Disable Windows Temporary IPv6 Address

In a "cmd" window with administrative rights, run the following commands:

netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=persistent
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=persistent

Then Restart your machine.

Shrew Soft VPN client group auth key auth-mutual-psk

If you are provided with a shrew-soft Windows VPN client from your company, and you would like to run a VPN client on Linux. You can either use the Shrew VPN client Linux version or another open source VPN client "vpnc".

To run vpnc, you will need to know the group password. If you export your Shrew VPN profile which is a plain text file, you will see a line in the file that starts with:


   b:auth-mutual-psk:


This is the group password, encoded with BASE64 format. So just copy the value and paste it to any web-based BASE64 decoder such as the one http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/ (This link happens to be on the top when I searched and it works fine), then you get the group password in plain-text.

Running User Mode Linux as normal non-root user

User Mode Linux (UML) is running linux over linux. The guest linux OS runs as a regular process on the host CPU. UML has been around for a while, the famous windows-based "coLinux" is inspired by it.

An unique feature of UML is that you can run it on a powerful Linux server as a regular user. You do not need any sort of root permission to run it. In fact, this is the only feasible solution for a non-root user (other than QEMU running in emulation mode which is much much slower). UML in fast.

To get UML running, you need two things: the kernel and the file system. UML provides the kernel and the compilation is straightforward.

To get file system, you need to have root access on a Linux machine (does not have to be your final HOST machine) and do the following:

(root@host)# apt-get install debootstrap

(root@host)# cd /tmp
(root@host)# dd if=/dev/zero of=debian.bin bs=1M count=1 seek=4096
(root@host)# mkfs.ext3 debian.bin

(root@host)# mkdir -p /mnt; mount -o loop debian.bin /mnt
(root@host)# debootstrap squeeze /mnt

If you are in the year after 2012, Replace "squeeze" with whatever the latest debian stable version name is. 

(root@host)# chroot /mnt 
(chroot@host)# mkdir /dev/ubd
(chroot@host)# cd /dev/ubd
(chroot@host)# for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7; do mknod $i b 98 $[ $i * 16 ]; done
(chroot@host)# cat > /etc/fstab << EOF
/dev/ubd/0      /        xfs    defaults 0 0
/dev/ubd/1      none     swap   defaults 0 0
none            /proc    proc   defaults 0 0
sys             /sys     sysfs  defaults 0 0
none            /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
EOF


(chroot@host)# echo uml0 > /etc/hostname
(chroot@host)# exit
(root@host)# rm -f /mnt/root/.bash_history
(root@host)# umount /mnt



Now the file debian.bin has the latest debian base installation. This is your File System. 

Now you need to download and compile Slirp from http://slirp.sourceforge.net/. Slirp is a cool hack that allows UML limited access to the network by 
tunneling it over regular UDP and TCP connections. This is really the 
key to making UML useful as a regular user. The other (better) methods 
for accessing the network need root access. Be sure to apply the latest 
patch, as otherwise it does not work. It is critical to edit config.h and uncomment the line that says #define FULL_BOLT. This will make Slirp go as fast as it can. Otherwise, slirp will only go 115kbps. Trying to do "apt-get" over that is painful. 

Copy the slirp program you build to /home/YOU/bin/

./linux ubd0=debian6.bin con=pts con0=fd:0,fd:1 eth0=slirp,,/home/user/bin/slirp

I also add "single rw" to get linux boot into single mode and get me started. Once everything is running, I take out "single rw" so that all the daemons are started correctly.

I also have a file ~/.slirprc to direct TCP connections so that I can ssh into the UML. 

#cat ~/.slirprc
redir 2200 22

StrongSwan Configuration Guide

Recently I got a chance to study strongswan and its configurations. This document intends to record the findings, in the hope to help myself in the future and to help others too.

Strongswan is open-source IPSec/VPN software. It was based on FreeSwan, whose development is now stopped. Another descendent of FreeSwan is “OpenSwan”. I have no experience with OpenSwan, and therefore will be focusing on StrongSwan in this document.

By the way, I found the authors of StrongSwan (Andrea and Martini) very much helpful. The know strongswan inside out and was able to explain things really well in many of the mailinglist posts and also in the wiki documentation. This is a great strength of strongswan.

StrongSwan’s core VPN behavior is largely controlled by the configuration file /etc/ipsec.conf. There are many possible lines there you can put in this file. Some lines are extremely important, and a good understanding of what they mean is critical to the successful establishment of the VPN tunnels.

