Category: Uncategorized

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Uncategorized

Keyboard macro programming

Intro
I had the perfect motivation to learn a new tool. I had hundreds of repetitive keyboard clicks in my future. So my strong motivation was to save time.

The details
I needed to cancel about 300 changes in the Helpdesk system AHD (Advanced Helpdesk) from CA. First I turned to the team with the power tools and showed them what I needed. It looked readily doable. Move the mouse over here. Click. New Window pops up, in focus. Click on this drop-down menu item. Chance status to Cancel and Save. But for whatever reason they couldn’t do more than two, and then they lost their motivation.

Meanwhile my friend Nix told me about alternatives I could try on my own.

Workstation Macro Recorder from Automation Anywhere
First I tried this one. You only get a 30-day free trial. It was supposed to record my clicks and other keystrokes and then play them back. It didn’t work. Running it seemed to interfere with the browser window and the Javascript, which normally displays a menu during a mouse-over event was not behaving that way: no menu was popping up as long as this program was running.

AutoHotkey
So Nix suggested AutoHotkey. He warned it was a little buggy and cantankerous, but probably suitable for the task at hand.

There’s learning a language theoretically and learning a language to accomplish a very specific task. I’m not too good at the former, just doesn’t interest me and motivate me. But as I was saying I had great motivation for the latter. It wasn’t obvious at first how to proceed. But I started with a test script, which of course initially didn’t do anything at all. And then I slowly built up in complexity for the task at hand. It probably took several hours in total time spent over a few days.

The actual, working script, tested and used on my Windows 7 laptop, test.ahk

; launch by holding down Windows key, then pressing z key.
#z::
; loop five times
loop, 5 {
; Rt-arrow key
send {Right}
sleep, 100
; cancel out my AHD changes. u is for update
send u
sleep, 6000 ; 6 seconds
; now we need 3 tabs
loop, 3 {
send {tab}
sleep, 300
}
send Change is being cancelled.
;
loop, 6 {
sleep, 100
send {tab}
}
sleep 200
; c is for cancel
send c
; save it
send !s
sleep, 5000
; make next change the active one
send {tab}
sleep, 100
send {tab}
sleep, 100
}


Can you use AHD without mouse movement?
The problem I was solving is two-fold. AutoHotkey is not really great at mouse movement. So I needed to understand how to interact with AHD without using the mouse at all. It tuns out to be possible, at least mostly and sufficiently for my purposes. And I think it is important to mention because most users never get to this level: most programs do offer you a keyboard alternative to mouse movements and in fact it’s probably worth the time to find out what those are as it will almost always be faster than dragging that mouse pointer around to the precise locale of your next click.

I never did get the script to perfection, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to save my mind and my time. And it did work for that! There were always special conditions, etc which I did not code for and wasn’t motivated to code for. So I plowed through cancelling five changes at a time.

Conclusion
AutoHotkey proved to be quite helpful. Did I mention it is free? I recommend to use it to save on keystrokes for repetitive things.

References
Auto HotKey web site.

Categories
Uncategorized

SANSA flying Adventure in Costa Rica

Intro
This is not a technical post but I wanted to document it here anyways. It’s good to be king!

The details
I was with my family recently in Costa Rica. I booked the flights late and paid dearly as a result. In fact the best direct flights were sold out. I ended up relying on Orbitz for a “mutliple carriers” flight from Liberia to San Jose (SANSA Airlines, and then from San Jose to the US (United).

The flight to Liberia was a direct United flight, so no problems there. My phone did not work in Costa Rica so I only had sporadic Internet access at the occasional Wifi-enabled restaurant. My time-share place did not have a working Wifi, either.

We had this early flgiht out of Liberia Saturday so we booked a room at the Hilton airport hotel, which has all the conveniences you’d expect. So I catch up on email. There’s nothing recent from Orbitz. So I try to ensure we have boarding passes.

Imagine my horror when after finally managing to check the Orbitz record locator only one of the four passengers is listed!

Then I manage to find separate United Airlines record locators. Another of the four passengers has a unique record locator, and is booked straight through Liberia to the US. The two remaining passengers have record locators that only show the San Jose to US trip, but I can find no information whatsoever about the Liberia to San Jose leg!

I ask the Concierge to call Sansa. They are very helpful, by the way and they do that. But it’s after 5 PM and they’re closed until 8 AM tomorrow. The flight is scheduled to leave at 7:57 AM, however.

