Tag: Linux

Fedora — Disabling IPv6

Since it’s the third time I’ve had to do this so far this year, I’m going to write down how I disable IPv6 in Fedora. Add these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf

[lisa@server~]# grep ipv6 /etc/sysctl.conf
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6=1

Then load the sysctl settings (sysctl -p) or reboot.

Without IPv6, if you do X-redirection, you may get an error indicating the redirection was refused. In journalctl, there’s an error “error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket”. Evidently you’ve got to configure sshd to use IPv4 by setting “AddressFamily inet” in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

[lisa@server~/]# grep AddressFamily /etc/ssh/sshd_config
AddressFamily inet

 

Fedora – Why were my packets dropped?

We’ve been seeing dropped packets on one of our servers — that usually means more data is coming in than can be processed, but it’s nice to confirm rather than guess. The command “netstat -s” displays summary statistics that are nicely grouped into causes:

TcpExt:
16 invalid SYN cookies received
88 resets received for embryonic SYN_RECV sockets
18 packets pruned from receive queue because of socket buffer overrun
2321 ICMP packets dropped because they were out-of-window
838512 TCP sockets finished time wait in fast timer

Increasing message text size in Evolution

Evolution has the most microscopic text. Scott literally picks his computer up sometimes just so he can read the message. You get a lot of text on the screen … I guess. But it’s not really useful if you cannot read it.

(1) There’s a system-wide default font in KDE. Under the Fonts, there are setting for “small”, “toolbar”, “menu”, “window title” … they seem to default to 10 points (8 for small). That’s rather small on a high-resolution monitor.

(2) In Evolution, select Edit > Preferences
Select Mail Preferences from the left sidebar. Untick the box “Use the same fonts as other applications” and then pick a bigger font. This only changes the message text — the from/subject/date and folder structure are still using the system font.

Notes on Adding Drive to Linux Host

Create partition, format, find UUID, and add line to fstab to mount the volume

[lisa@linuxhost ~]# parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 3.2.153
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel GPT
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? y
(parted) mkpart primary 2048s 100%
(parted) q
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

[lisa@linuxhost ~]# mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sdb1
meta-data=/dev/sdb1 isize=512 agcount=4, agsize=163839872 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=1 finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0
= reflink=1
data = bsize=4096 blocks=655359488, imaxpct=5
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=319999, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0

[lisa@linuxhost ~]# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─sda2 8:2 0 19G 0 part
├─fedora-lisa 253:0 0 17G 0 lvm /
└─fedora-swap 253:1 0 2G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 2.5T 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 2.5T 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 650M 0 rom
[lisa@linuxhost ~]# blkid | grep sdb1
/dev/sdb1: UUID=”801ebed3-ddd6-459d-bd62-04a0a75f91b8″ TYPE=”xfs” PARTLABEL=”primary” PARTUUID=”b9a9a340-28f5-4efb-b649-af804ef5bc4c”

Add a line to /etc/fstab to mount the volume — here I’m mounting it to /mnt/data/mythtv:

UUID=801ebed3-ddd6-459d-bd62-04a0a75f91b8 /mnt/data/mythtv xfs defaults 0 0

Tar Excluding Git Folders

You can, of course, use –exclude and avoid adding the .git folders to your tar archive, but I discovered a really cool option that excludes the folders created by a whole host of version control systems:

--exclude-vcs

Which, as of version 1.32, means excluding CVS, RCS, SCCS, git, SVN, Arch, Bazaar, Mercurial, and Darcs as follows:

  • CVS/ — recursive
  • RCS/ — recursive
  • SCCS/ — recursive
  • .git/ — recursive
  • .gitignore
  • .gitmodules
  • .gitattributes
  • .cvsignore
  • .svn/ — recursive
  • .arch-ids/ — recursive
  • {arch}/ — recursive
  • =RELEASE-ID
  • =meta-update
  • =update
  • .bzr
  • .bzrignore
  • .bzrtags
  • .hg
  • .hgignore
  • .hgrags
  • _darcs

PrivateTmp Strangeness — apachectl v/s systemctl

This is a very strange problem — we had a web server upgraded recently. We use “sudo apachectl start” to bring up the server since the server is maintained by a dedicated Unix support team, and the site worked fine. Until … Sunday morning after the log rotation. Then Box Spout was unable to access the XML data for an Excel file to compress it. Lots of errors:

 

