Category Archives: Linux

Hot add Nic into Vyatta VM – no reboot required

Recently I was asked about how to add a nic to a Vyatta VM, my reply “add it in VMware and reboot”- their response “We cannot reboot”. I asked why they can’t reboot and they said “If we were to reboot this Vyatta (Bring down the Client VPNs) then we would have to send out an email a ton of clients and let them know” – huge ordeal .

So we need to add a nic via VMware, and then have Vyatta recognize that nic right away, with out a reboot. So I added the Nic (see image below) in VMware:

Add-int

After I add the NIC, I can look on the Vyatta and see it still shows only two NICs.

showint

So, VMware added the nic but Vyatta(debian) never sees it. After trying to ifup/ifdown , service network restart – and many other commands it could never find it.

So, what is needed – we have to rescan the PCI bus to find the nic. Most Linux users are probably like — ya of course you do! But I just reboot and it works. In this case cant reboot.

To Rescan the PCI bus, we have to first change our permissions on that file, echo into that file, than change the permissions back. The commands to do so are:

configure

sudo chmod 0777 /sys/bus/pci/rescan

sudo echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan

sudo chmod 0220 /sys/bus/pci/rescan

After doing that look at your interfaces:

int3

Now we see the interface and can configure it. This process should work with Debian no problem (since Vyatta is Debian).

Using Logrotate in Vyatta to manage logs

Logrotate is a tool that is built into Debian which is really what Vyatta is built on. Logrotate is a tool that allows automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files.  Each log file may be handled daily, weekly, monthly, or when it grows too large. Recently I had an issue where all the space on my Vyatta was filled up, after some investigation it was the auth.log that had reached a couple hundred mb. After clearing it I was fine. After more investigation I found that auth.log was never in the logrotate config.

Below is an example. In this example if the size of the log file gets above 50m it will copy itself (by rotating), compress the copy and then start logging to the new auth.log. In another 50m it will rotate back. So at most I would have 100m of auth.log.

/var/log/auth.log {
size 50M
rotate 2
create
compress
}

I would just edit the /etc/logrotate.conf file and add this in.

 

Linux network interface perference

Sometimes you have multiple nics on a Linux host and need to have one be a backup for anything other than its own subnet. Lets say both these nics have default routes and we need to go out of eth0 by default. There are multiple ways to do this.

One was is to modify the interface config and add a Metric. A lower metric is more preferable.

The command would be:

vi /etc/networking/interfaces

or

vi /etc/networking/eth0

then add

METRIC 1 (0 is highest, 1 would make it very prefreable)

save the file, then restart networking:

/etc/init.d/network restart

Another way is to use the command ifmetric command to set the metric of the route.

ifmetric INTERFACE [METRIC]

Using the ifmetric I do belive does not set it permenatly.