So I get back to the hotel room and tell my fmaily “It’s a cluster mess!” And I use Skype to call Orbitz from my cell phone. After 90 minutes or so on the call they agree that although I bought tickets for four people, only one now shows up in their system with their record locator. They say it is a problem with the airline who has taken over the ticket, United, or SANSA, and that I need to straighten this out with them.

well, we know we can’t call SANSA, so we try United. But it just happens to be when a giant blizzard had cancelled lots of flights in the previous days. First I am on hold for 45 minutes and then dropped without warning. Then I cannot get back through at all.

We make contingent plans to take a private car service to San Jose since our other flight isn’t until 2:20 PM anyways and we probably should have done it that way to begin with. Again the Hotel is helpful contacting that service and getting the price for that ($240 for four people).

Now we have to go to sleep and just wing it, like in the old days. Either SANSA will have our reservations or they won’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it either way…

Turns out the airport is sort of a sleepy place before 6 AM, when suddenly velvet barriers start going up and airline check-in agents appear. So we’re tired and nervously waiting.

Turns out…

To be continued…

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Uncategorized

Measuring the speed of a fast-moving NJ Transit train

Intro
I’m trying to measure the speed of a NJ Transit train that really hauls past my station. I’ll compare results using two different methods, but no fancy equipment like radar guns. Just a Smartphone a ruler and some common sense.

To be continued…

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Uncategorized

The most natural ringtone of all

Intro
A couple years ago I heard about conceptual art on public radio. It’s intriguing and begs the question what is art. The example provided was something like this: the artist proscribes via written instructions what the owner should do to realize the physical manifestation of the artwork, such as
– Take a 24″ x 36″ bank canvas
– draw an X near the upper right corner
– draw a horizontal line to the left of the X until the border

That’s it! A proscription like this by a famous artist is actually has value, just like physical art.

OK, so how about conceptual technology?

The details
I wanted a ring tone that was as unobtrusive as possible, and yet still audible because the vibration-only setting on a Samsung just doesn’t deliver enough vibrating energy as compared to my old Blackberry Bold. So in vibrate-only I missed too many calls. And yet i find all ring tones to be offensive in some sense – disruptive to their surrounding environment.

So I finally hit on it. Here is the conceptual technology:

– record the sound of yourself exhaling* for about 3 seconds of sound.
– turn it into a mp3 file
– download it to your phone’s ringtones
– choose it as your ringtone

* Avoid recoding the full breathing cycle of inhaling and exhaling because that’s just going to sound like panting, and that gets weird! And when I say “exhale” I mean more “sigh,” that will be more effective.

That’s it! Is it art or technology?

I’m not 100% sure it will work out long term. For instance, every time I hear someone in the office sigh loudly I check my phone! But I’ve stuck with it so far so it can’t be all bad. Funny thing is, no matter how often I’ve heard it, I’m always caught by surprise when my phone rings with that ringtone! It’s always “What the heck?” before I come to my senses.

For those who want to skip the first step I’ve made my exhaling sounds available for download.

Exhale ringtone.

You can right-click on it and do a Save link as… to save it somewhere.

I purposely made it soft as I wanted to avoid drawing too much attention.

Conclusion
Conceptual technology is presented for what might be the most natural ringtone of all – the sound of yourself breathing. When it comes time to turn off your cellphone it may not be necessary. Everyone is allowed to let out a sigh now and then, right?

Appendix
For the curious, I used Audacity to record my exhale sound, which I edited to stretch it to three seconds and made sure it begins with an exhale sound followed by silence. A ringtone seems to be played in a loop by the phone. I found 3 seconds a good length between “rings.”

Some have suggested it sounds mildly obscene or creepy. Oh, well. that wasn’t what I was going for. As I say the jury’s still out…

Categories
Admin Uncategorized Web Site Technologies

The IT Detective Agency: Internet Explorer cannot display https web page

Intro
It’s a weird thing when a site that’s always worked for you suddenly stops working. Such was the behaviour observed today by a friend of mine. He could no longer access an old Oracle Enterprise Manger web site, and just this one web site. All other web sites were fine. What’s up, he asked?

The details
Well we tried this and that, reloading pages, re-starting the PC, and tests to make sure the DNS resolution was occurring correctly. It was. We logged on to his PC as another user to try the access. This tests registry settings specific to his userid. I thought that would work, but it did not. I tried the web site from my PC – worked great! The people around him also worked great. Give up? Never. For him the error page popped up quickly, by the way. He didn’t have Firefox, but I was tempted to have him install it and try that. I was pretty sure it would have worked.

He did have putty. We used his putty to telnet access the server on the same port as the https listener – we could connect, though of course we couldn’t really do anything beyond that. So there was no firewall-type issue.

We tried other https sites from his browser – no problems with those.

