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Connecting to my car over ZeroTier

November 9, 2020
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I use ZeroTier on my network for a good few things, including internal network peering between BGP VMs, management of machines, and now, connecting to my car over LTE. This is one of those posts that sounds silly, but is very handy! First, the parts list:

  • Car…
  • 3G/4G/5G modem of some sort. I am using a Huawei Wingle… Can be used without the Router below, but I wanted Zerotier, so I have it in modem only mode…
  • A router that supports Zerotier. I am using a modified TP-Link TL-WR703N upgraded to 16MB ROM and 64MB RAM. This is required for newer OpenWRT builds
  • a dashcam that connects over Wifi. I am using a BlackVue DR750S-2CH
  • Latest ROOter software from Of Modems and Men
  • Patients…

After installing the the latest copy of ROOter on the TPLink (or router of your choice) and getting the modem configured correctly (this took a while) you need to install the Zerotier software though the dashboard. Once installed, I joined my Zerotier network using the CLI (SSH into the router) and the approved it though the my.zerotier.com dashboard. Once its approved and connected, you can now go to the Zerotier IP and get to the router directly. From here, you can either setup a route in Zerotier to point at the internal network behind the router, or, in my case, setup a  SSH tunnel to the dashcam. I found the IP given to the dashcam and used SSH forwarding to get to it. Finally, i used the URLs from Digital-Nebula’s hackview repo to get to the different URLs. I use this to download stuff like GPS logs, emergency videos, etc. I have to clean up some scripts at some stage for this, and plan to upload them at some stage.

If anyone has any questions, leave a comment!

Domain Joining a machine over VPN and Password Resets/Changes with Azure AD

October 15, 2020
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With the whole Work From Home thing probably becoming more and more normal in the years to come (I can count on 2 hands how many times I have physically been in my main office in the last 7 months) there are a couple of certainties in that people will come up against. One is passwords expiring and needing to be changed, one is password resets being required and finally laptops or desktops needing to be domain joined or connected to the domain before they can be fully provisioned. As the (currently only) IT guy in our office, I have had to deal with these first hand, and decide to write this post, helping both my fellow employees, and possibly other IT Admins stuck in this challenge.

So, as the IT person, there are a couple of assumptions:

  • You have on premises AD
  • You have Azure AD (P1 and above seems to be required if users are mixed AD and on prem. Free allows just Cloud users).
  • Azure AD Sync installed and enabled

If all above are set, you will need to follow the steps to Enable Azure Active Directory Self Service Password Reset. I have enabled this on our domain. Next, you need to get your users to setup their secondary authentication for backup. All our users have a 2FA requirement, so most of them had that already. New users need to go though those setups. Finally, if a user needs to change or reset their password, they can do so though https://aka.ms/sspr. If all is done well, that reduces the amount of support calls I (and you) get.

Now, the next task: domain joining over VPN. This is a bit more “fun” to play with.

First, you need a VPN connection. We use Meraki gear using Active Directory for RADIUS auth. I wont go into too much details on setting that part up, but the script we use to build the VPN connections for users is below. This will probably be different for different VPNs, but this is our starting point.

Lines you need to change are at 8, 9, 10 and 47. Line 39 can also be modified to change from Split Tunneling (only sending traffic to internal subnets) or full Tunneling (all traffic over VPN). If you have multiple internal subnets, Line 49 can be copied with more.

The most important part we need though is line 34. The -AllUserConnection allows the connection to be available to all users on the machine, but also on the start screen. This is important.

So, with all that in place, you will need to connect to the VPN

you should now be able to join the domain as if you where on your local network.

Enter Domain details and change name of machine if required
when asked enter your domain username and password
You will be welcomed to the domain
and then asked to reboot

reboot your machine as usual and when it boots, you should see a new option on the login screen

VPN login option

Click this icon and if you only have one VPN connection the screen below will show up. If you have more than one, you will be given a list of options to use.

Login to VPN at the login screen

Enter your domain credentials. Since our AD and VPN use the same credentials, it will automatically log you in aswell.

