Roedie’s Wonderful World of Whatever

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For some time I’ve been wondering why none of my Debian/Ubuntu workstations would resolve something like ‘proxy.mycompany.local’. Simpy resolving ‘proxy’ would work.

I already knew that .local is not a correct tld, but since it was recomended by Microsoft to use this when installing Active Directory we used it. I never had any problems with it because most of the time I just use ip addresses when I need to access a server.

Now I installed a proxy server and a new mail relay server so I started using them as proxy.mycompany.local and relay.mycompany.local. The I found out that none of my Debian or Ubuntu workstations would resolve those addresses. At first I blamed the Microsoft DNS server for this. That’s the easiest and most logical thing to do . But Windows XP/Vista clients did resolve those addresses. Strange huh?

Then I started wireshark on my client. I did a query for proxy.mycompany.local and then there was…. an MDNS request instead of a normal DNS request?!?

This quickly gave me the conclusion that it was something avahi related because this does all the zeroconf stuff with Debian/Ubuntu. Avahi seems to be configured to pick up any request ending in .local and make MDNS requests for it. This must be a problem for more people because there must be loads of Microsoft networks out there ending in .local. I won’t say this is a fault from the avahi guys because it’s also completely wrong to use .local as tld.

My current solution is to just simply disable Avahi on my workstations. On Ubuntu I just do ‘System -> Administration -> Services’ and disable ‘Multicast DNS Service Discovery’ there. With Debian I just disable the startup of Avahi in /etc/default/avahi-daemon by settting ‘AVAHI_DAEMON_START=0′.

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There’s another way to create vlan interfaces with Debian/Ubuntu. It’s even shorter than the previous example. Just add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0.10
  iface eth0.10 inet static
  addres 10.0.0.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.0.0.1

Just make sure you dit ‘apt-get install vlan’ or something like that.

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It’s just that I can’t remember how to make vlan’s witch Debian. I always have to re-invent the wheel or look at old configs which are never where I think they are… So… Here it is so I don’t have to remember it and maybe some other people will find it useful.

In /etc/network/interfaces you add the following:

# Vlan 10
iface vlan10 inet static
    adress 10.0.0.2
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.0.0.1
    vlan_raw_device eth0

This will add vlan10 to interface eth0. It’s so easy but I just cannot remember it when I need it.

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I’ve backported keepalived from Debian Lenny to Etch (4.0). Both i386 and amd64 are available for download here. There was no need for changes from the original package, only a recompile.

I’m thinking about packaging feedbackd and use it together with keepalived to adjust the weight of realservers during runtime. I’m not sure if it’s feasible, else I will write my own poor mans implementation.

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Because the release of Nagios 3.0 is comming closer, I wanted to have a look at it. I’ve found some nice packages on the blog of Sven Velt. Those packages are for i386 only and I needed amd64 packages. I just took the sources and recompiled them for the amd64 architecture. You can get them here. I take no credit for the packages because I merely compiled it.

Nagios 3 looks good. It has some nice new features like the multi line output for plugins. This wil likely make it possible to run more checks with less stress on the Nagios server. I’ll post more when I find more nice features

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Uwe Hermann has written a nice article on how to install your laptop in a secure way using Debian GNU/Linux. It’s a bit paranoid but a very nice read. It uses dm-crypt, SELinux  and covers some basic practices anyone should implement on their laptops.

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I’ve updated the Debian on NX7400 page some more. You should get a basic working laptop using this

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Today I’ve created a page called ‘Debian on NX7400′. Here I will try to create a small document with info on how Debian is performing on this laptop. As of now the following works nicely:

• Video card (Intel 945GM)
• DVD/CD writer
• Wireless Card (Intel 3945ABG Needed to download the driver from ipw3945.sf.net
• Soundcard (after upgrading from the current 2.6.16 etch kernel to a custom 2.6.17.10 kernel)
• USB stuff…
• The duo processor (after installing the -smp kernel)

Well most likely I forgot stuff….. Take a look here.

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