Using TCP to ping test your Cloud server connectivity

So, you have probably heard that there are a variety of reasons why you shouldn’t use ICMP to test your service is operating normally. Mainly because of the way that ICMP is handled by routers. If you really want a representative view of the way that TCP packets, such as HTTP and HTTPS are performing in terms of packet loss (that is to say packets which do not arrive at their destination) , then hping is your friend.

You might be pinging a cloud-server that is not replying. You might think it’s down. But what if the firewall is simply dropping ICMP echo requests coming in on that port? Indeed.

Enter hping.

# hping -S -p 80 google.com
HPING google.com (eth0 74.125.136.102): S set, 40 headers + 0 data bytes
len=46 ip=74.125.136.102 ttl=46 id=23970 sport=80 flags=SA seq=0 win=42780 rtt=13.8 ms
len=46 ip=74.125.136.102 ttl=47 id=37443 sport=80 flags=SA seq=1 win=42780 rtt=12.6 ms
len=46 ip=74.125.136.102 ttl=47 id=43654 sport=80 flags=SA seq=2 win=42780 rtt=12.0 ms
len=46 ip=74.125.136.102 ttl=47 id=37877 sport=80 flags=SA seq=3 win=42780 rtt=11.4 ms
len=46 ip=74.125.136.102 ttl=47 id=62433 sport=80 flags=SA seq=4 win=42780 rtt=13.3 ms
^C
--- google.com hping statistic ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.4/12.6/13.8 ms

In this case I tested with google.com. I’m actually surprised that more people don’t use hping, because, hping is awesome. It also makes quite a decent port scanner, were it not for the fact that the machine I tried to test that feature with buffer overflowed 😉 It’s a nice way to test a firewalled box, but more than that, it’s a more reliable test in my opinion.

Using Nova and Supernova to manage Firewall IP access lists, automation & more

So, a customer today reached out to us asking if Rackspace provided the entire infrastructure IP address ranges in use on cloud. The answer is, no. However, that doesn’t mean that making your firewall rules, or autoscale automation need to be painful.

In fact, Rackspace Cloud utilizes Openstack which fully supports API calls which will easily be able to provide this detail in just a few simple short steps. To do this you require nova to be installed, this is really relatively easy to install, and instructions for installing it can be found here;

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/installing-python-novaclient-on-linux-and-mac-os/

Once you have installed nova, it’s simply a case of making sure you set these 4 lines correctly in your .bash_profile

OS_USERNAME=mycloudusernamegoeshere
OS_TENANT_NAME=yourrackspaceaccountnumbergoeshereusuallysomethinglike1010101010
OS_AUTH_SYSTEM=rackspace
OS_PASSWORD=apikeygoeshere
OS_AUTH_URL=https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/
OS_REGION_NAME=LON
OS_NO_CACHE=1
export OS_USERNAME OS_TENANT_NAME OS_AUTH_SYSTEM OS_PASSWORD OS_AUTH_URL OS_REGION_NAME OS_NO_CACHE

OS_USERNAME is your mycloud login username (normally the primary user).
OS_TENANT_NAME is your Customer ID, it’s the number that appears in the URL of your control panel link, see below picture for illustration

Screen Shot 2016-08-10 at 2.45.05 PM

OS_PASSWORD is a bit misleading, this is actually where your apikey goes , but I think it’s possible to authenticate using your control panel password too, don’t do that for security reasons.

OS_REGION_NAME is pretty self explanatory, this is simply the region that you would like to list cloud-server IP’s in or rather, the region that you wish to perform NOVA API calls.