I was hemming and hawing and muttering something about publisher certificate revocation when that prompted someone to recall that a related Microsoft setting adjustment had come out just last week. It requires that web sites have certificate lengths of at least 1024 bits. For discussion see this article. Could that be related to this problem he asks me? Could it? Could it? I quickly checked the key bit length of the server certificate on the OEM server. Yup. 512 bits. Then I checked the key length of another OEM server that he could still access. Yup. 1024 bits. It was a newer installation so that actually does make sense. This popular article about ciphers also mentions how to use openssl to find the key length (openssl s_client …).

Why could I and others do the access? Simple. We hadn’t (yet) received the patch. When we do, we won’t be able to access it either.

So whose fault is it, anyways? I kind of agree with Microsoft on this one. If you’re still running web sites with 512 bit-length keys, it’s time to change your certificates to something longer and more secure. After all on the Internet we’re required to have 2048 bit-length keys for almost two years now.

Problem is, it’s not so obvious how to change this key in OEM. It may be buried in a java keystore.

Case: almost closed!

Conclusion
With a little help from my friends I solved the case of the browser with the message Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage. Like all such problems it was quite puzzling for awhile, but once understood all the symptoms made sense and could be explained rationally.

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Uncategorized

Experimenting with GoodSync

Intro
I was thinking about doing something with photos – not exactly sure what yet. But since I have this nice decicated server with lots of space, it’s a great place to store my collection of thousands of photos. But how to upload them and keep the server copy in sync?

The traditional Unix approach might be to install rsync, and I suppose I could have gotten it to work. But I decided to see what commercial package was out there. I settled on Goodsync. One of the inducements is that it has support for sftp servers. Or so it says.

Well, I got it to work. I decided to use a private key approach to login. I generated my key pair with cygwin’s openssl. It all seemed fine, however, I couldn’t use that key in GoodSync. Based on something I read in their documentation, I decided it might need a key generated by putty. So I downloaed puttygen and generated another keypair. I then had to make a saved session in putty, which I had never done before, using that keypair. I tested with putty’s psftp -load session. It worked.

So I loaded up that session in GoodSync. It began to work. I could successfully analyze.

I thought JPEG files were compressible. I played around with setting the compress option in putty, but it didn’t seem to matter one bit. Then I ran gzip on one of the files and saw essentially no reduction in size from compression.

So now the files are crawling from my home PC over to the server. It will take days to finish. I bought the professional version of GoodSync and run multiple jobs simultaneously, which is kind of nice and a slightly better use of the bandwidth.

Open issues include: would GoodSync’s native server offer me any advantages? Does it even run on Linux? What program do I use to display the images? Is there a scheduler for GoodSync?

Conclusion
GoodSync seems to be a solid program for syncing files from a PC to an sftp server, although that is not its primary focus, The GUI is nice and makes it easy to set up sync jobs.

Categories
Admin Apache Uncategorized Web Site Technologies

The IT Detective agency: Excessive Requests for PAC file Crippling Web Server

Intro
Funny thing about infrastructure. You may have something running fine for years, and then suddenly it doesn’t. That is one of the many mysteries in the case of the excessive requests for PAC file.

The Details
We serve our Proxy Auto-config (PAC) file from a couple web servers which are load-balanced. It’s worked great for over 10 years. The PAC file is actually produced by a Perl script which can alter the content based on the user’s IP or other variables.

The web servers got bogged down last week. I literally observed the load average shoot up past 200 (on a 2-CPU server). This is not good.

I quickly noticed lots and lots of accesses for wpad.dat and proxy.pac. Some PCs were individually making hundreds of requests for these files in a day! Sometimes there were 15 or 20 requests in a minute. Since it is a script it takes some compute power to handle all those requests. So it was time to do one of two things: either learn the root cause and address it, or make a quick fix. The symptoms were clear enough, but I had no idea about the root cause. I also was fascinated by the requests for wpad.dat which I felt was serving no purpose whatsoever in our environment. So I went for the quick fix hopinG that understanding would come later.

To be continued…
As promised – three and a half years later! And we still have this problem. It’s probably worse than ever. I pretty much threw in the towel and learned how to scale up our apache web server to handle more PAC file requests simultaneously, see the references.

References
Scaling apache to handle more requests.

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Uncategorized

Running Multiple Web Server Instances on SLES

Intro
My initial plan was to run multiple virtualhosts under one global umbrella. But my virtualhosts have to do diverse things. One will front-end JBoss, another will front-end IBM WebSphere, etc. I thought or rather hoped that the differences could all be expressed in the separate virtualhosts sections. But I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks with JBoss when I tried that:

Syntax error on line 28 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/mod-jk.conf:
JkWorkersFile cannot occur within  section

Hmm. So JkWorkersFile has to appear in the global section. I’m not comfortable with that. I guess it’s time to consider running separate processes for my different classes of service. How best to do that?

