Category: System Administration

Windows Admin Center – Changing the Port

Where I work, the “OS Support” and “Application Support” functions are different verticals. Sometimes what constitutes an “OS” and what constitutes an “application” is nebulous. In this case, we needed to install a web-based application but found TCP port 443 was already bound to Windows. Unfortunately, the OS support group disclaims any ownership of “Windows Admin Center” and told me I was welcome to fix it myself. So … oddly, there isn’t any easily located configuration for this thing. You have to go through the add/remove programs and modify the installation of Windows Admin Center.

Select “Change”

You will get the configuration panel — here, you can specify a different port for the Admin Center.

Let the installer complete …

Voila — not using port 443!

Unable to Use JMX Remotely for Kafka Stats

I noticed, today, that our Kafka Manager interface only shows details from one server — the one where we run Kafka Manager. We’ve done everything that we need to do in order to get this working — the port shows as open with nmap, the command to run Kafka includes all of the settings. I’ve even tried setting the JMX hostname, but still there is just one server reporting data

Then I happened across an article online that detailed how JMX actually uses three ports — the configured port 9999 and two other randomly selected and non-configurable ports. I used netstat to list all of the ports in use by the Java PID running my Kafka server and, voila, there were two odd-ball high ports (30000’s and 40000’s). I added those additional ports to the firewall rules and … I’ve got data for all of the Kafka servers!

This is obviously a short-term solution as the two randomly selected ports will be different when I restart the service next time. I’d prefer to leave the firewall in place (i.e. not just open all ports >1024 between the Kafka Manager host and all of the Kafka servers) so might put together a script to identify the “oddball” ports associated to the Java pid and add them to transient firewalld rules. But the last server restart was back in 2021 … so I might just manually add them after the upgrade next week and worry about something ‘better’ next year!

KDE Dolphin — Unable to Move Files and Folders

Scott was trying to move some backup files from /a/path/to/backup to /a/path/to-a-different/backup — he’s using Dolphin & has a tab open to each of the folders in question. He chown’d /a/path to his account, chmod’d /a/path so user can read and write. But using the copy/paste option … nothing happens.

I came across a few old (and closed) bugs that seemed to produce errors in this same situation — but the reporters were able to perform their copy/move operations when they used the same tab instead of having one folder open in each tab. It worked … inexplicable, but we have success!

Samba Server Not Appearing In Network Locations (Fedora)

One of our Samba servers — unfortunately the file server — did not show up when browsing the network locations in Dolphin. I map drives from Windows, so it’s not something I’ve really noticed … but Scott is trying to avoid using network mounts and wanted to access everything through “Network”. Several other servers — ones that Scott built — show up, but not the one where we actually store our files.

There’s no salient difference in the samba configurations. But … it turns out that the “newer” way Samba advertises its presence is through mDNS. And I routinely disable the avahi-daemon because, well, I “don’t use” mDNS for anything. Turns out I do use mDNS … so I had to enable and start the avahi-daemon (and restart Samba). Voila, the file server is visible in the list of network places.

Running a Docker Container without *RUNNING* The Container

I needed to get files from a container image that I couldn’t actually start (not enough memory, and finding a box with more memory wasn’t a reasonable option) — fortunately, you can override the container entrypoint to start the container without actually running whatever the container would normally run.

docker run -ti --entrypoint=bash imageName

Yum Does Not Work On CentOS

Since this is the fifth time this month that I’ve spun up some CentOS image and been stymied by the inability to install new packages … I’m going to write down the sed commands that magic the default yum repository configuration to something that’s still functional. 

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*
sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*

Firewalld — Adding and Removing a Forwarding Rule

(Sorry, Anya … after today, I’ll try to not post anything about computers for three days!) Linux restricts non-root users from opening ports <1024. It’s generally a good idea not to run your services as root. Which means, unfortunately, we end up running a lot of services on nonstandard ports (so frequently that 1389 and 1636 are a quasi-standard port for LDAP and LDAPS, 8080 and 8443 quasi-standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS). But having to remember to add the nonstandard port to a web URL is an annoyance for users — I’ve seen a lot of people fix this by adding a load balanced VIP or NGINX proxy in front of the service to handle port translations. But there is a quick and easy way to handle port translation without any additional equipment. Most Linux hosts have firewalld running, and you can tell the firewall to forward the port for you. In this example, I’m letting my Kibana users access my web service using https://kibana.example.com without needing to append the :5601:

firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=public –add-forward-port=port=443:proto=tcp:toport=5601

