Archive for May, 2009

A follow up to using ipv6 when your home/business connection doesn’s support it.

I wrote a howto a while back on how to setup windows vista with a ipv6 tunnel to tunnelbroker.net – this post can be found here http://larmeir.com/?p=354 . To follow up on this I host a Debian etch 5.0 server in my office that I use for troubleshooting network connections and as a backup system for my webserver. Below is how I setup the ipv6 tunnel:

#ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote my.tunnel.broker.ip local 192.168.1.8 ttl 255
#ip link set he-ipv6 up
#ip addr add 2001:470:1f0e:4ee::2/64 dev he-ipv6
# ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6
#ip -f inet6 addr

Also, dont forget to check that the ipv6 kernel module is loaded:

~# lsmod | grep ipv6
ipv6                  235364  31 sit

If not then load it:

# modprobe ipv6

then test it :)

~# ping6 -c4 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(vx-in-x68.google.com) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from vx-in-x68.google.com: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=116 ms
64 bytes from vx-in-x68.google.com: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=117 ms
64 bytes from vx-in-x68.google.com: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=116 ms
64 bytes from vx-in-x68.google.com: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=116 ms

— ipv6.google.com ping statistics —
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3011ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 116.301/116.750/117.440/0.429 ms

Hopefully this will help somone with Debian when trying to get a ipv6 tunnel setup.

Russian Scientist: UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth – Science News | Science

Russian Scientist: UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News – FOXNews.com

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Kid forced to change out of a kilt

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What in the heck has this world come too? A student in Utah was forced to remove his kilt as his teacher said it could be misconstrued as “cross-dressing” – I can’t help but find this ridicoulus. Well, apparently principal Longshanks has to apologize to the student. You can read the whole story here: http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/weird/dpg_School_Makes_Student_Change_out_of_Kilt_SAB_05172009_2492726

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Earthquake in North Texas, Saturday May 16th 2009

You normally do not think of Texas as being a place for earth quakes, well yesterday we had a 3.3 magnitude quake near Forth Worth. you can read more about this here http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/last_event_states/states_texas.html – The USGS details are below:

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Magnitude 3.3
Date-Time
  • Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 16:24:06 (UTC) – Coordinated Universal Time
  • Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 11:24:06 AM local time at epicenter
  • Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

    Location32.80N 97.09W
    Depth5.0 kilometers
    RegionNORTHERN TEXAS
    Distances15 km (10 miles) ESE of Watauga, Texas
    25 km (15 miles) ENE of Fort Worth, Texas
    25 km (15 miles) W of Dallas, Texas
    285 km (180 miles) NNE of AUSTIN, Texas
    Location UncertaintyError estimate: horizontal +/- 9.0 km; depth fixed by location program
    ParametersNst=11, Nph=11, Dmin=44.4 km, Rmss=0.86 sec, Erho=9.0 km, Erzz=0 km, Gp=92.8 degrees
    SourceUSGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
    Event IDusgsba

    Setting up mrtg to monitor dedicated server bandwidth usage. A simple howto for all for RedHat/CentOS!

    Working in the Technology industry, I hear alot of people asking about how to monitor their bandwidth accurately.  Most people (specially sharedhosters, gameserver admins, etc.) will use their control panels to monitor their bandwidth and this often leads to inaccurate results. In this article we will go over setting a basic mrtg bandwidth graph that can be monitored from a webpage on your server to help you keep track of your bandwidth usage. I have written the below howto as a guide to your installation on a RedHat ES 5.x or CentOS 5.x system. The link http://www.cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/linux/docs/uniqlinuxfeatures/mrtg/ was used as a guide regarding the snmpd.conf so if you have any doubts please check it out.

    The best way to watch your own bandwidth is with iptables or snmp however in this article we are covering snmp only – If you want to have a better technical understanding of snmp you can read more about snmp protocal here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol

    Let’s get started

    My server enviornment:  cat /etc/redhat-release
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)

    Our goals: Setup snmp and mrtg and have it monitor the bandwidth in 5 minute intervals with it publishing to a webpage.