To be continued…

Categories
DNS IT Operational Excellence Network Technologies Uncategorized

Google’s DNS Servers Rock!

Intro
DNS is the Domain name Service, the Internet service that converts IP addresses, e.g., 200.54.129.57 into mnemonic names like www.mysite.com.

I tried to run a cache-only DNS server for use by a proxy server. What I found is that certain sites were not accessible on a frequent basis. I think uol.com.br is one of the problem sites (need to check this). It may not mean much to a US audience, but it’s really popular in Brazil!

At some point I happened to learn that Google has a public DNS service. This is worth pondering. No one of any repute has offered a DNS service to that point. There are a host of concerns about security, especially DNS cache poisoning. They blazed a trail, and did it in a way only Google and very few other major infrastructure players could. Not only did they offer a DNS service, they put their DNS servers all over the Internet and created convenient anycast addresses for their servers.

I am no expert on anycast addresses. You can look it up on Wikipedia, however. The essence for my purposes is that with a single IP address you’re going to hit the closest server, network-wise. So no matter where you are some Google DNS server is not far away. Try it. The anycast addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. They don’t mind, really! You can ping them. Traceroute to them, whatever. From the Amazon cloud Northeast 8.8.8.8 responds to PINGs in 3.4 ms. That’s really low. Not so low as to make me think they are in the same data center (it is different companies after all), but not far away.

The gold standard for running a DNS service is BIND. I have been running it for many years now and I want to give the Internet Software Consortium their due for providing this wonderful application. Once I got wind of my DNS difficulties as mentioned above, I had to wonder why not everyone else was complaining? They had to be using something else. I ran a flat-out performance test. 5000 queries from an actual proxy log, fed straight to my BIND DNS server, and then to Google’s DNS server 8.8.8.8. I have to dig up the numbers, but Google’s won by quite a bit! This result was actually surprising because you’re always going off-site to the Google DNS server, whereas my server can build up its cache and is right on my network. From where I tested the Google server was about 11 ms away. So 5000 x 11 ms = 55 s. So there is a 55 s handicap from just network considerations alone! Yet it is faster. On the quickest of queries the local server is indeed faster, but what happens is that over the course of real life queries, you always get a few problematic ones which either time out or just seem to take a long time to get back a response. That’s what kills the traditional DNS server and where Google has (obviously) made some optimizations.

And, that’s not all! Google also deals in a more forgiving fashion with broken domain names. I used to get on my high horse and proclaim to others about how broken their DNS servers are – it’s no wonder I can’t resolve their names, which means, by the way, I also cannot get to their web site nor send them email!

It’s effectively like taking yourself off the Internet, or so I thought. Turns out in some cases that’s only true if you’ve constrained yourself to resolving names with BIND. You see, BIND enforces the rules. And I’m a believer in rules. The Internet has about 5,000 technical rules called RFCs. DNS is a topic of many of these rules. The Internet could only have expanded to the size it currently has because all the major players agreed to abide by those rules. What Google has done with their server, in effect, is to say, “Well, if you don’t follow the rules, we’re going to try to work with you anyways.”

Here’s a concrete example. appliedcoatings.org. I guess at some point they’ll actually fix their severely broken DNS, but at the time I write this, August 21, 2011, these comments are valid and their domain is severely broken. In fact, I was amazed that people weren’t jumping up and down screaming at them. I couldn’t even send an email to them. That’s akin to knocking yourself off the Internet, right? Ah, but it all depends on whose DNS servers you are using!

There used to be lots of good free DNS analyzers, like dnsreport.com. You can still find a few around. www.zonecheck.fr, for instance. It shows FAILURE. If it were better written it would show the real problem, which is a lame delegation. But we’re experts, and we don’t need such tools! We will do the queries ourselves and show the lame delegation. We start by learning who are the authoritative nameservers for .ca, the top-level domain used in Canada:

 dig ns ca

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> ns ca
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52928
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ca.                            IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      a.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      c.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      e.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      f.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      j.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      k.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      l.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      m.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      z.ca-servers.ca.
ca.                     83585   IN      NS      sns-pb.isc.org.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
a.ca-servers.ca.        83594   IN      A       192.228.27.11

Now we ask one of them about the nameservers for appliedcoatings.ca:

 dig ns appliedcoatings.ca @a.ca-servers.ca.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> ns appliedcoatings.ca @a.ca-servers.ca.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 288
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      sp2.domainpeople.com.
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      sp1.domainpeople.com.