Should you decide against the port forwarding, the same command with –remove-forward-port deregisters the rule:
firewall-cmd –zone=public –remove-forward-port=port=443:proto=tcp:toport=5601

Using the Dell 1350CN On Fedora

We picked up a really nice color laser printer — a Dell 1350CN. It was really easy to add it to my Windows computer — download driver, install, voila there’s a printer. We found instructions for using a Xerox Phaser 6000 driver. It worked perfectly on Scott’s old laptop, but we weren’t able to install the RPM on his new laptop — it insisted that a dependency wasn’t found: libstdc++.so.6 CXXABI_1.3.1

Except, checking the file, CXXABI_1.3.1 is absolutely in there:

2022-09-17 13:04:19 [lisa@fc36 ~/]# strings /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 | grep CXXABI
CXXABI_1.3
CXXABI_1.3.1
CXXABI_1.3.2
CXXABI_1.3.3
CXXABI_1.3.4
CXXABI_1.3.5
CXXABI_1.3.6
CXXABI_1.3.7
CXXABI_1.3.8
CXXABI_1.3.9
CXXABI_1.3.10
CXXABI_1.3.11
CXXABI_1.3.12
CXXABI_1.3.13
CXXABI_TM_1
CXXABI_FLOAT128

We’ve tried using the foo2hbpl package with the Dell 1355 driver to no avail. It would install, but we weren’t able to print. So we returned to the Xerox package.

Turns out the driver package we were trying to use is a 32-bit driver (even though the download says 32 and 64 bit). From a 32-bit perspective, we really didn’t have libstdc++ — a quick dnf install libstdc++.i686 installed the library along with some friends.

Xerox’s rpm installed without error … but, attempting to print, just yielded an error saying that the filter failed. I had Scott use ldd to test one of the filters (any of the files within /usr/lib/cups/filter/Xerox_Phaser_6000_6010/ — it indicated the “libcups.so.2” could not be found. We also needed to install the 32-bit cups-libs.i686 package. Finally, he’s able to print from Fedora 36 to the Dell 1350cn!

 

 

Finding PCI Devices

You can use dmidecode to list all sorts of information about the system — there is a list of device types that you can use with the “-t” option

   Type   Information
   ────────────────────────────────────────────
      0   BIOS
      1   System
      2   Baseboard
      3   Chassis
      4   Processor
      5   Memory Controller
      6   Memory Module
      7   Cache
      8   Port Connector
      9   System Slots
     10   On Board Devices
     11   OEM Strings
     12   System Configuration Options
     13   BIOS Language
     14   Group Associations
     15   System Event Log
     16   Physical Memory Array
     17   Memory Device
     18   32-bit Memory Error
     19   Memory Array Mapped Address
     20   Memory Device Mapped Address
     21   Built-in Pointing Device
     22   Portable Battery
     23   System Reset
     24   Hardware Security
     25   System Power Controls
     26   Voltage Probe
     27   Cooling Device
     28   Temperature Probe
     29   Electrical Current Probe
     30   Out-of-band Remote Access
     31   Boot Integrity Services
     32   System Boot
     33   64-bit Memory Error
     34   Management Device
     35   Management Device Component
     36   Management Device Threshold Data
     37   Memory Channel
     38   IPMI Device
     39   Power Supply
     40   Additional Information
     41   Onboard Devices Extended Information
     42   Management Controller Host Interface

Blah

[lisa@fedora ~/]# dmidecode -t 9
…
Handle 0x0024, DMI type 9, 17 bytes
System Slot Information
Designation: Slot6
Type: 32-bit PCI
Current Usage: In Use
Length: Short
ID: 6
Characteristics:
3.3 V is provided
Opening is shared
PME signal is supported
Bus Address: 0000:0a:02.0

The “Bus Address” value corresponds to information from lspci:

[lisa@fedora ~/]# lspci | grep “0a:02.0”
0a:02.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. CX23418 Single-Chip MPEG-2 Encoder with Integrated Analog Video/Broadcast Audio Decoder