual is a well-written piece of documentation. It would do all SysAdmins well to read this manual a few times.

Well, here’s the new shortcuts I learned:

Basic moves

• Move back one character. Ctrl + b
• Move forward one character. Ctrl + f
• Delete current character. Ctrl + d
• Delete previous character. Backspace
• Undo. Ctrl + -

Moving faster

• Move to the start of line. Ctrl + a
• Move to the end of line. Ctrl + e
• Move forward a word. Meta + f (a word contains alphabets and digits, no symbols)
• Move backward a word. Meta + b
• Clear the screen. Ctrl + l

What is Meta? Meta is your Alt key, normally. For Mac OSX user, you need to enable it yourself. Open Terminal > Preferences > Settings > Keyboard, and enable Use option as meta key. Meta key, by convention, is used for operations on word.

Cut and paste (‘Kill and yank’ for old schoolers)

• Cut from cursor to the end of line. Ctrl + k
• Cut from cursor to the end of word. Meta + d
• Cut from cursor to the start of word. Meta + Backspace
• Cut from cursor to previous whitespace. Ctrl + w
• Paste the last cut text. Ctrl + y
• Loop through and paste previously cut text. Meta + y (use it after Ctrl + y)
• Loop through and paste the last argument of previous commands. Meta + .

Search the command history

• Search as you type. Ctrl + r and type the search term; Repeat Ctrl + r to loop through results.
• Search the last remembered search term. Ctrl + r twice.
• End the search at current history entry. Ctrl + j
• Cancel the search and restore original line. Ctrl +

CodeWeavers Flock The Vote is Live!

CodeWeavers has again launched a Presidential Election Year promotion! This is similar to the Lame Duck promotion that many of you may remember from 2008.  This is the campaign that made me aware of CodeWeavers and Crossover, and has since helped me run all kinds of Windows software on my Linux workstations.

I have been a very happy customer of CodeWeavers since 2008, and now I am happy to help them spread the word on this new campaign.  Heres the details:

If 100,000 people signup as "pledging to vote" in this years Presedential Election campaign, they will launch a 24 hour give-a-way of their Crossover software for Mac and Linux! All you have to do is enter your email address saying that you will be voting in this years election, and thats it!  Once they hit 100,000 people signed up, they will announce when they will be doing the 24 hour give-a-way.

Click on the logo below to be taken to the "Flock The Vote" campaign!

Install VMware Workstation 8 in Fedora 17

When I was attempting to install VMware Workstation 8 on my Fedora 17 64 bit OS. I had a few problems when it tried to compile the virtual network adapters.  After a little bit of trouble shooting and searching I realized there was a patch that I needed to apply in order to get the two working together. 

As noted below from a commenter named Adam, this method also works with VMWare workstation 8.0.4.  Thanks Adam!

Heres the steps:

First, we need to make sure we have all the dependancies installed before proceeding, so run the following command:

yum install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers

Then, download VMware Workstation from http://www.vmware.com Once you have it downloaded, run the installer script that you downloaded.  This will build Workstation in your OS.  It will also inject a fwe more menu items.  This is where I had my problems.  When I tried to launch Workstsation, it would complain about not being able to compile a few of the modules it needed for the current kernel.  To solve this problem, you will need to patch a few files.  Diasnet from FedoraForums.org has built a very handy patch for us!  

Download the patch here:  patch-vmware803.tar

Once you have the tar downloaded, extract it to any directory ( /tmp is fine) and run the patch using this command:

./patch-modules_3.4.0.sh

After the patch has finished running, you should be able to launch VMware Workstation from your menu, and begin using it.

If you would like to read up more on the post over at FedoraForum.org, follow this link: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1581288