So far everything's cool. Now, since the authoritative flag (AA) was not present in that response we re-ask that query, but now to one of the nameservers that's supposed to be authoritative for that domain:

dig ns appliedcoatings.ca @sp2.domainpeople.com.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> ns appliedcoatings.ca @sp2.domainpeople.com.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24373
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      ns1.domainpeople.com.
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      ns2.domainpeople.com.

Oh, oh. That's not supposed to happen. We're getting back an entirely different set of nameservers. That's a lame delegation. The domain should be considered completely broken. I think even BIND might be forgiving up to this point. a BIND resolver does these types of quesires to get at the answer. At this point it says, "OK, this is strange, but not necessariily fatal. I will ask my subsequent queries to ns1.domainpeople.com and ns2.domainpeople.com since they are listed as being the nameservers of record.

So now let's get to something useful: looking up the mail exchanger record so we see how to deliver mail to this domain. BIND, which has been fastidiously following the rules, does it as follows:

dig mx appliedcoatings.ca @ns1.domainpeople.com.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> mx appliedcoatings.ca @ns1.domainpeople.com.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 49996
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      MX

;; Query time: 79 msec
;; SERVER: 204.174.223.72#53(204.174.223.72)
;; WHEN: Sun Aug 21 19:05:43 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 36

That's not good. Status is REFUSED. But BIND can even forgive this slight. There is one more nameserver to try after all, right? Last chance query:

dig mx appliedcoatings.ca @ns2.domainpeople.com.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> mx appliedcoatings.ca @ns2.domainpeople.com.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 44404
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      MX

;; Query time: 72 msec
;; SERVER: 64.40.96.140#53(64.40.96.140)
;; WHEN: Sun Aug 21 19:07:34 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 36

Status also REFUSED. Now we are really and truly dead. If you are using a BIND nameserver you have no way to send email to [email protected]. But not so with Google!

Of course I don't know how Google wrote their DNS server, but I do think that some of their infrastructure experts write it themselves rather than using open source programs. So with a Google nameserver you will get a response:

dig mx appliedcoatings.ca @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> mx appliedcoatings.ca @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6901
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
appliedcoatings.ca.     82805   IN      MX      10 mail.appliedcoatings.ca.

;; Query time: 4 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sun Aug 21 19:11:14 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 57

and just to close the loop and make sure this is a valid host you would do this:

dig mail.appliedcoatings.ca @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> mail.appliedcoatings.ca @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35190
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mail.appliedcoatings.ca.       IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mail.appliedcoatings.ca. 86400  IN      A       66.183.21.181

And we can go the next step and begin an SMTP conversation with that server to make sure it is really operating. After all, if they messed up DNS there's no telling what else they might have gotten wrong.

 telnet  66.183.21.181 25
Trying 66.183.21.181...
Connected to 66.183.21.181.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.appliedcoatings.ca Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.4675 ready at  Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:22:04 -0700
HELO localhost
250 mail.appliedcoatings.ca Hello [50.17.188.196]
quit
221 2.0.0 mail.appliedcoatings.ca Service closing transmission channel
Connection closed by foreign host.

Yup. They've got an operating mail server at that IP.

So we can reverse engineer a bit what Google's DNS server must have done behind the scenes to arrive at a valid answer where BIND could not. I'm 100% sure that Google would have also done the query

dig mx appliedcoatings.ca @ns1.domainpeople.com

since that is the right thing to do. But not getting a satisfactory answer (status: REFUSED), what it must do additionally after getting refused a second time by ns2.domainpeople, is to go back to the originally named nameservers sp1 and sp2. Watch what happens in that case:

 dig mx appliedcoatings.ca @sp1.domainpeople.com.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> mx appliedcoatings.ca @sp1.domainpeople.com.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10226
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appliedcoatings.ca.            IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      MX      10 mail.appliedcoatings.ca.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      ns1.domainpeople.com.
appliedcoatings.ca.     86400   IN      NS      ns2.domainpeople.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
mail.appliedcoatings.ca. 86400  IN      A       66.183.21.181

The AA (authoritative) flag is set in the response. So it's a good response, but sent to the "wrong" nameserver. Nevertheless, it is a response and it gets anyone using that nameserver more functionality than someone using BIND.