Machine is now domain joined and logged in, and in my case, finishing setup

So, there you have it. How to domain join a machine outside the network. Now, in reality, Azure Active Directory and Intune would probably be the better option, but that’s future work…

Network Update Info April 2019

April 18, 2019
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So, this post has been a long time coming! A load of different things to talk about, so lets get started!

GodBox V3

So, for a long time, I have been thinking about GodBoxV3, the replacement to GodBoxV2. And when planning this, i had some ideas of what it should be:

  • Minimum of 2×16 cores (double godboxv2)
  • About the same RAM, if not more
  • FAST STORAGE!
  • Is able to run my twin 30" 4K monitors
  • Would like 10Gb/s NICs

Well, It finally happened! I got the machine, built it and, well, its impressive! How did i do with specs? Well…

All is good! Photos, more details and benchmarks coming soon… stay tuned!

Finally 10Gb/s Networking!

Since GodBoxV3 had a few 10Gb nics, i needed to upgrade the network to support it. I ended up with a Ubiquiti Networks EdgeSwitch-XG. 16 ports (12 SFP+ and 4 RJ45). The SubperMicro board has 2xRJ45 ports. Due to lack of RJ45 ports, GodBoxV3 is connected to 1, GodBoxV2 is getting a 10Gb card soon, which will be connected to 1 port, and a new Sun Microsystems server (details below) will be getting the last 2… Of the SFP+ ports, 2 are connected to the EdgeSwitch Lite, 2 to the Synology (it got a 10Gig NIC reciently too!) and 2 to the new NAS (again, more details below!)

Good bye Mikrotik, Hello EdgeRouter 4

Since i was going all Ubiquiti gear (Wifi is Unifi gear) i got rid of the old Microtik and replaced it with a Ubiquiti ER4. Happy days! Got some plans for this, more details coming soon…

Updates to BGP Stuff, including IPv6

I lost one VPS in London, but replaced it with a new one from HostUS. I still use Vultr, Packet and VServer.Site as providers too. I am also adding more and more IPv6 stuff too… There is a post on AS204994 explaining a lot of this.

New NAS and more storage!

New NAS got purchased: QNAP TS-932X. I have 5X8TB spinny disks (shucked from 5 WD My Book 8TBs) + 4 X 500GB WD Blue SSDs.

New Servers and cooling updates

Moved lots of stuff around the room… Servers run cooler, and less noisy! happy days! I also got my hands on a very nice looking Sun Server X3-2. Its a Dual Xeon E5 (currently got quad cores, going to upgrade it to 8 cores) and i think its got 16GB ram and 4x300GB SAS Disks. It also has 4X10Gb nics! ESXi will probably go on here!

VMWare in the house

Up till recently, I ran Hyper-V all round. Its still on GodBox V2 and V3 (v1 has a HDD issue, so its off…), but the main VM hosts (the C6100’s) are being migrated to VMWare ESXi… Why? Its a learning exercise… We see how it goes…

So, long update… Any questions, comments, etc… shout!

Adding a Netgear LB2120 to the homelab

September 6, 2018
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A few months back, Three Ireland came out with an LTE broadband offer: Unlimited* LTE broadband for EUR30 per month. It did come with a 18 month contract, but I pulled the trigger and got it as a backup link. I picked this up in the local Three store, and they had a couple of options for modems: a couple of Huawei mobile Wifi hotspots (E5573 or E5577) or a Huawei B525 Modem, which is designed for home use. Alternatively, there was a Sim only option, but given the modem was free with the contact, i went with the B525.

The B525 is not a bad router, don’t get me wrong, but its a Router… i already have a few of them, including my Mikrotik RouterBoard CCR1016-12G, an EdgeRouter POE, a Ubiquiti USG 3 and some virtual ones too… yea, don’t ask… What i wanted was a modem; no WiFi, no routing, and give me a full, non NATted IP to the internet. There was some mention of some of the Huawei modems being able to be put into bridge mode, but i could not find out how to do it… That’s where the Netgear LB2120 comes in.

