VMWare Virtual Machine Ignores DCHP Lease - ip

I have a VMWare Player (Workstation 9 )virtual machine on an Ubuntu 12.10 (13.10 Kernel) host running Ubuntu 12.04 using a bridged connection and set to replicate the physical network connection. Everything usually works properly in a variety of locations. But at one location that I often frequent, the ip address of the virtual machine changes roughly every 10 minutes -rendering the vm entirely useless as it is a postgresql server and thus needs a dedicated local ip. Not only that, but when I copied a database dump into a shared folder, the file ended up getting corrupted.
I can verify that the network caused this problem, as the actual on the vm was not corrupted. I managed to temporarily solve the problem by going into a local modem and setting a DHCP Mac Address. Everything was working and files were not getting corrupted. However, it only lasted temporarily, and another random address was assigned, breaking several running processes on my machine. Between the router/gateway, there is a redundant apple router involved in the network that is likely causing the issue -but I cannot just throw it away or deactivate it, as it is not my network
Furthermore, DHCP leases work just fine for every other machine on the network; so
I believe the root issue is with vmware.
I have no clue what could possibly cause something like this to occur, as IP address assignment is one of those things that normally "just works". I am thinking about just switching to VitualBox, as I have used it in the past and never had a problem (except with properly running Windows 8. However,I have never actually seen any article suggesting VirtualVox over WMWare, as the latter supposedly performs better and has more intuitive shared folder support. Obviously though, any benefit from a shared folder is negated if it just shares corrupt garbage.

So you manually set a MAC address on your VM? In the past, I've seen VM's change MACs quite often; generally only after a reboot or cold start. It shouldn't happen on the fly... You could install Wireshark and grab a few packet captures to see if anything in there points you in the direction of the root cause.

Related

Problem communicating over a local area network (LAN) with ROS on WSL2

I am a developer of ROS projects. Recently I am trying using ROS(melodic) on WSL2(Windows Subsystem for Linux), and all things works just great. But I got some trouble when I want to use another PC which also in the same local area network(LAN) to communicate with. Before setting the environment variables like "ROS_MASTER_URI, ROS_IP", I know that since WSL 2 work on Hyper-V so the IP show on WSL2 is not the one in the real LAN. I have to do some command like below in order to make everyone in LAN communicate with the specific host:PORT on WSL2.
netsh interface portproxy delete v4tov4 listenport=$port listenaddress=$addr
But here comes a new question:
The nodes which use TCPROS to communicate with each other have a random PORT every time I launch the file.
How can I handle this kind of problem?
Or is there any information on the internet that I can have a look?
Thank you.
The root problem is described in WSL issue #4150. To quote from that thread,
WSL 2 seems to NAT it's virtual network, instead of making it bridged
to the host NIC.
Option 1 - Port forwarding script on login
Note: From #kraego's comment (and the edited question, which I'm just seeing based on the comment), this is probably not a good option for ROS, since the port numbers are randomly assigned. This makes port forwarding something that would have to be dynamically done.
There are a number of workarounds described in that issue, for which you've already figured out the first part (the port forwarding). The primary technique seems to be to create a PowerShell script to detect the IP address and create the port forwarding rules that runs upon Windows login. This particular comment near the top of the thread seems to be the canonical go-to answer, although many people have posted their tweaks or alternatives throughout the very long thread.
One downside - I believe the script that is mentioned there needs to be run at logon since the WSL subsystem seems to only want to run when a user is logged in. I've found that attempting to run a WSL service or instance through Windows OpenSSH results in that instance/service shutting down soon after the SSH session is closed, unless the user is already logged into Windows with a WSL instance opened.
Option 2 - WSL1
I would also propose that, assuming it fits your workflow and if the ROS works on it (it may not, given the device access you need, but not sure), you can simply use WSL1 instead of WSL2 to avoid this. You can try this out by:
Backing up your existing distro (from PowerShell or cmd, use wsl --export <DistroName> <FileName>
Import the backup into a new WSL1 instance with wsl --import <NewDistroName> <InstallLocation> <FileNameOfBackup> --version 1
It's possible to simply change versions in place, but I tend to like to have a backup anyway before doing it, and as long as you are backing up, you may as well leave the original in place.

Extremely slow initial connection to nginx on Vagrant?