[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137728 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: ZipArchive::close(): Zlib error: stream error in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 199, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137785 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fopen(/tmp/xlsx5f5f934699dcd9.17695276.zip): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 213, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137803 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: stream_copy_to_stream() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 214, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.137814 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 215, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.138360 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Box\\Spout\\Common\\Exception\\IOException’ with message ‘Cannot perform I/O operation outside of the base folder: /tmp’ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php:130\nStack trace:\n#0 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(82): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->throwIfOperationNotInBaseFolder(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#1 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(369): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->deleteFile(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#2 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Internal/Workbook.php(134): Box\\Spout\\Writer\\XLSX\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->zipRootFolderAndCopyToStream(Resource id #26)\n#3 /path/to/site/ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php on line 130, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139468 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: ZipArchive::close(): Zlib error: stream error in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 199, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139504 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fopen(/tmp/xlsx5f5f934699dcd9.17695276.zip): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 213, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139515 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: stream_copy_to_stream() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 214, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139533 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/Common/Helper/ZipHelper.php on line 215, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php
[Mon Sep 14 10:59:39.139599 2020] [:error] [pid 57117] [client 10.1.2.3:49276] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Box\\Spout\\Common\\Exception\\IOException’ with message ‘Cannot perform I/O operation outside of the base folder: /tmp’ in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php:130\nStack trace:\n#0 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(82): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->throwIfOperationNotInBaseFolder(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#1 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php(369): Box\\Spout\\Common\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->deleteFile(‘/tmp/xlsx5f5f93…’)\n#2 /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Writer/XLSX/Internal/Workbook.php(134): Box\\Spout\\Writer\\XLSX\\Helper\\FileSystemHelper->zipRootFolderAndCopyToStream(Resource id #26)\n#3 /path/to/site in /path/to/site/classes/vendor/box/spout/src/Spout/Common/Helper/FileSystemHelper.php on line 130, referer: https://hostname.example.com/path/to/code.php

 

The postupdate script is “systemctl reload httpd.service” — so not exactly the same thing we used to launch the service originally. But I’ve never seen differing behavior between apachectl and systemctl started HTTPD instances. Quick/dirty solution is to disable PrivateTmp, but I’m hoping to be able to isolate why exactly the postupdate script appears to break the service’s access to the private tmp space.

30 November 2020 addendum — In discussing the issue with RedHat, they suggested using either

/sbin/killall -HUP httpd

or

/bin/systemctl restart httpd.service > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true

Doing this has allowed continual access to the Private Tmp space after log rotation. Woohoo! Not sure why the default configuration that came from the Apache httpd package didn’t work (i.e. it’s not like we built some funky weird log rotation script). But success is good enough for me.

Listing Modules In Dynamically Linked Shared Object Libraries

We had to rebuild a server over the weekend — it’s a lot harder to get Apache and PHP set up when you don’t have root access to just install things from the yum repository. And, unlike the servers where I built httpd and php from source … we basically relayed requests to the Unix admin to have packages installed. One of the confusions during the whole process was that we didn’t know what to use as the module name for PHP to load in the httpd.conf file. The line from our old server (LoadModule php5_module /etc/httpd/modules/libphp5.so) produced an error that there was no such thing to load.

When a library fails to load with some error, I know to use ldd … but I didn’t know there was a way to list out the modules in a library. Fortunately, one of my coworkers had already run nm and listed out the modules — nm -D –defined-only sharedLibraryFile | grep module — and we were able to identify that the libphp5.so that we had wasn’t anything like the one on the old server. By listing the modules for each of the shared object libraries installed by the php package, we got the proper module name for httpd.conf

What Can I sudo?

Some 90% of my Linux experience is on servers where I have root or root-equivalent access (i.e. I can sudo anything). In those cases, ‘what can I run under sudo’ was never a question. And I’d use something like “sudo less /etc/sudoers” to inspect what someone else was able to run when they questioned their access. In my new position, we have a lot of servers that we own too — the Engineering IT support group lets us spin up our own VMs, do whatever we want (within reason). But we have a few IT-managed servers with very restricted rights. And the commands I would use to perform functions (think systemctl restart httpd) aren’t in my sudoers access list. Luckily you can list out what you can run under sudo:

$ sudo -l
[sudo] password for useraccount:
Matching Defaults entries for useraccount on this host:
syslog=auth, loglinelen=0, syslog_goodpri=info, syslog_badpri=err,
logfile=/var/log/sudo.log

User useraccount may run the following commands on this host:
(ALL) /opt/lampp/lampp start, (ALL) /opt/lampp/lampp stop, (ALL)
/opt/lampp/lampp restart, (ALL) /usr/sbin/apachectl

And that is how I know to use apachectl instead of systemctl.

NVIDIA Driver Installation Issue – Fedora 30

NVIDIA finally released an updated driver for Scott’s laptop — one that should be compatible with the 5.x kernel. Ran through the normal process and got the following error:

     Unable to load the nvidia-drm kernel module

Which … was at least new. Tried running through the installation again but not registering the driver with the kernel. Installation completed successfully, and he’s able to boot the 5.8.100 kernel.