Making the API call using the nova API wrapper

# supernova lon list --tenant 100010101 --fields accessIPv4,name
[SUPERNOVA] Running nova against lon...
+--------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
| ID                                   | accessIPv4      | Name      |
+--------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
| 7e5a7f99-60ae-4c28-b2b8              | 1.1.1.1  |  xapp      |
| 94747603-812d-4594-850b              | 1.1.1.1  |   rabbit2   |
| d5b318aa-0fa2-4269-ae00              | 1.1.1.1  |   elastic5  |
| 6c1d8d33-ae5e-44be-b9f0              | 1.1.1.1  | | elastic6  |
| 9f79a7dc-fd19-4f8f-9c26              |1.1.1.1   | | elastic3  |
| 05b1c52b-6ced-4db0-8af2              | 11.1.1.1 | | elastic1  |
| c8302366-f2f9-4c36-8f7a              | 1.1.1.1  | | app5      |
| b159cd07-8e68-49bc-83ee              | 1.1.1.1  | | app6      |
| f1f31eef-97c6-4c68-b01a              | 1.1.1.1  | | ruby1     |
| 64b7f0fd-8f2f-4d5f-8f89              | 1.1.1.1  | | build3    |
| e320c051-b5cf-473a-9f96              | 1.1.1.1  |   mysql2    |
| 4fddd022-59a8-4502-bf6e              | 1.1.1.1  | | mysql1    |
| c9ad6951-f5f9-4351-b31d              | 1.1.1.1  | | worker2   |
+--------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+

This is pretty useful for managing autoscale permissions if you need to make sure your corporate network can be connected to from your cloud-servers when new cloud-servers with new IP are built out. considerations like this are really important when putting together a solution. The nice thing is the tools are really quite simple and flexible. If I wanted I could have pulled out detail for servicenet instead. I hope this helps make some folks lives a bit easier and works to demystify API to others that haven’t had the opportunity to use it.

You are probably wondering though, what field names can I use? a nova show will reveal this against one of your server UUID’s

# supernova lon show someuuidgoeshere
+-------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Property                            | Value                                                            |
+-------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| OS-DCF:diskConfig                   | MANUAL                                                           |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host                | censored                                                   |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname | censored                                                 |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name       | instance-734834278-sdfdsfds-                   |
| OS-EXT-STS:power_state              | 1                                                                |
| OS-EXT-STS:task_state               | -                                                                |
| OS-EXT-STS:vm_state                 | active                                                           |
| censorednet network                 | censored                                                     |
| accessIPv4                          | censored                                                 |
| accessIPv6                          | censored                      |
| created                             | 2015-12-11T14:12:08Z                                             |
| flavor                              | 15 GB I/O v1 (io1-15)                                            |
| hostId                              | 860...         |
| id                                  | 9f79a7dc-fd19-4f8f-9c26-72a335ed2be8                             |
| image                               | Debian 8 (Jessie) (PVHVM) (cf16c435-7bed-4dc3-b76e-57b09987866d) |
| metadata                            | {"build_config": "", "rax_service_level_automation": "Complete"} |
| name                                | elastic3                                                         |
| private network                     |                                                 |
| progress                            | 100                                                              |
| public network                      |          |
| status                              | ACTIVE                                                           |
| tenant_id                           |                                                    |
| updated                             | 2016-02-27T09:30:20Z                                             |
| user_id                             |                             |
+-------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+

I censored some of the fields.. but you can see all of the column names, so if you wanted to see metadata and progress only, with the server uuid and server name.



nova list --fields name, metadata, progress

This could be pretty handy for detecting when a process has finished building, or detecting once automation has completed. The possibilities with API are quite endless. API is certainly the future, and, there is no reason why, in the future, people won't be building and deploying websites thru API only, and some sophisticated UI wrapper like NOVA.

Admittedly, this is very far away, but that should be what the future technology will be made of, stuff like LAMBDA, serverless architecture, will be the future.

Checking Load Balancer Connectivity & Automating it in some interesting ways

So, in a dream last night, I woke up realising I had forgot to write my automated load balancer connectivity checker.

Basically, sometimes a customer will complain their site is down because their ‘load balancer is broken’! In many cases, this is actually due to a firewall on one of the nodes behind the load balancer, or an issue with the webserver application listening on the port. So, I wrote a little piece of automation in the form of a BASH script, that accepts an Load Balancer ID and then uses the API to pull the server nodes behind that Load Balancer, including the ports being used to communicate, and then uses, either netcat or nmap to check that port for connectivity. There were a few ways to achieve this, but the below is what I was happiest with.

