Monthly Archives: January 2019

31 Jan

DHCP domain-search on Juniper SRX

DHCP Option 119

In the last few years, the DHCP service in enterprises got more and more integrated into complex management and provisioning systems or became a part of the Active Directory solutions. Routers, switches, wireless controllers or other devices in such networks act as DHCP Proxy instead of DHCP Servers just sending the requests to the central server. But the feature itself is not dead! Sometimes you need to run it locally and not only provide the IP address and default gateway to the client device but also DNS servers information or domain-search parameters. The last feature is an DHCP Option 119 and I put it in “tricky, non-obvious DHCP config”, together with bunch of other DHCP options.

The central point of my home and lab networks is the Juniper SRX220H – it is quite old but the services and its performance fulfills my requirements so far. One of the services it provides is DHCP Server for some of the VLANs. I was not really missing the domain-search feature so far but decided to add it to make my work more convenient. This feature configuration is not straightforward, and there are many misleading guides about setting up this feature on different platforms or operating systems. Let me show you how it works on Juniper.

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17 Jan

Accessing host socket when using namespaces for Docker isolation

Socat will connect two sockets together

Nothing is secure by default and Docker is no exception. One of the recommended change to improve Docker security is isolation of the containers in user namespace which was introduced in Docker Engine 1.10. The namespaces makes the process run on the host thinks that it has its own access to some global resources like the PIDs. User namespaces provides the mechanism of remapping container resources to host resources limiting container access to the host system.

In some cases you may need to access the host resource from the container like the Docker own socket. It is required if you run Docker inside of the Docker container or you deploy a tool that will manage your Docker hosts or Docker Swarm cluster. The problem is the socket on the hosts is owned by the root, while the root PID from inside of your container is remapped to non-root PID on the host. It make the host socket inaccessible for the processes inside the container. But there is an easy workaround for this problem

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04 Jan

Observium pollers vertical scaling

Observium in containers

There are several free monitoring tools available for commercial or non-commercial use. I decided to use Observium to monitor my home and remote labs. I had no specific requirements except that it had to have an option to run in Docker containers on RaspberryPi (ARMv6/8 CPUs). The downside of all monitoring solutions are the resource requirements. There are three resources that matter – storage, memory, and CPUs. Vertical scaling of Observium pollers and other processes is one of the solutions if your hardware resources are limited.

The vertical scaling means adding more workers doing the same process in parallel, but tasks assigned to each process should not overlap. In my case, I wanted to spread the polling across my RaspberryPi cluster. Polling process can consume the CPU and make RaspberriPi unresponsible. In worst scenario, if you have many devices or you are poling lots of data from your devices the polling processes may not finish their work within 5 minutes (this is how often devices have to be queried) so you will miss some data. You may of course tune number of threads the polling process start but any platform has it resources limitations you cannot bypass.  

In this article I will present my solution based on Docker Swarm cluster. It has some limitations and downsides but may work for many people, not only on RaspberyPi.

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