I running an Ubuntu VM via Vagrant on a Windows 10 host. On the Vagrant machine I am running a fairly standard PHP/nginx app.
Whenever I try to access the web app, it takes forever to load. Chrome network inspector shows this:
Chrome network timeline
This huge latency is completely gone on subsequent requests, but whenever I pop back into the browser and try again after a while, it crops up yet again.
I am using NFS.
I have disabled firewalls on both guest and host machines.
I increased keepalive_timeout in nginx which helped hide the problem, as it increased the time window for latency-free subsequent requests.
This latency occurs even when accessing static files, so I don't think it's a PHP-FPM/MySQL problem.
I successfully figured out what my problem was!
After looking at my Windows hosts file, it looked like my vagrant-hostmanager plugin had not been properly clearing out older IP entries (i.e. I had three seperate IP entries for myapp.dev even though only one IP was active). Probably because I'd forgotten to properly vagrant halt before shutting down my PC a few times.
Windows was clearly spending ages trying to resolve the two older entries before successfully resolving the 'real' one.
It's weird: you'd think this problem would cause the latency to show up in the DNS Lookup portion of the Chrome network timeline, rather than Initial connection, but oh well!

beginner backend web programming questions about SSH

So, I've taken a handful of programming courses(object-oriented, web) but never had "hands-on" projects where it's outside of coding.
Now I'm trying to figure out what these SSH stuff is about, I can't even figure out which client to use, so picked filezilla for now.
My question is, where can I read more about these terms like ports, and whatnots, in a way so I'm not learning aimlessly.
Thanks!
Basically, SSH is a way to command another computer exactly what to do over the Internet. You can execute any commend the remote system has, and your user has permission for.
The Internet
The Internet runs on a series of protocols collectively named TCP/IP. TCP/IP defines a way to find and address individual computers (IP) and a way to communicate between them (TCP).
You can think of computers on the Internet as a large collection of office buildings all close together. Each office has the exact same number of windows: 65535. Offices (computers) communicate by stringing channels between windows (ports). Each channel has two ends, called sockets. Each socket is associated with a port on the respective computer. We send data back and forth, and then the connection is closed.
Client/Server
There are two types of computers on the Internet: clients, and servers. Clients request information, and servers provide it. Ports 1-1024 are reserved for servers, 1 port per protocol. The full list is here, and as you can see, it is not without contention.
Let's say you visit a website
Your browser, the client program, sees that you typed "stackoverflow.com", and using DNS, discovers that stackoverflow.com is computer number 64.34.119.12. This is it's IP address. It allows your computer to find the network stackoverflow.com is located in, route to it, and establish a connection to the Stack Overflow web server. The web server is a program that accepts client requests from a browser like yours.
They speak in a protocol called HTTP - it allows your browser to request a page determined by a URL. The server sees the request, runs a program to construct a web page (or retrieves an HTML file, image, or any other file), and sends the result back to the browser. Port 80 has been reserved for HTTP. That means, your computer chooses a random port to connect from, and connects to port #80 on the server.
Unix and the shell
The majority of the Web (The Internet, even) runs on an OS called Linux (a Unix variant), instead of something like Windows. Unix systems possess a command-line interface, running a program called a "shell", which is a direct interface to the system. The shell accepts input, one command at a time. You type text in, and it spits out the out put of the command.
Secure Shell
SSH allows you to do this securely. All data traffic is encrypted using a well-studied published "public-key" cryptographic system. (In fact, it was major news when a vulnerability was discovered in a supporting encryption scheme, see these advisories).
SSH is a protocol commonly running on port 22. Anyone with a computer on the Internet (not behind a firewall) can run an SSH server, and allow users to connect to it and execute commands.
The majority of systems administrators and software developers using Unix on the server use SSH to configure, control, and upload programs to that server (located in some data center somewhere).
More
There are many many more details to all of this. Any term or acronym above can be typed into Wikipedia for pretty comprehensive information. There are plenty of books on Unix, Networking, and Web programming.
SSH is originally a secured replacement for telnet. The need for SSH arose from the fact that telnet does not support encryption and therefore everything (commands, output and password) was plainly visible on the network for all to see.
Because in the beginning SSH encryption (based on key exchange) was supposed to be strong (and it was indeed a marked improvement), and was open source, it took off rapidly and several extensions to the protocol were added, especially in the domain of remote file manageent and transfer.
In addition, SSH is used in tunelling and port forwarding configurations.
In the domain of file copy there are several options.
SCP: cp (copy). Inspired by rcp, an early file transfer extension to ssh.
SFTP: SSH File Transfer Protocol, a newer SSH extension to support File copy and browsing (but not really like FTP with 2 ports). It is more feature rich than both scp and ftp. Think of it as a remote file system protocol (however, however somewhat slower than scp).
FTPS: FTP over TLS/SSL. Needs 2 ports like ftp, one for command and one for data. Both connections can be encrypted.
Secure FTP. Real FTP tunelled over SSH.
The site to which you will need to connect probably offers SFTP. You just need to declare the remote server connection configuration in Filezilla site manager. You will need to provide the server ip address or name, the SSH server port, usually 22 but there are other possibilities (you should have been provided with this info) and select sftp as server type). When the connection is established, accept the public key and that should be it.
You can then drop your devs on the remote server.
OS choice
You shall first make a kind of choice between 2 worlds (MS or Linux).
Provided that the Linux community is somehow significantly less reluctant to share explanations. Also you will loose less time by choosing one or the other one, avoiding to wonder the same questions twice, with different answers depending on which OS you chose.
I experienced both, starting to search for solutions in the MS world, that I knew. Big mistake, loss of time. Then I changed, too late, to the Linux world. So I would advice to go straight to the linux OS for learning. Really many distributions for this. I would advice Debian (opened, user friendly, simple, safe, huge community) but you'll get as many proposals as there are admin.
OS understanding
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bash.html
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
Specific Questions about SSH
It depends a lot on the system you will choose but you could easily build a small client and a small server, then configure both and use ssh. Your 2 servers could even be hosted on the same machine, locally if you wish. Then you will learn how to set up the ssh-client side (often called ssh_config) and the ssh server side (often named sshd_config, with "d" standing for daemon).
Here you can find explanations about ssh for both worlds :
http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux
Some keywords for your google searches
List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers
ssh-keygen : encrypted keys (private/public),
ssh-add ssh agent
Gentoo keychain
and later but soon if you administrate your server on your own
The two main ones :
1) iptables
You may start with this and then go further with that one
2) fail2ban
this is a complement tool for which you'll find easily plenty of docs
...
Have fun :-)
EDIT: you can easily experience a Linux machine hosted in a windows OS, using virtualization (virtualbox, vm-ware..). It's a safe start and offer a good payback for this time investment. It would allow you to host as many machines (for example one linux server and one linux client) as you wish, in the limits of your HD room.
I assume you need to learn shell scripting. I recommend this book.
Filezilla is a FTP client. Try Putty - free SSH Client. And of course you need Linux server.
If you want to learn about SSH in depth then may I advise you this book SSH: The Secure Shell The Definitive Guide
See here for more info: http://www.snailbook.com/
I've read the book and learned really a lot. It teaches you all about setting up servers, clients, key agents and various (practical) applications.