#!/bin/bash

# Username used to login to control panel
USERNAME='mycloudusernamegoeshere'

# Find the APIKey in the 'account settings' part of the menu of the control panel
APIKEY="apikeygoeshere"

# Your Rackspace account number (the number that is in the URL of the control panel after logging in)
ACCOUNT=100101010

# Your Rackspace loadbalancerID
LOADBALANCERID=157089

# Rackspace LoadBalancer Endpoint
ENDPOINT="https://lon.loadbalancers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0"

# This section simply retrieves and sets the TOKEN
TOKEN=`curl https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens -X POST -d '{ "auth":{"RAX-KSKEY:apiKeyCredentials": { "username":"'$USERNAME'", "apiKey": "'$APIKEY'" }} }' -H "Content-type: application/json" |  python -mjson.tool | grep -A5 token | grep id | cut -d '"' -f4`

#   (UNUSED) METHOD 1Extract IP addresses (Currently assuming port 80 only)
#curl -H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET "$ENDPOINT/$ACCOUNT/loadbalancers/$LOADBALANCERID/nodes" | jq .nodes[].address | xargs -i nmap -p 80 {}
#   (UNUSED) Extract ports
# curl -H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET "$ENDPOINT/$ACCOUNT/loadbalancers/$LOADBALANCERID/nodes" | jq .nodes[].port | xargs -i nmap -p 80 {}


# I opted for using this method to extract the important detail
curl -H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET "$ENDPOINT/$ACCOUNT/loadbalancers/$LOADBALANCERID/nodes" | jq .nodes[].address | sed 's/"//g' > address.txt
curl -H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET "$ENDPOINT/$ACCOUNT/loadbalancers/$LOADBALANCERID/nodes" | jq .nodes[].port > port.txt

# Loop thru both output files sequentially, order is important
# WARNING script does not ignore whitespace

while read addressfile1 <&3 && read portfile2 <&4; do
   ncat $addressfile1 $portfile2
done 3

Output looks a bit like;

# ./lbtest.sh
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 5143 100 5028 100 115 4731 108 0:00:01 0:00:01 --:--:-- 4734
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 225 100 225 0 0 488 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 488
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 225 100 225 0 0 679 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 681
Ncat: No route to host.
Ncat: Connection timed out.

I plan to add some additional support that will check the load balancer is up, AND the servicenet connection between the cloud servers.

Please note that this script must be run on a machine with access to servicenet network, in the same Rackspace Datacenter to be able to check servicenet connectivity of servers. The script can give false positives if strict firewall rules are setup on the cloud server nodes behind the load balancer. It's kind of alpha-draft but I thought I would share it as a proof of concept.

You will need to download and install jq to use it. To download jq please see; https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/

Protecting yourself from Brute Force Attacks on SSH

To protect yourself against this type of attack succeeding, namely to guess your password and compromise your server, you can choose an extremely long password utilizing many symbols %$!&^ and numbers 190921, both UPPERCASE and lowercase letters.

Alternatively, and the most effective way to protect yourself against these attacks is to change the port with which your SSH service runs on. However some caution should be taken when changing SSH ports of the server, as if done improperly this can cause you to lock yourself out with the firewall. The process is simple though;

locate sshd_config in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Change port to something else like 777

Change from:

#Port 22

Change to:

Port 777

Open up Firewall rule (very important)

sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp  --dport 777 -j ACCEPT

Save Firewall Rule

/etc/init.d/iptables save

The entire process is described at:
https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/introduction-to-iptables/

Other alternatives ways to resolve this other than using secure passwords, or a less obvious port than SSH’s default port 22, is to install something like fail2ban. Which will ban any IP address preventing it from logging in if it gets the password wrong a certain number of times in a row. However, pleas be careful with this too as you can lock yourself out if you are not careful, as with all security software.