Setting up an environment for benchmarking XDP load balancer - linux

I want to do benchmarking against XDP LBs which are deployed within virtual machines. Besides these LBs, there exist a ingress switch (also a VM) which helps splitting the traffic to each LB.
Is ECMP the most-recommended way to be used within the ingress switch here? If it isn't, is there any better (or appropriate) way for my scerario?
I was earlier using ECMP but it's somehow not forwarding traffic properly (tcpdump at another machine didn't sniff any packets came out from it). I want to know that whether this is a feasible way before doing any further check against my ECMP configuration.
Any advice is appreciated!

Related

Is a DNS Cache Manager necessary to accurately test the performance of my web application?

What I'm doing:
I have several servers that sit behind my load balancer, hosting a dummy website. I am trying to profile the performance of the servers and load balancer with Jmeter.
What I'm unsure of:
I was recommended to use the DNS Cache Manager option in my Jmeter configuration. However, is this necessary? Since I'm using a load balancer, doesn't Jmeter only see the LB's IP address?
If your LB has only one IP address - it doesn't really make a lot of sense. If more than one (like described here)- it's highly recommendable (if not mandatory)
Moreover DNS Cache Manager has nice feature of DNS entries override so you can transform IP addresses into human-readable meaningful values like "appserver1", "appserver2", "LB", "DB", etc.
More information: The DNS Cache Manager: The Right Way To Test Load Balanced Apps

NodeJS TLS/TCP server in need of an external firewall

Problem:
I have an AWS EC2 instance running FreeBSD. In there, I'm running a NodeJS TLS/TCP server. I'd like to create a set of rules (in my NodeJS application) to be able to individually block IP addresses programmatically based on a few logical conditions.
I'd like to run an external (not on the same machine/instance) firewall or load-balancer, that I can control from NodeJS programmatically, such that when certain conditions are given, I can block a specific remote-address(IP) before it reaches the NodeJS instance.
Things I've tried:
I have initially looked into nginx as an option, running it on a second instance, and placing my NodeJS server behind it, but after skimming through the NGINX
Cookbook
Advanced Recipes for High Performance
Load Balancing I've learned that only the NGINX Plus (the paid version) allows for remote/API control & customization. While I believe that paying $3500/license is not too much (considering all NGINX Plus' features), I simply can not afford to buy it at this point in time; in addition the only feature I'd be using (at this point) would be the remote API control and the IP address blocking.
My second thought was to go with the AWS/ELB (elastic-load-balancer) by integrating AWS' SDK into my project. That sounded feasible, unfortunately, after reading a few forum threads and part of their documentation (unless I'm mistaken) it seems these two features I need are not available on the AWS/ELB. AWS seems to offer an entire different service called WAF that I honestly don't understand very well (both as a service and from a feature-stand-point).
I have also (briefly) looked into CloudFlare, as it was recommended in one of the posts, here on Sackoverflow, though I can't really tell if their firewall would allow this level of (remote) control.
Question:
What are my options? What would you guys recommend I did?
I think Nginx provide such kind of functionality please refer to link
If you want to block an IP with Node TCP you can just edit a nginx config file and deny IP address.
Frankly speaking, If I were you, I would use AWS WAF but if you don’t want to use it, you can simply use Node JS
In Node JS You should have a global array variable where you will store all blocked IP addresses and upon connection, you will check whether connected host IP is in blocked IP variable. However there occurs a problem when machine or application is restarted, you will lose all information about blocked IP-s. So as a solution to that you can just setup Redis (It is key-value database but there are also other datatypes) DB and store blocked IP-s there. Inasmuch as Redis DB is in RAM all interaction with DB will be instantly and as long as machine or node is restarted, Redis makes a backup on hard drive and it syncs from it and continue to work in RAM with old databases.

Wide area service discovery via bonjur / avahi

I'm looking into wide area service discovery and bonjur / avahi seem to be really good.
However, I'm a bit confused about how all this works?
So:
I have a bunch of services running in a cloud.
I have clients which can be located anywhere in the world.
I want the clients to automatically discover the services in the cloud.
I need the clients to be absolutely zero conf, so they don't know IPs, ports, nothing.
If I understand it correctly, this can be done using the above mentioned dns-sd libs. I have full access to a DNS server, so I suppose, the services can register themselves on startup using these libs and then the data can be spread through DNS servers world wide.
The clients can obtain the advertised info by querying the DNS record of my domain using bonjur / avahi tech, right?
All I need to do is to link the client with bonjur / avahi libs, and tell it which domain it should use (query).
Is this correct?
Am I missing something here or is it how this works?
Thanks in advance!
Avahi does not currently support publishing to a wide-area server, though it can browse wide-area. So if you can dynamically update a DNS server somewhere with the appropriate records Avahi would be able to see it.
You do however potentially have more problems to solve here including port mapping/nat traversal which Avahi does not address at all.