Use Synergy on a computer on a workgroup and a laptop on a different domain

So, I recently installed synergy because I was tired of using two mice and keyboards. Problem is, set up is not working. First, the setup.
Server:
Desktop
Windows 7 64 - on our home network, part of Workgroup: WORKGROUP
Client:
work issued laptop
Windows XP SP2 32 - on home network, part of workd Domain: DOMAIN
Server is set up, all the computer names are correct. I'm a bit of a noob at networking things, and I don't want to mess up the configuration of my work laptop again (I already switched the domain to my workgroup, BAD). So, any suggestions that aren't too crazy please, since it's a company laptop.
I've tried putting in the ip on the client as well, firewall is allowing on the port in use, just can't get it to work. I think I'm SOL with the Workgroup/Domain difference though...
From what I remember, Synergy doesn't care about the workgroup and/or domain, it just needs to be able to communicate with the server/client IPs. Did you try to manually insert IPs of client/server?
In a very similar situation I discovered that when trying to ping my non-domain desktop with its workgroup name the dns resolver was appending the work domain to the desktops name. So when I tried synergy with an IP address I successfully connected the two computers.
The only caveat I can offer is maybe you needed to add the application to the windows firewall exception list for both machines. I would assume the port setting was the same between the two computers (default is 24800) in which case you should only use the IP address because the application knows to access 24800 via that setting in the advanced configuration.
You can add the program to the whitelist or specifically the port if you prefer via the Windows Firewall. On a side note - I am also using an older version of synergy (1.3.1) and not the latest as of this answer (1.4.2 Beta) which did not work for me, but I will assume it's because my server was running 1.3.1.
I chose not to update all 6 machines and their respective horrific configuration constructs that synergy loves to enforce upon us. [caution... rant: x is left of y and y is right of x... really? are you sure about that Einstein? Synergy could at least INFER that bit of logic instead of REQUIRING it!]
Hope that helps.

is it possible to limit the network traffic from my PC to my PC?

Hi Guys I'm debugging some CS program and to view the performance of the application in slow internet I tried many different ways. However the best would be the Server and the client be in the same PC ---- my debugging environments for both the server side and the client is setup in one PC.
So I'm wondering is there anyway to limit the speed? I'm using TCP but I don't know too much in-depth knowledge of it.
Thank you
There are two important factors regarding a "slow" internet connection that you need to test out since they have different implications for your application: bandwidth and latency.
If you provide some more details about what os you are running your tests on, it would be easier to recommend a way to limit the network performance.
On a related side note, it's generally a bad idea to performance test any kind of networking using the loopback device on your machine, since many aspects of this will perform very different than the regular network device on your machine.
You mention in the comments this needs to be done on windows, while the Network Emulators I know of (e.g. netem, TCN, other variants) all require Linux. So one thing you could do is create a virtual machine (VirtualBox is fine, I did similar things with it), install linux on it, configure 2 network interfaces, emulate the slow/long/lossy/jittery network between them, and route the test traffic through it from windows.
Finally I found this does what I need.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/socket_sniffer.html
Captures Windows Socket traffic, no matter it's local or not.

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