The LB2120 (there are a few different models, but mine is the Europe edition) has a Micro SIM Slot,a WAN and a LAN port (both GigE), Power in, Power button and 2 inputs for Aerials.

The home page is fairly basic, and gives you all you need: how much data you’ve used, how much you have left, when the data plan resets, etc.

There is also an alerts option, so you can get it to send you an SMS when something happens:

But the relay handy stuff is under Advanced setting/LAN:

You have the option of using it as a router, or using it in a Bridge. Needless to say, i bridged it and got a fully public IP. Currently, mine is hooked up to the second WAN port of the USG, and is currently serving about 30-40% of the traffic on that network (mostly media devices, IOT stuff, etc). Speed wise, its not bad.

Not as good as a hardwired connection, but its only getting 4 bars, and its about 1km to the nearest cell tower. I do want to get some external aerials for it, to see if i can boost the download/upload speed, but we will see. Also, i plan on changing out the Mikrotik for something else… lets see what i end up with!

*Unlimited is mobile network speak for 750GB per month… which does not sound very unlimited to me… but, anyway…

AS204994, Own IP Space and Anycast

April 1, 2018
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So, if you are reading this page, it is being delivered with the magic of Anycast… Well, technically, it was before, since i used Cloudflare, and it still is because of Cloudflare, but also because of my own ASN (As204994), some servers in different locations, and some magic, which i will explain a bit of in this post.

This all started late last year when i got my hands on an ASN and a /48 block of IPv6 addresses. I had been reading stuff about BGP, routing, etc, and decided to go all in. it was quite cheap with the help of HostUS. All in, it was about $50 for the year. As part of the process, i needed 2 upstream providers to say they would accept my announcement. They were Hurricane Electric though their Tunnel Broker service, and Vultr using a few of their VPSs.

After i got my space and ASN, i started to announce the V6 addresses over Vultr and Hurricane Electric, and all was good. I had 2 Vultr servers: 1 in London, UK, and one in New Jersey, USA. I had my home machine announce to HE, and then also link to both Vultr servers using Zerotier. All worked well, but due to some family issues, i never got around to putting it into production… till now.

Those 3 servers now share an IPv6 address on the loop-back port. When you (well, Cloudflare) asks for that IP, the closet (network) with that IP responds, and the NGinx server on that box sends back the contents of the site. This site is hosted on each box, since its fully static, but both AS204994 and TiernanOToole.net are hosted in Ghost, so Dublin (my machine in the house) serves them, and both Lon1 and Nyc1 do proxying. so, most requests from the US are hitting the box in NYC and the ones in Europe share either Dub1 or Lon1. I have some tweaks to do with which servers will be running where, and may add more, but currently its working well.

So, how do you figure out what server responded? Simple. Open your Dev tools on your browser, go to network tab, refresh, and see the response headers for anything on this domain. You should see something like below.

Over the next while, i will be updating tiernanotoole.net with more details on how this works, and more stuff will end up on AS204994.net too. If anyone notices any weird and wonderful issues, shout. If you have more questions, shout.

Zerotier and Minio Followup

May 5, 2017
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in a previous post, I talked about setting up a distributed S3 like data storage system using Minio and ZeroTier. Well, this week, the ZeroTier guys tweeted about this.

A few people then started asking questions, and looking for a follow up, so here it is…

First, a quick recap. I had 4 machines, all running Linux. Three of them were in 1 time zone (GMT+1) and one was in another (GMT). Looking at the Distributed Minio Quickstart Guide again, there is a mention of times being in sync… which is probably why this did not work as planned… and by “not work as planed”, I mean that Minio would crash, or not be responsive, or not write data in the place it should have… which was a pain. But looking at the documentation again, they do mention that Windows support is “experimental” which means, hopefully, some day it will be not so experimental, and might work… Given that most of my machines in house are Windows boxes, this would be a nice feature.