Windows Active Directory Domain setup remotely through univention using samba4

I have a slight problem bit of the back story. recently ive been trying to test out univention which is a linux distribution with the goal of being able to replace Microsoft active directory.
I tested it locally and all went reasonably well after a few minor issues i then decided to test it remotely as the company wants to allow remote users to access this so i used myhyve.com to host it and its now been setup successfully and works reasonably well.
however
my main problem is DNS based as when trying to connect to the domain the only way windows will recognize it is by editing the network adapter and setting ip v4 dns server address to the ip address of the server hosting the univention active directory replacement. although this does allow every thing to work its not ideal and dns look up on the internet are considerably longer. i was wondering if any one had any ideas or have done something similar and encountered this problems before and know a work around. i want to avoid setting up a vpn if possible.
after initially registering the computer on the domain i am able to remove the dns server address and just use a couple of amendments to the HOST file to keep it running but this still leads to having issues connecting to the domain controller sometimes and is not ideal. any ideas and suggestions would be greatly received.
.Michael
For the HOST entries, the most likely issue is, that there are several service records a computer in the domain needs. I'm not sure, whether these can be provided via the HOST file or not but you'll definitely have authentication issues if they are missing. To see the records your domain is using issue the following commands on the UCS system.
/usr/share/univention-samba4/scripts/check_essential_samba4_dns_records.sh
For the slow resolution of the DNS records there are several points where you could start looking. My first test would be whether or not you are using a forwarder for the web DNS requests and whether or not the forwarder is having a decent speed. To check if you are using one, type
ucr search dns/forwarder
If you get a valid IP for either of the UCR Variables, dns/forwarder1, dns/forwarder2 or dns/forwarder3, you are forwarding your DNS requests to a different Server. If all of them are empty or not valid IPs then your server is doing the resolution itself.
Not using a forwarder is often slow, as the DNS servers caching is optimized for the AD operations, like the round robin load balancing. Likewise a number of ISPs require you to use a forwarder to minimize the DNS traffic. You can simply define a forwarder using ucr, I use Google on IPv4 for the example
ucr set dns/forwarder1='8.8.8.8'
The other scenario might be a slow forwarder. To check it try to query the forwarder directly using the following command
dig univention.com #(ucr get dns/forwarder1)
If it takes long, then there is nothing the UCS server can do, you'll simply have to choose a different forwarder from the ucr command above.
If neither of the above helps, the next step would be to check whether there are error messages for the named daemon in the syslog file. Normally these come when you are trying to manually remove software or if the firewall configuration got changed.
Kevin
Sponsored post, as I work for Univention North America, Inc.

Azure virtual network - How to change localnetworksite address space?

I need to change the address space prefix in my virtual network configuration. How can I do this?
<LocalNetworkSites>
<LocalNetworkSite name="xxx-xxx-DC">
<AddressSpace>
<AddressPrefix>xx.xx.15.0/24</AddressPrefix>
<AddressPrefix>xx.xx.67.0/24</AddressPrefix>
</AddressSpace>
<VPNGatewayAddress>xx.xxx.xx.xx</VPNGatewayAddress>
</LocalNetworkSite>
</LocalNetworkSites>
Your extract shows the local network definition whilst your question seem to refer to the virtual network itself, but actually it doesn't really matter as the answer is the same - You can't change the address space for either on a created network.
You will have to
Export the configuration
Make the changes you require (make sure to change subnets as well)
Delete the network
Re-create the network by importing the modified configuration
Re-deploy your services
Yossi,
Is this a Microsoft supported solution?. The reason I ask is apart from having to create the vm's I also have to change the config on the local vpn side as the IP address of the gateway and shared key changes. Fortunately I only have 3 vm's but lets say I had 20, this would not be a sustainable solution at all.
I agree with user3120398 that this is not a viable and sustainable solution and it still seems to be modus operandi more than a year later :-(

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