Conclusion
So far we've got three advantages speaking favorably for Google's DNS server: it's faster, it's answers are more complete and it's universally available. Wait, there's more! Another nice thing is what it does not do. Some ISPs have a "feature" I call DNS clobbering. In fact it's so annoying I will devote a whole blog post to describing it in more detail. Essentially they take license with DNS and make up answers to some queries! It's true and it's truly annoying. Not all ISPs do this but mine certainly does. So the other nice thing about Google DNS is that it does not do DNS clobbering and it's available for you to use it at home and avoid this annoying feature. You just set your DNS servers rather than have them assigned automatically via DHCP.

Other Resources
I should mention that while researching public DNS servers I was also led to commercial versions of the same thing. I went so far as to test the timings on one of those services and found that it is more distant, round-trip-wise, than Google's anycast server. Stands to reason. Google's got the best Internet access of anyone. They're on all the major highways. The commercial offerings have some additional cool features, however. They can serve as URL filter. So if someone puts in a URL which leads to a malicious site, for example, they can respond with an answer that spares you from going to that infected site. This is a little more crude than URL filtering at the proxy level, since a DNS server has no knowledge of the URI whereas a proxy URL filter does, but it could be quite serviceable. I'm not sure it allows you to pick and choose URL categories to block as with a URL filter (gambling, porn, hacking sites, etc.).

A lot more information on using Google DNS is at http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html.

September 1 Update - a Crack in the Infrastructure
I now have my first case of a domain name which Google DNS did not resolve correctly, and for no apparent reason. The domain name is forums.tweaktown.com. Here's proof of Google's failure, followed immediately by Amazon's DNS servers' success:

dig forums.tweaktown.com @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> forums.tweaktown.com @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 15826
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;forums.tweaktown.com.          IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
tweaktown.com.          116     IN      SOA     ns21.domaincontrol.com. dns.jomax.net. 2011060602 28800 7200 604800 86400

;; Query time: 4 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Thu Sep  1 14:40:50 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 106


 dig forums.tweaktown.com

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> forums.tweaktown.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52290
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;forums.tweaktown.com.          IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
forums.tweaktown.com.   1885    IN      A       38.101.21.25

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
tweaktown.com.          1943    IN      NS      ns22.domaincontrol.com.
tweaktown.com.          1943    IN      NS      ns21.domaincontrol.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns21.domaincontrol.com. 753     IN      A       216.69.185.11

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 172.16.0.23#53(172.16.0.23)
;; WHEN: Thu Sep  1 14:40:55 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 122

All BIND servers I tried during this time returned the correct answer.

Is this an isolated incident or a tip of an iceberg of problems? I hope it is a one-off. I'll post updates as I find out more. I am slightly concerned now.

References and related
I finally wrote my own web interface to DNS and published the code I did it with. Check it out here.

A web interface to Google's public DNS service, which will give you more debug information, is https://dns.google.com/

Categories
IT Operational Excellence Uncategorized

The IT Detective Agency: Debugging a Thorny Citrix Connection Issue

This case begins with the observation by the application owner for Citrix XenApp. External users were being knocked out of their sessions frequently – several times a day. And it happened en masse. Before this problem users were typically logged in all day. You can see that many must have been bumped around 12:30 PM then again around 2 PM. The problems began July 5th.

The users suffering the disconnects were all external users who access the applications via a Citrix Secure Gateway. The XenApp servers being accessed are also used on the Intranet and those users were not seeing any drops.

The AO asked if I had changed anything in the network. Nope. Had he changed anything? Nope.

So now we have the classic stand-off, right? AO vs network. There’s a root cause and it’s either the AO or the network guy who’s ultimately at fault.

My attitude in these cases is the following: the network person should prove it’s an application problem and the application owner should prove it’s a network problem! It sounds cynical, but this approach aligns with the best interests of each party. Both are really working towards the same goal, but preserving their own interests. E.g., the networking person thinks that If I can prove it’s an application problem then the AO will quit bothering me and I can get back to my real job. After all, I am not knowledgeable about the application. Even if it is a networking issue, I do not know where the issue is so I need the AO to point out the problem at a detailed level, e.g., the dropped packet or whatever, so I can focus my energies. The reality in my experience is quite different however. The AO typically does not know enough about networking to make this proof.

Nonetheless I proceeded this way, hoping to prove some knid of application problem so I could get back to my normal activities.

We enabled my own PC to use the application. This is always much easier than bothering other people. I can take traces to my heart’s content! So Monday I was connected to XenApp via the CSG. I was going along fine until 11:35 when I got the disconnected message! I later learned that the bulk of users, who are using a different app, were not disconnected then, but were at about an hour later.

