Richard's questions

I have two locations. HQ and branch. I have a pfSense FW installed in both locations although HQ is pf2.3.4 and the branch is pf2.4.4.

• HQ has a VPN Server site2site(port yyy) shared key
• branch has a VPN client site2site(port yyy) shared key
• both locations have the same ipv4 tunnel (10.0.9.0/24)
• on the branch I added the ipv4 remote networks correspinding to the HQ netx behind the VPN (10.80.248.0/24)

The network comes up. I can ping, trace, and route from the branch and the HQ

• I added a remote ssl/tls server(port zzz) on the branch
• I set the FORCE all traffic to the VPN flag
• set the tunnel network to 10.0.10.0/24
• created and exported certs
• launched openvpn on my client

from my client I can

• ping all the machines on my local subnet
• ping 1.1.1.1
• ping both side of the 10.0.10.0 net
• ping both side of the 10.0.9.0 net

however I cannot ping any machine on the 10.80.248.0 network from my client... but I can ping the same machine from the branch FW(diags ping).

As a side note I am able to ping the user machine from the HQ firewall.

Fedora21 Cloud comes in 2 flavors. Base and Atomic. I'm trying to install the BASE version using VirtualBox. The Atomic version will enable dhcp on eth1 if it's enabled, however, BASE refuses to enable eth1. I installed nmcli and tried any number of options and I have not been able to get things going correctly. I'm thinking that if nmcli is not the way to go then there must be something in cloud-init which would be a preferred method.

How do I activate DHCP on eth1?

I would like to create a backup of one of my Ubuntu systems. Put that backup file/image on one of my web servers and use iPXE or gPXE to restore it onto multiple servers. I'm assuming that I need a specialized application or distro that can be loaded via PXE.

Any recommendations?

My (MySQL) database is experiencing intermittent lock timeouts. I do not have a root cause yet and we do not have any recommendations yet. Back in the day I would have to reindex my SQL Server and Oracle indexes because they needed it. No one ever talks about that and MySQL.

Any recommendations?

Last night we were having some serious server events. At first it appeared that our issue was with google (8.8.8.8). We would run ping and at some point we would have some packet loss. At about the same time our systems would pop a DNS getaddr() exception.

Separately; this is strange to me because I have had to flush my local DNS cache from time to time when my DNS records change at my provider...

Shouldn't my applications and servers, which hit the same 5 remote service providers, have cached the DNS? Why would I get DNS errors instead of network errors?

My rails installation was chugging along nicely. Last night we had to perform a hot-patch with was really a standard deploy of some exception code. Once capistrano finished the operation one of our admins discovered that there were two long running passenger processes. While we have deployed release over the past two weeks it would appear that these processes have been here and alive the whole time. Granted they could have been zombies or any other artifact and at this point we do not know what state they were in.

Which leads me to the question: There are so many moving parts between the rails application and the OS/hardware that being a SME is probably no longer possible. So; how does a sysadmin perform root-cause analysis with any certainty?

And: When do I just start rebooting servers?

I'm trying to determine what sort of data is coming or going from my domain. The activity light on my modem and firewall are flashing like crazy regardless of the number of actual computers connected. When I disconnect the systems I still see the traffic. How can I peek onto that side of the firewall?