Using Ultimate GPS to bootstrap Maxim DS3231M

June 11th, 2014

I’m currently building a project that is based around a Maxim DS3231M, which is an I2C-attached RTC.

I’m currently using the chip through the TinyTempus breakout from Phenoptix which only lacks the 32.768 KHz output which I don’t use anyway. I’m using the provided CR1216 battery to keep the clock ticking at all times however I had a need to get the clock set to the right time.

As I had an Adafruit Ultimate GPS breakout I figured it would be easy to just use the time from that to bootstrap the clock to the right time rather than deal with user input. I put together the following basic circuit:

ds3231-from-gps

I’ve uploaded the sketch I wrote to GitHub: https://github.com/bodgit/ds3231-from-gps

The sketch uses the undocumented $GPZDA NMEA sentence to retrieve the time from the GPS module and reprograms the DS3231 on receipt of every new sentence so you just need to run the sketch long enough to get the message that the clock is set. Assuming your battery is good, the clock will keep ticking and maintain time accurately after you pull the power.

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Posted in Arduino | No Comments »

Enabling $GPZDA NMEA sentence on Adafruit Ultimate GPS

June 10th, 2014

I’ve been using an Adafruit Ultimate GPS module as a time source which with their standard GPS Library provides the $GPRMC NMEA 0183 sentence containing the time and date however I had a preference for the $GPZDA sentence for the simple fact it provides the year as four digits instead of only two.

This forum post suggested it was possible on the MTK3339 chip by sending an unsupported variant of the command that enables the various sentences: 

$PMTK314,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0*29

However, this didn’t work. The datasheet provided by Adafruit doesn’t document the majority of the data fields in this command, just identifying them as reserved. I found another datasheet elsewhere which I think is just an older revision of the same document and this has slightly better information. In fact, the command was only slightly wrong, it’s in fact this: 

$PMTK314,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0*29

It’s the 18th field, not the 17th as the forum post originally suggested. Sending this command to the GPS module now returns the $GPZDA NMEA sentence. It can be enabled with other sentences, you just need to update the XOR checksum after the * using something like this online tool.

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Posted in Arduino | 5 Comments »

Annoying Keychain bug on Mavericks

January 27th, 2014

Just been bitten by this annoying bug on Mavericks after a seemingly innocuous reboot whereby I’m prompted repeatedly to unlock my “Local Items” keychain. No password I’m aware of works and mashing Cancel just puts you in an endless loop cycling through each application or framework that wants to access said keychain.

The solution is simple as outlined in the linked support document; just nuke the UUID-named folder in ~/Library/Keychains and reboot. The same folder will reappear afterwards but it’s fine to leave it if you’re not prompted to unlock it again. Obviously something got corrupted, possibly related to iCloud.

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Posted in Mac OS X | No Comments »

HP Microserver TPM

January 10th, 2014

I’ve been dabbling with DNSSEC which involves creating a few zone- and key-signing keys, and it became immediately apparent that my headless HP Microserver has very poor entropy generation for /dev/random. After poking and prodding it became apparent there’s no dormant hardware RNG that I can just enable to fix it.

Eventually I stumbled on this post which suggests you can install and make use of the optional TPM as a source of entropy.

I picked up one cheaply and installed it following the above instructions to install and configure it; I found I only needed to remove the power cord for safety’s sake, the TPM connector on the motherboard is right at the front so I didn’t need to pull the tray out.

Also, since that blog post, the rng-tools package on RHEL/CentOS 6.x now includes an init script so it’s just a case of doing the following final step: 

# chkconfig rngd on
# service rngd start

It should then be possible to pass this up to any KVM guests using the virtio-rng.ko module.

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Posted in CentOS | No Comments »

IPsec between Meraki and OpenBSD

August 6th, 2013

I recently acquired some (Cisco) Meraki networking kit including an MX60 security appliance (read: router, firewall, NAT, etc.).

Once it’s set up and running, I was browsing the dashboard and the site-to-site VPN configuration options. Normally with multiple Meraki devices in use, a fully-meshed VPN can be created automatically with very little configuration.

I also noticed the ability to add non-Meraki VPN peers so I added details for my OpenBSD-based gateway. You can see from the screenshot the details are basic:

meraki dashboard

On the OpenBSD side, I started with a basic configuration in /etc/ipsec.conf: 

ike esp from 192.0.2.0/24 to 192.168.128.0/24 \
        peer example-xyzzy.dynamic-m.com \
        psk mekmitasdigoat

The Meraki dashboard allows you to register a dynamic DNS record for the MX60 which will be in the .dynamic-m.com domain so you can use this to refer to the remote peer in the configuration, (especially if you have a dynamic IP address).