Now there’s lots of pieces to look at, any one of which could be at fault. Working from PC on Internet to the XenApp we have: The Internet, my Internet router, firewall, load balancer, CSG server, firewall, XenApp server. That’s a lot to look after, but you have to start somewhere. I chose the load balancer. It was rather confusing, even to establsih a baseline of “normal” activity. I quickly observed that every 30 seconds packets were being transmitted to the PC even when nothing was going on.. Of course the communication was all encrypted so I did not even attempt to look into the packets. But sometimes I saw seven packets, sometimes six, and more rarely different numbers. The packet order didn’t even make sense. Sometimes the load balancer responded to the XenApp before the PC did! The trace of this behaviour until I was disconnected will be shown here when I get the time to include it:

The end of the trace shows a bunch of FIN packets. FIN is used to terminate a TCP connection. Now we’re getting somewhere. It looks like, from a TCP perspective, that a more-or-less orderly shutdown of the connection was occuring. If confirmed that would point to an application problem and life would be good!

The next day I logged into CSG and used a XenApp app again. This time I did an additional trace and included the CSG server itself. Again I was disconnected after a few hours. In this trace the CSG server is called webservera, the XneApp server is xenapp15. This is not a byte-level trace but rather running snoop on Solaris and looking at the meta-data:

________________________________
11:29:23.81577 xenapp15 -> webservera    ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 60 bytes
11:29:23.81577 xenapp15 -> webservera    IP  D=10.201.142.41 S=10.201.88.34 LEN=46, ID=4842, TOS=0x0, TTL=126
11:29:23.81577 xenapp15 -> webservera    TCP D=56011 S=1494 Push Ack=1900995851 Seq=4198089996 Len=6 Win=64134
________________________________
11:29:25.01881 xenapp15 -> webservera    ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 60 bytes
11:29:25.01881 xenapp15 -> webservera    IP  D=10.201.142.41 S=10.201.88.34 LEN=46, ID=4844, TOS=0x0, TTL=126
11:29:25.01881 xenapp15 -> webservera    TCP D=56011 S=1494 Push Ack=1900995851 Seq=4198089996 Len=6 Win=64134
________________________________
11:29:27.42530 xenapp15 -> webservera    ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 60 bytes
11:29:27.42530 xenapp15 -> webservera    IP  D=10.201.142.41 S=10.201.88.34 LEN=46, ID=4861, TOS=0x0, TTL=126
11:29:27.42530 xenapp15 -> webservera    TCP D=56011 S=1494 Push Ack=1900995851 Seq=4198089996 Len=6 Win=64134
________________________________
11:29:30.87645    webservera -> xenapp15 ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 54 bytes
11:29:30.87645    webservera -> xenapp15 IP  D=10.201.88.34 S=10.201.142.41 LEN=40, ID=847, TOS=0x0, TTL=64
11:29:30.87645    webservera -> xenapp15 TCP D=1494 S=56011 Ack=4198090002 Seq=1900995851 Len=0 Win=48871
________________________________
11:29:30.87657    webservera -> xenapp15 ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 54 bytes
11:29:30.87657    webservera -> xenapp15 IP  D=10.201.88.34 S=10.201.142.41 LEN=40, ID=848, TOS=0x0, TTL=64
11:29:30.87657    webservera -> xenapp15 TCP D=1494 S=56011 Ack=4198090002 Seq=1900995851 Len=0 Win=48871
________________________________
11:29:33.02325    webservera -> xenapp15 ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 54 bytes
11:29:33.02325    webservera -> xenapp15 IP  D=10.201.88.34 S=10.201.142.41 LEN=40, ID=849, TOS=0x0, TTL=64
11:29:33.02325    webservera -> xenapp15 TCP D=1494 S=56011 Ack=4198090002 Seq=1900995851 Len=0 Win=48871
________________________________
11:29:53.34945 xenapp15 -> webservera    ETHER Type=0800 (IP), size = 60 bytes
11:29:53.34945 xenapp15 -> webservera    IP  D=10.201.142.41 S=10.201.88.34 LEN=40, ID=4923, TOS=0x0, TTL=126
11:29:53.34945 xenapp15 -> webservera    TCP D=56011 S=1494 Rst Ack=1900995851 Seq=4198090002 Len=0 Win=0

What I saw this time is that RST packet was being sent from the XenApp server! That’s the very last line, which I will repeat here for emphasis since it is so important to the case:

11:29:53.34945 xenapp15 -> webservera    TCP D=56011 S=1494 Rst Ack=1900995851 Seq=4198090002 Len=0 Win=0

TCP RST is a way to immediately disconnect a connection! It seemed as though this was begin converted to a FIN by the CSG. Now it’s looking very much like for whatever reason the application decided to terminate the connection. It almost has to be an application problem, right?

