Tag: virtualbox

Up again, but not public yet

Well, except, you’re reading this so it is public.

Lost interest in maintaining this server and website when I lost my job and couldn’t get another. The server’s Ubuntu, web server is Apache, and CMS is WordPress. It’s been running for a number of years without issue. I wouldn’t call it production because I don’t rely on it for anything. It’s just a test bed to familiarize myself with the software stack and gain some understanding of it’s setup and administration. I’m self hosting. Its an old computer repurposed as a server.

One other thing I experimented with is DNS. I wanted to be able to get to my server on my home network using wp.boba.org, whether on the public Internet or my home network. That worked fine for years with BIND9 and isc-dhcp.

I developed the habit of running upgrades periodically without testing. If there was a problem then no big deal, not production, figure out the issue, repair and proceed. Problems happened a few times with that approach and were always easily rectified.

DNS on the server stopped working after an upgrade. I tried many things and couldn’t figure out why. Rather than rollback the upgrade or restore the system from a backup I kept mucking with it to try and get it to work. No success. Eventually I just lost interest and let the server go dark. I wasn’t working so didn’t have anyone to talk with about the server. With no one to talk tech with about my server project there seemed no point to fixing it.

I did want to dip my toe in the water again after a while. I decided to rebuild the server and bring all components up to the latest release. I still couldn’t get BIND9 DNS to work. Searching BIND9 issues I found other Ubuntu users were also having problems with it. After searching for alternate DNS servers I decided to try dnsmasq. That got me to a working DNS on my home network. And that got me to the point of having the server up and publicly available again.

All development of the server configuration and settings was done on a virtual machine, vm, in a virtual network with virtual clients. VirtualBox is the hypervisor being used. Once everything worked as expected I migrated the server vm to a physical host. That took surprisingly little tweaking. Network addresses had to be changed from the virtual network settings to the home network settings and a different Ethernet device name entered where needed. That was about it to migrate from a virtual to physical server.

For all the world to see, in all its underwhelming glory, wp.boba.org is back. Enjoy.

Mount an external LFS drive

It’s easy. Just took a while to recall.

Original server was hardware installed from thumb drive iso. Set up LFS on server install.

New server from VirtualBox vm. Used ext4 there. Have it running on different drive on original server. LFS drive is set aside.

Want to get at some info from LFS drive. Trying to mount external LFS drive is running into many dead ends so far.

And of course it was simply a question of installing the correct file system drivers. In this case # apt update & apt install lvm2, and the volume can be mounted read/write.

I will keep the old drive around for a while in the external housing. I’m sure there will be times I want to find stuff to pluck off. But I need to put a label on it for a hard date to be DBANed.

AD CI Struggles

Active Directory Configuration Item struggles! Seems like feeling around in the dark.

I set up a test lab to practice creating an administratively tiered AD forest with a single domain. Challenges came from everywhere; available documentation, platform the lab was built on, and ultimately figuring a way to compare policies and OU structure between labs.

First the virtualization was run in VirtualBox on my laptop and the lab build began there. That was abandoned because of available drive space.

Then it was moved to a dedicated virtual server running VMware ESXi. The browser interface was sluggish for me and, as I leaned, my account didn’t have permissions to copy/paste between my pc and the VM. That slowed me as I tried to enter configurations and compare between guests.

The ESXi guests occasionally froze after changes and were very slow to be to be power cycled when that happened, minutes.

Back to the laptop. Purge VMs that were built for other labs (intended to be continued) and start again on the laptop. And this time, got the administratively tiered lab running.

Great. Needs to be repeatable though. Go back to the ESXi test lab and try to produce the same results. Tried altering ESXi lab guests’ AD and GPO settings to be same as those on the VirtualBox lab. Didn’t work.

Found several ways to produce GPO reports to compare settings in each and see where they differed. Found a few differences and changed ESXi vms’ to match VirtualBox’ working ones. GroupPolicy Module | Microsoft Docs are a great tool. The most useful to me for this were Get-GPOReport, Import-GPO, and Backup-GPO.

Sadly the ESXi lab setup still didn’t produce the same results and response in the console was often sluggish. When I started ESXi I used the console tool which let me open multiple windows within one browser window. Unfortunately it didn’t copy paste between my pc and the session. Not helpful for testing.

I eventually tried the remote console tool. It opened a window for each connection and was more responsive than the console. And, bonus, copy paste worked between my pc and the terminal?!!

Better control of the ESXi test lab now but still not the correct tiered admin function. The ESXi test lab guests showed some symptoms of not enough memory like the sluggish responses and hangs. Am upping RAM from 2Gb to 4Gb, rebuilding the guests and trying again.

VirtualBox guests on the laptop are running 2Gb and the tiered admin lab works.

If more memory doesn’t do it I’ll have to come up with some other adjustment to try. Need to get both working with admin tiering.

Detail that may be a clue, the ESXi lab was built with a Windows 2019 Server lab DVD source. The VirtualBox lab was built with a Windows 2019 Server Microsoft Download image. The VirtualBox lab has Schema Admins group in AD DS as part of the default install from the DVD, the ESXi lab DOES NOT and is built from the different media. Makes me wonder if there are other differences, unseen, that prevent the ESXi lab from successfully building the tiered administration setup.

Virtual Host??

Setting up Apache to support multiple websites on one host. My server already does that for my public websites.

However I want to control what is returned to the browser if a site isn’t available for some reason. So I’ve set up a virtual server with multiple sites. Each site works when enabled. However if the site is set up to be unavailable, disabled, no index file, etc. the default page returned to the browser is not what I’d like.

Need to identify a few fail conditions, see what the server returns when the condition exists, see if what’s returned for a given condition is the same regardless which site the failure is generated by, then figure out why the webserver is sending back the page it does.

Reasons not available:

  • site not being served, e.g. not enabled on server
  • site setting wrong, e.g. DocumentRoot invalid
  • site content wrong, no index file

Answers that might be returned:

  • site not available
  • forbidden
  • …other’s I’ve seen but don’t remember now

From what I’ve read it seems whatever’s in 000-defalut.conf should control which page/site loads when a site isn’t available. That’s not the result I’m getting.

Either I’m doing it wrong or I’m just not understanding what’s supposed to happen and how to make it happen.

More digging…

VBoxManage

Important VirtualBox command to be familiar with. Get virtual machine info that can be copy pasted into documents and other commands.

vboxmanage list runningvms

Also display running machine properties without having to navigate the UI. Good for quick review of network settings too.

vboxmanage showvminfo "VWebHostTest" | grep "Name: \|Rule"
Name:                        VWebHostTest
NIC 1 Rule(0):   name = Web8000, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8000, guest ip = , guest port = 8000
NIC 1 Rule(1):   name = Web8001, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8001, guest ip = , guest port = 8001
NIC 1 Rule(2):   name = Web8002, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8002, guest ip = , guest port = 8002
NIC 1 Rule(3):   name = Web8003, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8003, guest ip = , guest port = 8003
NIC 1 Rule(4):   name = Web8004, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8004, guest ip = , guest port = 8004
NIC 1 Rule(5):   name = ssh, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 2223, guest ip = , guest port = 22
NIC 1 Rule(6):   name = web8080, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8080, guest ip = , guest port = 8080
NIC 1 Rule(7):   name = web8800, protocol = tcp, host ip = , host port = 8800, guest ip = , guest port = 80