This configuration didn’t work, but using isakmpd(8)‘s handy -L option to write to /var/run/isakmpd.pcap all of the unencrypted IKE traffic it then becomes apparent the OpenBSD and the Meraki disagree on the phase 1 negotiation; mainly that the Meraki end wants to use Triple DES and OpenBSD prefers AES by default. As there’s no way to tweak the cryptography options on the Meraki side, we change the OpenBED side like so: 

ike esp from 192.0.2.0/24 to 192.168.128.0/24 \
        peer example-xyzzy.dynamic-m.com \
        main auth hmac-sha1 enc 3des group modp1024 lifetime 28800 \
        quick auth hmac-sha1 enc aes-256 group none lifetime 28800 \
        psk mekmitasdigoat

The main option sets the phase 1 parameters and the quick option sets the phase 2 parameters that match the highest settings out of the handful proposed by the Meraki side.

With that done, all that remains is to ensure isakmpd(8) starts at boot and the rules in /etc/ipsec.conf are automatically loaded by adding the following to /etc/rc.conf.local: 

isakmpd_flags=-K
ipsec=YES

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Posted in Networks, OpenBSD | 1 Comment »

Elasticsearch clusters plugged into Cisco switches

May 31st, 2013

I was building up an Elasticsearch cluster as a storage backend for Logstash. Using the default Zen discovery method, I found that some of the nodes in the cluster could not automatically find each other.

Zen uses multicast to locate other nodes and by using tcpdump I could see that some nodes weren’t receiving the multicast traffic. This lead me straight to the network layer and I found the culprit; a Cisco Nexus 5000 switch.

Normally a switch often treats multicast traffic much like broadcast traffic, it floods the packet to every port on the same VLAN. However Cisco switches try to be clever and learn which ports are interested in receiving the traffic by listening for IGMP packets, (referred to as snooping), but IGMP is only sent if there’s a multicast router on the network, (note also I’m not trying to route multicast, all nodes are on the same VLAN).

The solution was to enable a feature on the Nexus known as an “IGMP querier”. What this does is mimic enough of a multicast router that nodes report which multicast groups they’re interested in receiving traffic for and the switch can then learn which ports to forward multicast traffic on.

On the Nexus 5000, I needed to add the following configuration: 

vlan configuration 1234
  ip igmp snooping querier 1.2.3.4

(If you have a Catalyst switch running IOS, the configuration should be very similar)

The VLAN should match whatever VLAN the nodes are attached to, and you can basically make up the IP address used here, the switch sends IGMP packets with it as the source, but it’s never used as the destination for packets, nodes use a specific multicast group instead.

As soon as I added this configuration my Elasticsearch cluster sprung into life.

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Posted in Networks | No Comments »

Soekris CPU Scaling and OpenBSD 5.2

December 25th, 2012

OpenBSD 5.2 was released nearly two months ago and I had forgotten to upgrade my Soekris net6501, apart from my driver now being part of the kernel, this release also added support to the SpeedStep frequency scaling driver for the Atom CPU.

The simple benchmark to keep in mind is using the md5(1) command, using its built-in time trial test. Under the previous OpenBSD 5.1 release: 

# md5 -ttt
MD5 time trial.  Processing 1000000 10000-byte blocks...
Digest = f0843f04c524250749d014a8152920ec
Time   = 124.227876 seconds
Speed  = 80497230.750367 bytes/second

You can see I’m getting roughly 80 MB/s. Now upgrade to OpenBSD 5.2 and repeat the test, you’ll get pretty much the same speeds, however now we have the CPU frequency scaling to play with. The scaling is very coarse, the only two speeds supported are 600 MHz and whatever maximum the CPU supports, so in my case with a net6501-70, it’s 1.6 GHz. To change the scaling simply manipulate the hw.setperf sysctl(8) variable.