    Setting up snmp:

    First we have to get snmp and its utlities installed. To do this we will use yum

    yum -y install net-snmp-utils net-snmp

    Now we will make sure that snmpd starts at boot time:

    chkconfig –add snmpd

    chkconfig snmpd on

    We can then verify that it is properly setup by issuing this command:

    # chkconfig –list | grep snmpd
    snmpd           0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

    Start the snmpd daemon up:

    /etc/init.d/snmpd start or service snmpd start

    Make sure it is up and listening:

    # netstat -anp | grep snmpd | grep LISTEN
    tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:199               0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      24465/snmpd

    Configuring snmpd.conf:

    the snmpd.conf is found /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf – there is a million options here but we will only modify what is necessary to get this working :)

    We will go section by section:

    first find this area and adjust it accordingly with your network address information – make sure and leave localhost as is – for the network part, add your networks cidr notation (you can get this from your dedicated server provider if you are not sure) :

    ####
    # First, map the community name “public” into a “security name”

    #       sec.name  source          community
    #com2sec notConfigUser  default       public
    com2sec local     localhost           public
    com2sec mynetwork 10.0.0.200/30     public
    ####

    Next, find this area and adjust it exactly as shown below:

    ####
    # Second, map the security name into a group name:

    #       groupName      securityModel securityName
    group MyRWGroup v1         local
    group MyRWGroup v2c        local
    group MyRWGroup usm        local
    group MyROGroup v1         mynetwork
    group MyROGroup v2c        mynetwork
    group MyROGroup usm        mynetwork
    ####

    Then, move on the to next section and it configure it exactly as shown below:

    # Make at least  snmpwalk -v 1 localhost -c public system fast again.
    #       name           incl/excl     subtree         mask(optional)
    #view    systemview    included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.1
    #view    systemview    included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.1.1
    view     all           included   .1

    Now modify this section exactly as shown below:

    ####
    # Finally, grant the group read-only access to the systemview view.

    #       group          context sec.model sec.level prefix read   write  notif
    #access  notConfigGroup “”      any       noauth    exact  systemview none none
    access MyROGroup “”      any       noauth    exact  all    none   none
    access MyRWGroup “”      any       noauth    exact  all    all    none

    Find this section and modify it as you would like:

    ###############################################################################
    # System contact information
    #

    # It is also possible to set the sysContact and sysLocation system
    # variables through the snmpd.conf file:

    syslocation www.elitepowerhost.com
    syscontact Dustin Larmeir <dustin@larmer.com>

    There is a great article on how to configure this that served as a point of reference for me that can be found here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/linux/docs/uniqlinuxfeatures/mrtg/mrtg_config_step_3.php

    Now we need to restart the snmpd daemon:

    /etc/init.d/snmpd restart or service snmpd restart

    And now we need to test it:

    # snmpwalk -v 1 -c public localhost IP-MIB::ipAdEntIfIndex
    IP-MIB::ipAdEntIfIndex.10.8.118.194 = INTEGER: 2

    When executing the snmpwalk command this should show all of your network addresses – if this returns them that means snmp is monitoring correctly. Now how the 10.x.x.x address was returned.

    Installing mrtg

    Use yum to install the mrtg package

    yum -y install mrtg

    Assuming your htdocs directory is in /var/www/html – you would create  a location to place the mrtg graphs:

    mkdir -p /var/www/html/mymrtg/

    Now you will setup the config for mrtg:

    cfgmaker –global ‘WorkDir: /var/www/html/mymrtg’ –output /etc/mrtg/mymrtg.cfg public@my.fqdn.com

    Note, it is best to your FQDN but you can use localhost as well. The FQDN is much cleaner though.

    Making the mrtg index file:

    indexmaker –output=/var/www/html/mymrtg/index.html /etc/mrtg/mymrtg.cfg

    Making sure all the images files are where they should be:

    cp -av /var/www/html/mrtg/*.png /var/www/html/mymrtg/

    Testing it out:

    env LANG=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mymrtg.cfg

    now browse to your vhost.com/mrtg and you should now see your graphs!

    Setting the graphs up as a cron job:

    run crontab -e

    and put this in the file:

    */5 * * * * env LANG=C mrtg /etc/mrtg/mymrtg1.cfg –logging /var/log/graphing.log

    This will generate your graphs every 5 minutes and log it for you.

    This should be all you need to monitor your own bandwidth graphs, there are many different options you can modify with this system so researching into it further would be worth your time! Ill write a howto on Debian soon.