Wrong! We have to keep an open mind.

This trace, while dense, hints at where the problem may lie. It is taken on the load balancer with tcpdump -i 0.0. The load balancer has two interfaces, one towards the Internet, the other towards webserverw. The hostname of the load balancer’s Internet interface is called CSG, the hostname of the Citrix client on the Internet is drjohnspc.

11:03:59.392810 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > webserverw.https: . ack 35 win 32768 (DF)
11:03:59.455730 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 webserverw.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 35:68(33) ack 1 win 48677 (DF)
11:03:59.554810 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > webserverw.https: . ack 68 win 32768 (DF)
11:03:59.585845 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > CSG.https: . ack 35 win 64426 (DF)
11:03:59.585855 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 35:68(33) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:03:59.885805 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > CSG.https: . ack 68 win 64393 (DF)
11:04:59.465070 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 webserverw.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 48677 (DF)
11:04:59.465080 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:04:59.564818 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > webserverw.https: . ack 103 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:00.664812 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:02.864812 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:07.064810 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:15.264811 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:31.464812 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:59.807514 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 webserverw.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 103:130(27) ack 1 win 48677 (DF)
11:05:59.807741 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 webserverw.https > drjohnspc.20723: F 130:130(0) ack 1 win 48677 (DF)
11:05:59.807754 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > webserverw.https: . ack 131 win 32768 (DF)
11:05:59.807759 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: FP 103:130(27) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:06:03.664813 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: . 68:103(35) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)
11:06:12.642847 802.1Q vlan#4093 P0 drjohnspc.20723 > webserverw.https: R 1:1(0) ack 131 win 32768 (DF)
11:06:12.642862 802.1Q vlan#4094 P0 CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: RP 103:130(27) ack 1 win 32768 (DF)

Notice the time stamp increasing by larger and larger leaps beginning with 11:05:00.664812. 11:05:02, 11:05:07, 11:05:15, 11:05:31 – the time keeps doubling! this is characteristic of a TCP retransmit. Note that all the other information is the same. It must be retransmitting the same packet. Why? Because it never got there! That seems to be the most likely reason. Now my conviction and hope that an application problem lies at the heart of the issue is starting to crumble. See why you need to keep an open mind? Your opinion can change to the polar opposite conclusion with the input of some additional data like that. Where to turn next?

There is a firewall inbetween the load balancer and the Internet. Now we will focus our attention on it. Could be that it dropped that packet and all the re-transmits.

Here’s the trace of that same conversation on the firewall’s internal interface (which faces the CSG) (I(O) means inbound(outbound) with respect to that interface):

11:04:59.441022  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 2210302227:2210302262(35) ack 1714160833 win 32768
11:05:00.640781  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
11:05:02.840742  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
11:05:07.040729  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
11:05:15.240780  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
11:05:31.440571  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
11:05:59.783366  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: FP 35:62(27) ack 1 win 32768
11:06:03.640595  I IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: . 0:35(35) ack 1 win 32768
^C

and the trace of the same thing on the firewall’s external interface, i.e., facing the Internet and drjohnspc:

11:03:59.269334  O IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 2210302159:2210302194(35) ack 1714160833 win 32768
11:03:59.562011  I IP drjohnspc.20723 > CSG.https: . ack 35 win 64426
11:03:59.562139  O IP CSG.https > drjohnspc.20723: P 35:68(33) ack 1 win 32768
11:03:59.861970  I IP drjohnspc.20723 > CSG.https: . ack 68 win 64393

Notice what’s not present in the exterenal interface trace – all those re-transmits, or even the original packet.

Let’s summarize so far. One of those keep-alive packets from the XenApp server reached the firewall, but didn’t exit the firewall. the only possibility is that it got dropped by the firewall!

Now that was a lot of work, but who’s going to do it if not a patient and methodical IT person?

Results
We got a networking problem on our hands after all. Good thing we persisted in this investigation even when it looked like we were off the hook! Later it was confirmed that the firewall was “aggressively aging” its connections because it had either reached or was very close to its connection limit. The firewall connection limit was raised and the Citrix connection issues went away.

Let’s go back to that simplistic question that non-experts like to ask: what had changed that caused this problem? The change was external events – increased usage of that firewall. Network bandwidth, Internet usage – they all tend to increase over time. There were no changes done by either networking or the application group to cause this issue. A seasoned IT detective uses all available clues and arrives at the right conclusion. The “what has changed” question is normally very relevant, but it can’t be the only tool in your toolbox!

Case closed!