There are a few types of VPN Connections:

1. Host to Host
2. Net to Net
3. Host to Net

Host to Host is fairly rare, and many of the things discussed here also apply to apply to it. So I will focus on “net-net” and “host-net”.

The following settings are tested with StrongSwan 4.5.3 and 4.6.1.

1.      Common Configuration

Common configuration lines in /etc/ipsec.conf

config setup

        strictcrlpolicy=no

        charonstart=yes

        plutostart=no

conn %default

        ikelifetime=60m

        keylife=20m

        rekeymargin=3m

        keyingtries=1

        keyexchange=ikev2

        esp=aes256gcm16,aes128gcm16!

        mobike=yes

        leftikeport=4500

        rightikeport=4500

Explanations:

“strictcrlpolicy” indicates whether CRL is mandatory or not. If CRL is not mandatory, put no. Otherwise, put yes.

“Charon” is the IKEv2 daemon, and “Pluto” is the IKEv1 daemon. In this document, we are only using “IKEv2” and will focus on IKEv2 options only.

“Mobike” stands for Mobile IKE. This is for the case where the public IP of the device may change. If Mobike is enabled, strongswan may float its communication port from UDP port 500 to UDP port 4500 and start telling the Linux kernel to use UDP encapsulation for ESP packets.  It is a good thing to enable if there is a chance that your device’s public IP may change.

“leftikepor” and “rightikeport” tells strongswan to always use UDP port 4500, from the very beginning of IKEv2 message exchange.

2.      Net to Net

2.1   VPN Server

A working net-net VPN SERVER configuration file

Conn myvpn

    left=%defaultroute

    leftcert=/etc/certs/vpn.cert

    leftsubnet=192.168.17.0/24

    leftfirewall=yes

    right=%any

    rightsubnet=0.0.0.0/0

auto=add

Left means “my side”. Right means “my peer’s side”.  You could switch it the other way, but this is how most people use it and is a common convention. Unless one really wants to be different and asking for troubles, it is strongly suggested that this common convention be followed.

“left” is your IP address. This can be set to “%defaultroute” where the system will figure out the value based on the “right” IP address.

“leftcert” is the certificate file of the left. The file path can be an absolute path (starting with /) or a relative path, in which case, the system will look for certs under /etc/ipsec.d/certs/

“leftsubnet”: This is “the” critical line that tells strongswan you want a subnet tunnel instead of a host tunnel. Without this line, the strongswan will try to make a host-only tunnel.  This is the subnet on “your” device’s side. Your peers will only be able to talk to IPs in this subnet.

“leftfirewall”: optional. Tells strongswan to automatically insert firewall rules (iptables rules) when a connection is up or down.

“right” is the peer’s address. For server, this can be “%any”.

“rightsubnet”: similar to “leftsubnet”, this line is critical to indicating that you want to connect to a “subnet”, not just a remote host. Unless “leftsubnet”, you can put “0.0.0.0/0” indicating that you just accept the subnet that the peer defines.

“auto=add” means when you run “ipsec start”, the ipsec daemon just listens, not initiate a connection. “auto=start” means that when you run “ipsec start”, the ipsec daemon will actually try to initiate a call. So “auto=add” is good for servers, and “auto=start” is good for clients. “auto=start” is equivalent to “auto=add” plus “ipsec up MYCONNECTION”

We skipped “leftid=”. leftid by default is derived from the leftcert certificate file, using the Distinguished Name, in the format of “C=XX, O=XXX, CN=XXX, …”. There are any forms of ID that can be used by the leftid/rightid field, but in this document we chose to use this format. See the end of this document for more detailed description of leftid/rightid field.

A working net-net VPN CLIENT configuration file

Net-net is pretty much symmetrical. You can run the above same configuration file on client side and it will work. I chose to one more configuration line:

rightid="C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=server"

This tells the client to check the server’s certificate ID and make sure it matches this ID. This is just to be safe so that I know I did not connect to some other server. Keep this mind this is after the server certificate is being authenticated by the CA certificate.

3.      Host to Net

3.1   VPN Server

A working host-net VPN SERVER configuration file

conn server

leftcert=server.cert

leftfirewall=yes

right=%any

rightsourceip=192.168.22.0/24

auto=add

Notice that we simply removed “leftsubnet” and “rightsubnet” from the net-net VPN SERVER configuration, and here we have a host-net VPN SERVER.

We added one more line “rightsourceip”. This enables the server to “automatically assign a virtual IP address to the connecting peer”.

