Working Notes Archives - Page 5 of 14

VirtualBox, Windows Guest Virtual Machines, and The VirtIO Network Interface

Apr 302017

Despite how long I have been running Windows in virtual machines (as far back as Vmware Workstation 1.0), I have never gotten around to looking at the virtio network interface – except for naïvely turning it on once, finding it didn’t work, and turning it off – so I decided to have a look at it. I was prompted to do this by a suggestion that emulating the NIC hardware as opposed to simply using a virtual communications channel to the host would hurt network performance. Good job I chose a long weekend because I ran into a few issues :-

Getting appropriate test tools took a while because most of the tools I know of are very old; I ended up using iperf2 on both the Linux main host and the Windows 10 guest (within the “Windows
The “stable” virtio drivers (also called “NetKVM”) drivers didn’t work. Specifically they could send packets but not receive them (judging from the DORA conversation that was more of a DODO). I installed the “latest” drivers from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Windows_Virtio_Drivers. Note to late readers: this was as of 2017-04-30; different versions may offer different results.
Upgrading my ancient Debian Jessie kernel to 4.9 on the off-chance it was a kernel bug turned into a bit of an exercise what with ZFS disappearing after the upgrade, and sorting out the package dependencies to get it re-installed was “interesting” (for small values of course). No data loss though.

I ran two tests :-

sudo nping –tcp -p 445 –count 200 –data-len 1280 ${ip of windows guest) – to judge how reliable the network connection was.
On the Linux host: sudo iperf -p 50001
On the Windows guest (from within the Ubuntu-based environment): sudo iperf -p 50001 -c ${ip of Linux host}

Device	nping result	iperf result
Windows guest (virtual Intel Pro 1000 MT Desktop	1 lost	416 Mbits/sec
Windows guest (virtio)	0 lost	164 Mbits/sec
CuBox running ARM Linux	n/a	425 Mbits/sec

Which is not the result I was expecting. And yes I did repeat the tests a number of times (I’ve cheated and chosen the best numbers for the above table), and no I did not confuse which NIC was configured at the time of the tests nor did I get the tests mixed up. And to those who claim that the use of the Ubuntu environment screwed things up, that appears not to be the case – I repeated the test with a Windows compiled version of iperf with much the same results.

So it seems despite common sense indicating that a NIC “hardware” custom designed for a virtual environment should perform better than an emulation of a hardware NIC, the actual result in this case was the other way around. Except for the nping result which shows the loss of a single packet with the emulated hardware NIC.

Increasing the Size Of HTML Emails In Claws Mail

Computing, Working Notes No Responses »

Apr 032017

Since getting a HiDPI screen, I have been plagued with claws mail merrily doing the right thing with proper emails, but showing HTML emails at a tiny size.

Whilst it doesn’t appear to be a preference you can change in the normal way, there is a zoom variable you can change within the Claws preferences file. Quit claws, and edit ~/.claws-mail/.clawsrc and scroll down through the file until you find the “[Fancy]” section :-

[fancy]
enable_images=1
enable_remote_content=1
enable_scripts=0
enable_plugins=0
open_external=1
zoom_level=100
enable_java=0
enable_proxy=0

Change the “zoom_level” to a suitable percentage (such as 200).

Exim: Rejecting Mail With No Reverse DNS

Computing, Linux, Security, Working Notes No Responses »

Feb 122017

A very long time ago, I used to collect spam in order to graph how much spam a single mail server was likely to get over time, and almost as long ago, I lost interest in maintaining it. As a consequence I still get a ton of spam every day and after a long period of procrastination I have been slowly raising defences against spam.

This particular recipe is not really a defence against spam – it verifies that the remote server is properly DNS registered with a reverse DNS registration – in other words that the IP address it is connecting from is registered. This is a requirement for all mail servers, and as it turns out, spammers don’t care for registering their servers in the DNS.

This ACL snippet goes into the ACL for checking the recipient or for checking the message :-

 deny
   message = Your mail server is not properly DNS registered
   log_message = BLOCKED: No rDNS
   condition = ${if eq{$host_lookup_failed} {1} {1}{0}}
   # Check rDNS and block if not registered

There are three items of interest :-

The message is intended to be easily read by recipients to determine what the problem is. It turns out that many people do not read NDRs, but if we get the message right at least we are doing the right thing.
The log_message is intended to make automating log parsing easier.
Within the condition, the $host_lookup_failed variable indicates that the reverse DNS lookup returned NXDOMAIN and not that it timed out (which would be $host_lookup_deferred).

That’s all there is to this little piece of configuration.

Converting ihex Format To Binary Under Linux

Computing, Linux, Working Notes No Responses »

Jan 052016

A bit of a simple one this … if you are looking at converting an Intel hex format file that looks like the following :-

2016-01-05_2123

Then it is relatively trivial under Linux (Debian). The relevant tool is probably installed anyway; unless you are not compiling software which may be a marginal activity for weird people but so is converting ihex files. But just in case, you can install it with: sudo apt-get install binutils.

Once installed (or being already present) the conversion process is as simple as :-

» objcopy -I ihex -O binary somefile.hex somefile.bin

Be careful to specify the second file name or objcopy will overwrite the original hex file (don’t ask how I discovered this!).

Getting The Maximum Of A Set Of Numbers

Computing, Linux, Working Notes No Responses »

Dec 102015

damascus-unix-prompt

You have a a column of numbers that you have produced in some manner such as :-

$ awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log
...
100935
12197
3606
84653
4498
99110
4762
3001
10889
12611
12249
12245
136599
49097
6668

And you want a quick and dirty way of finding the largest number. Well there is a way but it is perhaps the least efficient way to do it, and that is to sort the numbers into numerical order and use “head” to display the first one :-

$ awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log | sort -rn | head -1
5476168

But frankly there must be a better method. And yes there is if you happen to be using zsh (or possibly others, but this has been tested with zsh). Simply iterate over the values assigning the current value to the “max” variable if the current variable is larger :-

$ max=0; for x in $(awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log); [[ $x -gt $max ]] && max=$x; echo $max
5476168

You may be wondering why I don’t simply use the ability of awk to perform calculations. Well that is certainly possible, but I may not always be using awk to produce the numbers in the first place, and this is supposed to be a generic recipe.

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