Now, what about ZeroTier? Given they posted it to their twitter? Well, it worked. it did the inter connect stuff well, and, given bandwidth limitations on a home broadband connection, it was still quite fast.

So, the question is, how fast? Well, on my Surface Book on a WiFi connection in the house, behind a Meraki MX64 firewall, connecting to the GodBoxV2 over FTP though ZeroTier, i get the following result:

the same download over FTP direct (no ZeroTier) does the following:

So, direct over FTP is faster… in this instance by about 70%, but, over the download, it did get slower (seen it hit 12 at one stage) and because its over WiFi, those are a bit wonky…

I did get one last screen shot:

as you can see, the Zerotier network adapter is showing 77.3Mbps, but the main network adapter is showing 80.8Mbps. There would be other traffic there, but if we assume there is nothing but ZeroTier traffic being sent, there is about 5% of an overhead.

So, to wrap up: Minio and its distributed storage system over ZeroTier needs more testing. Ideally, all hosts need to be in the same time zone, or at least have the same time… Will try work on that soon. As for ZeroTier? I am extremely happy with them. Its fast, easy to setup, and easy to configure. What more could you ask for? Oh, and free, unless you need a pro account!

Distributed S3 data storage using Minio (and Zerotier)

January 19, 2017
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So, something i have been looking into in recient times has been Distributed Storage, and, more specifically, how to use the storage in my many, many machines to protect data, and also increese my usable space… There are a few projects on the market that do this (Ceph, NooBaa and Gluster all spring to mind) but some are more painful to setup than others… which brings me nicely to Minio. Minio is a 20ish MB executable you download from their site, mark it as executable (on Linux or Mac Boxes) and run… and you have yourself a S3 compatable storage server… Simples!

“But Wait!” i here you screem! “thats not distributed!”. Well, yes… but, it can be! Their Distributed Quick Start Guide, which is where i started with this, allows you to run a distributed copy of your data. I will let their documentation explain more, but this is what i did:

  • download the minio server (single executable file) on a minimum of 4 machines.
  • on each machine, run a command like the following:

replacing accesskey and secretkey with keys (check minio documentation to get these) and foldertoexport with, well, the folder you want to export!

For me, i have 4 servers currently clustered. 2 are in online.net (one in Paris, one in Amsterdam), 1 in OVH.NET (France, somewhere) and one in Dublin (GodBoxV2 currently). They are all interconnected using ZeroTier (I will explain that later) and so far, so good… only ran some basic tests, but with it, i could loose 2 machines and still have data… Not bad for free! I will run some speed tests soon.

Cloud Desktop becoming a reality

September 14, 2016
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I have talked about the theory of the “Cloud desktop” twice on my older blog (Rackspace’s Hosted Virtual Desktop and More on the desktop in the cloud) way back since 2011. Since then, a few things have changed:

With all the increased bandwidth for mobile devices (4 and 5G, expanding wifi, etc) the idea of having your desktop live in the cloud is getting nearer… interesting times, my friend… interesting times…

[Update] Thinking a bit more about this, and if this was to work correctly, your phone could be everything required. Get up in the morning, check your emails on your phone, calander items, and news. head off, head to the coffee shop and plug your phone into a “laptop” style device like a NexDock and catch up on some emails, checking more news sites, etc. When you get into the office, plug your phone into the docking station and Remote Desktop in to your cloud desktop to do your development work, or whatever needs to be done. basic Office apps and Email can be run direct from the phone. When you get home, you can use the Microsoft Wireless Display adapter to watch videos on the big TV, or show web pages. And if your cloud desktop is available outside of your work network, you could work anywhere also…

double speed Internet Part 9 – Going Back

July 20, 2016
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[NOTE] This part 9 in a series of posts. The rest can be found here

Well, the double internet experiment is about ready to be finished… After 9 posts, 4 months, lots of sweating, many painful nights trying to figure out why something stopped using, shouting when Netflix did not work, wondering why my internet connection was so slow, and many, many other problems, i have decided to wind down the project. in the last 9 posts, i have learned a lot, and i hope i have helped someone figure out some stuff on their end. Even though this is a wind up of the project, there are still new things i have to share.

