Author: Lisa

Signing Kernel Modules

The new servers being built at work use SecureBoot — something that you don’t even notice 99% of the time. But that 1% where you are doing something “strange” like trying to use OpenZFS … well, you’ve got to sign any kernel modules that you need to use. Just installing them doesn’t work — they won’t load.

To sign a kernel module, first you need to create a signing key and use mokutil to import it into the machine owner key store. 

cd /root
mkdir signing
cd signing
openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout MOK.priv -outform DER -out MOK.der -nodes -days 36500 -subj "/CN=MyOrg/"

mokutil --import MOK.der

When you run mokutil, you will set a password. This password will be needed to complete importing the key to the machine.

Get access to the console — out of band management, vSphere manager, stand in front of the server. Reboot, and there will be a “press any key” screen for ten seconds that begins the import process. Press any key!

Select “Enroll MOK”

View the key and verify it is the right one, then use ‘Continue’ to import it

Enter the password used when you ran mokutil

Then reboot

To verify your key has been successfully enrolled:

mokutil --list-enrolled

Postgresql with File System Compression – VDO and ZFS

Our database storage is sizable. To reduce the financial impact of storing so much data, we opted to use a compressed file system. This allows us to maintain, for example, 8TB of data in under 2TB of space. Unfortunately, the ZFS file system we use to compress our data is no longer “built in” with newer version of RedHat.

There are alternatives. BTRFS is a long-standing option, however it’s got reliability issues (we piloted BTRFS on one of the read only replicas, and the compression ratio is nowhere near as good — the 2TB of ZFS data filled the 10TB BTRFS disk even using the better compression option. And I/O was so slow there was a continual replication backlog). RedHat introduced Virtual Disk Optimizer to replace ZFS. In theory, it’s better since it also deduplicates data (e.g. if every one of us saved the same PPT presentation to the disk, only one copy would actually be stored). That’s great for email and file shares where a lot of people are likely to store the same information. Not so useful on a database server where there’s little to de-duplicate. It does, however, compress data … so we decided to try it out.

The results, unfortunately, are not spectacular. VDO does not allow you to do much customization of the compression. It’s on or off. I’ve found some people tweaking it up in unsupported ways, but the impetus behind trying VDO was that it’s supported by RedHat. Making unsupported changes to it defeats that purpose. And the compression that we’re seeing is far less than we get in ZFS. Our existing servers run between 4.5x and 6x compression

In VDO, however, we don’t even get a 2x compression factor. 11TB of information is stored in 8TB of space! That’s 1.4x

So, while we found the performance of VDO to be satisfactory and it’s really easy to use in newer RedHat releases … we’d have to increase our 20TB LUNs to 80TB to continue storing the data we store today. That seems like A Really Bad Idea(tm).

Seems like I’m going to have to sort out using OpenZFS on the new servers.

Tableau — Who Deleted That Workbook?!?

While Tableau doesn’t have anything nice like a ‘dumpster’ from which you can restore a deleted workbook, it does at least keep tables for historic events like workbook deletion. The following query finds records where a workbook with FOOBAR in its name was deleted. It lists all of the event info as well as info on the user who deleted it. Near as I can tell, the “created” date for the historical_events table is the date the workbook was deleted (from my restore, I know the workbook itself was created last year!)

SELECT historical_events.*, hist_workbooks.*, hist_users.*
FROM historical_events
left outer join historical_event_types on historical_event_types.type_id = historical_events.historical_event_type_id 
left outer join hist_workbooks on hist_workbooks.id = historical_events.hist_workbook_id 
left outer join hist_users on hist_users.id = historical_events.hist_actor_user_id 
WHERE historical_event_types.name = 'Delete Workbook'
and hist_workbooks.name like '%FOOBAR%'
;

Grilled Lamb

For Mother’s Day, we grilled lamb steaks. Anya made a garlic sauteed corn, and we had some cherry whiskey (since there was cherry wood in the wood fire … figured that would match). Quick salt and pepper on the steaks, then seared over the fire and cooked for about 20 minutes. Rested inside, and we had a delicious meal.

Oracle SQLNET.ORA Active Directory Anonymous Binds

A very, very long time ago (2002-ish), we moved to using AD to store our Oracle connections — it’s far easier to edit the one connection entry in Active Directory than to distribute the latest connection file to every desktop and server in the company. Frankly, they never get to the servers. Individuals enter the connections they need … and update them when something stops working and they find the new host/port/etc. Unfortunately, Oracle used an anonymous connection to retrieve the data. So we’ve had anonymous binds enabled in Active Directory ever since. I no longer support AD, so haven’t really kept up with it … until a coworker asked why this huge security vulnerability was specifically configured for our domain. And I gave him the whole history. While we were chatting, a quick search revealed that Oracle 21c and later clients actually can use a wallet for credentials in the sqlnet.ora file:

MES.LDAP_AUTHENTICATE_BIND = TRUE
NAMES.LDAP_AUTHENTICATE_BIND_METHOD = LDAPS_SIMPLE_AUTH
WALLET_LOCATION = (SOURCE = (METHOD = FILE)
(METHOD_DATA =  (DIRECTORY = /path/to/wallet.file)  )

From https://www.oracle.com/a/otn/docs/database/oracle-net-active-directory-naming.pdf

 

A Bird in your pocket?

I had clothes drying on the line, and Anya grabbed them just before sunset. She quickly tossed everything into a basket and brought it into the house. A short time later, I got the clothes out of the basket to fold. I took out a pair of Scott’s jeans and … out flies this little bird! No idea how she got in there, and I’m really glad she didn’t seem to be hurt in any way. We turned off all the interior lights, opened the front door, and turned out the outside light. A little following her around and trying to persuade her to go in the right direction and swoop, she flew outside.