Note that in IKEv1 (Pluto) "rightsourceip" can be used to specify the internal side IP address. For IKEv2 (Charon) this is done automatically by the charon daemon and rightsourceip takes up the new meaning of requesting a virtual IP address. If the server does not have "rightsourceip" configured but client has "leftsourceip=x.x.x.x" configured, the tunnel establishment will fail because the server is rejecting the request for a virtual IP address.

3.2  VPN Client

A working host-net VPN CLIENT configuration file

left=%defaultroute

leftcert=client.cert

leftsourceip=%config

leftfirewall=yes

right=192.168.5.1

rightid="C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=server"

auto=start

The only special line here is “leftsourceip”, which tells the client to obtain a virtual IP address from the VPN Server.

4.       leftid and rightid, what to use?

The ID by which a peer is identifying itself during IKE main mode can by any of the ID types IPV4_ADDR, FQDN, USER_FQDN or DER_ASN1_DN. If one of the first three ID types is used, then the accompanying X.509 certificate of the peer must contain a matching subjectAltName field of the type ipAddress (IP:), dnsName (DNS:) or rfc822Name (email:), respectively. With the fourth type DER_ASN1_DN, the identifier must completely match the subject field of the peer's certificate. One of the two possible representations of a Distinguished Name (DN) is the LDAP-type format

     rightid="C=CH,O=Linux strongSwan, CN=sun.strongswan.org"

Additional whitespace can be added everywhere as desired since it will be automatically eliminated by the X.509 parser. An exception is the single whitespace between individual words , like e.g. in Linux strongSwan, which is preserved by the parser.

The Relative Distinguished Names (RDNs) can alternatively be separated by a slash ( '/')  instead of a comma (',')

rightid="/C=CH/O=Linux strongSwan/CN=sun.strongswan.org"

This is the representation extracted from the certificate by the OpenSSL command line option

openssl x509 -in sunCert.pem -noout –subject

The following X.501 RDNs are supported by strongSwan

DC	Domain Component
C	Country
ST	State or province
L	Locality or town
O	Organisation
OU	Organisational Unit
CN	Common Name
ND	Name Distinguisher, used with CN
N	Name
G	Given name
S	Surname
I	Initials
T	Personal title
E	E-mail
Email	E-mail
emailAddress	E-mail
SN	Serial number
serialNumber	Serial number
D	Description
UID	User ID
ID	X.500 Unique Identifier
TCGID	[Siemens] Trust Center Global ID
unstructuredName	Unstructured Name
UN	Unstructured Name
employeeNumber	Employee Number
EN	Employee Number

5.      Recommended Documentation

1. http://www.strongswan.org/docs/readme.htm I’ve found this readme file very helpful, although it may be a little old. Information presented here still applies.  It is a good starting point, and gives you a good base understanding of everything. This should be the first read, and then you can move on to other documentation such as the wiki.
2. Strong Swan WiKi, which contains “lots of” information. Here is a guide to get you started:
1. IpsecConf http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/IpsecConf
2. ConnSection http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/ConnSection
3. ConfigurationExamples: http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/UserDocumentation#Configuration-Examples

ubuntu kvm KSM high cpu usage

Source: http://www.interphero.com/?p=219

If you use KVM virtualization, under Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS, with more than one virtual host running at a time, you may have noticed ksmd eating a lot of CPU cycles.  This behavior was not present under 8.04 Server LTS.  Apparently, the kmsd functionality was enabled by default in 10.04.  KSM – Kernel Samepage Merging – merges memory pages between virtual hosts to save space.  Unfortunately, for some, it also utilizes a lot of CPU resources to perform this function.  For my use case, I don’t care about the amount of RAM occupied by my virtual hosts, indeed, I installed far more RAM than I need in my server so that I don’t have to worry about a lack of RAM. 

If you would like to disable ksmd, edit your /etc/default/qemu-kvm file as follows:

# To disable qemu-kvm’s page merging feature, set KSM_ENABLED=0 and
# sudo restart qemu-kvm
KSM_ENABLED=0
#SLEEP_MILLISECS=2000

Then, as the comments in the file state, restart qemu-kvm. (stop your VM, then "sudo stop qemu-kvm", then "sudo start qemu-kvm")

Net-snmp debug token list

http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Debug_tokens_5.4.2.1

For example: register_mib is an useful token for debugging SNMP AGENTX subagents.

crontab for non-root user

If you could not get your crontab file to work with non-root user, and you have made sure the crond is running and your crontab syntax is correct, check this:

Make sure there is an empty line as last line in your crontab file.

This fixed my problem.