  • I found another project that has potential for speeding up the internet: VTrunkd. after some testing, i does seem to manage to speed up the connection, but either limits on hardware i have in house, or limits of hardware in the cloud, or even the software, stopped me in my tracks… i did see 400mb/s out of it at one stage, using 200mb/s from each modem… its close, but its not the full 720…
  • messing with Quagga/Zebra as mentioned in the previous post has been, well, interesting… I did manage to get all OVH traffic sent though their server, Digital Ocean traffic sent over that box, and everything else over Hetzner. I added an Azure box to the mix for a while, aswell as a Vultr box, but it got very messey, very quickly. if i had something automated, it would be better.
  • the idea of having a /29 IP range in Hetzner and forwarding it though the tunnels back to the house did work. My Meraki MX64 had one IP address, i had a mail server on a second, everything else on a third, and was planning on using more… but its just, well, again, messy. So, i will be going back to the idea of 2 IP addresses, and hoping whatever i put infront of the network can figure stuff out…

So, what am i moving to? well, thats a question… Currently, i have the Meraki MX64 plugged directly into the modems, and protecting my LAN. So far, so good, but due to hardware limits, it maxes out at around 260mb/s. So, thats out of the question for the main network! I did at one stage have Sophos UTM Home edition running. Sophos also have their XG firewall available for home use, so i might try that… There is also PFSense which i used before also… And there may be more… Maybe there will be a new series reviewing these home firewalls? we will see…

Meraki and Ubiquiti networks gear Update

June 20, 2016
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In part 6 of my Double Internet Series I mentioned i was running a Meraki MX64 in the network, and said i would write up about it. I am taking this opportunity to also write up about the Ubiquiti networks gear in the house also.

  • First on the list is my older Ubiquiti Edgerouter POE. It currently in the process of being decommissioned, or used for something else. It was the main edge router for the network: it had both internet connections connected, and did routing, firewalls, etc, but with the Proliant taking over as a router, it is not required as much any more… Its still on, mainly because its still a DHCP server, but not much else.
  • There are 2 Meraki MS220-8 switches next. GodBox1 and Godbox2 both connect in here, and are bonded, as is everything else on the network. The MS220-8 has 8 GigE ports, but also has 2 SFP ports. I bought 4 SFP Ethernet adapters and have a short calbe running between the switches. That uplink is also bonded. All going well so far!
  • All Meraki hardware can be managed though the Meraki dashboard. check out their site for more details and examples of how to use it.
  • I bought one of the MS220’s from eBay a few months back, and loved it. Then i realized that you can get your hands on free gear, the MX64, an MS220 and a Wi-Fi Access point if you attend their webinars. Terms and conditions apply, but check them out!
  • I have 2 Ubiquiti UniFi APs, one in the front of the house, one in the back. They are connected to one of the MS220’s, but dont work with its POE (maybe the EdgeRouter could do that, since its POE…) so there are injectors for them. Anyway, the network ports on there are VLANed to the MX64 (more on that later) and the default traffic is going to a management VLAN.
  • The MX64 has a static internal IP on my DMZ network, and uses the Proliant as an upstream connection. Upstream on the Hetzner server, all traffic coming from the MX64 ip uses one of my /29 ip block. all traffic to that ip is also forwarded directly to the MX64.
  • I has 2 small, unmanaged switches (a cheap 8 port Linksys and a 8 port TP Link) which are used for separate things: the Linksys has 4 Raspberry Pi’s, which run a GlusterFS cluster, plugged into it and the TP Link connects to my printers.
  • I also have a Mikrotik CRS226-24G-2S+IN which has 2 10Gbit SFP+ Ports, and plan on using this for higher speed networking soon, aswell as a Cisco 48 port 3560 which also has 4 SFP ports (GigE) and may come in handy for something soon…

So, thats the network currently. any questions, please leave a comment.

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