By default the CPU is running at 100%, confirmed by: 

# sysctl hw.setperf
hw.setperf=100

Now set the CPU frequency to the slowest speed: 

# sysctl hw.setperf=0
hw.setperf: 100 -> 0

Now running the test again I get the following results: 

# md5 -ttt
MD5 time trial.  Processing 1000000 10000-byte blocks...
Digest = f0843f04c524250749d014a8152920ec
Time   = 123.948587 seconds
Speed  = 80678612.334645 bytes/second

Almost exactly the same speed, which doesn’t make sense given I’ve knocked 1 GHz off the clock speed! So put the CPU back to 100% and try again: 

# sysctl hw.setperf=100
hw.setperf: 0 -> 100
# md5 -ttt
MD5 time trial.  Processing 1000000 10000-byte blocks...
Digest = f0843f04c524250749d014a8152920ec
Time   = 46.424699 seconds
Speed  = 215402581.285449 bytes/second

Ah-ha, about 210 MB/s this time! It transpires there’s a bug in the Soekris BIOS, despite advertising the CPU as 1.6 GHz it wasn’t programmed correctly and was only being clocked at 600 MHz, so all this time I’ve effectively had the base net6501-30 model albeit with the extra RAM. You can work around this by setting hw.setperf to 100 on each boot.

A new BIOS 1.41c has been released which fixes this issue and programs the CPU to run at its advertised maximum speed. However to upgrade to this involves my eternal battle with serial terminal software and uploading over XMODEM which is notoriously fickle, although I think I have it cracked…

I usually use a Mac OS X host with a KeySpan USB/Serial adapter to connect to the net6501 so I already have tools like cu(1) and screen(1). You’ll also need the lrzsz tools installed which if using MacPorts is as easy as: 

# sudo port install lrzsz

Using cu(1), connect to the Soekris: 

# sudo cu -l /dev/tty.KeySerial1 -s 19200

Power the board on, use Ctrl+P to break into the BIOS monitor and type download to start the Soekris waiting to receive over XMODEM. Now you need to type ~+sz -X /path/to/b6501_141c.bin, possibly as quickly as you can after the previous command. If that works, type flashupdate afterwards to reprogram the BIOS. You’ll get something like the following transcript: 

> download
 
Start sending file using XMODEM/CRC protocol.
~+sz -X /path/to/b6501_141c.bin
Sending /path/to/b6501_141c.bin, 1982 blocks: Give your local XMODEM receive command now.
Bytes Sent: 253696   BPS:1746                            
 
Transfer complete
 
File downloaded succesfully, size 253696 Bytes.
 
> flashupdate
Updating BIOS Flash ,,,,,,,,,,,,, Done.
 
> reboot

Reboot and boot back into OpenBSD. Now the time trial should return a result of roughly 210 MB/s every time. Because I obviously don’t need 1.6 GHz of CPU all time, I’ve enabled the apmd(8) daemon which manipulates the hw.setperf variable based on the CPU idle time. Add the following to /etc/rc.conf.local: 

apmd_flags="-C -f /dev/null"

The -f is only necessary when running i386 otherwise apmd(8) complains. Start with: 

# /etc/rc.d/apmd start
apmd(ok)

Normally hw.setperf will be 0 however when you do something CPU-intensive (such as the MD5 time trial) apmd(8) will automatically adjust hw.setperf back to 100 so you still get the 210 MB/s result, but most of the time you’ll have lower power draw and less heat.

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Posted in OpenBSD | 10 Comments »

Soekris net6501 improvements for OpenBSD

June 9th, 2012

I’ve recently had committed to the OpenBSD project a kernel driver, tcpcib(4), that adds support for the hardware watchdog and HPET found in the Soekris net6501, (although it should also work on any system based around the Intel Atom E600 “Tunnel Creek” processor).

I’ve not had any issue with my net6501 that has required a hard reset although I managed to trigger the watchdog a few times on the net4501 by pushing too much network traffic through it, so it’s handy to have it there as a safeguard. The HPET support simply provides a time counter with better precision that benefits anything on the system that can use it.

With the driver in your kernel, you should now see the following attach lines: 

tcpcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel E600 LPC" rev 0x00: 14318179 Hz timer, watchdog
isa0 at tcpcib0

Enabling the watchdog is as easy as setting kern.watchdog.period with sysctl(8). The watchdog supports a maximum period of 600 seconds and if it ever triggers a reboot of the host, you’ll be treated to a slightly different attach line: 

tcpcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel E600 LPC" rev 0x00: 14318179 Hz timer, watchdog, reboot on timeout

The HPET support “just works”, but you can confirm it’s active with the following: 

# sysctl kern.timecounter 
kern.timecounter.tick=1
kern.timecounter.timestepwarnings=0
kern.timecounter.hardware=tcpcib0
kern.timecounter.choice=i8254(0) tcpcib0(2000) dummy(-1000000)

The driver is available in -current and so should be in 5.2 onwards and can be backported to 5.1 which is how I’m currently running it.

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Posted in OpenBSD | No Comments »

HP Microserver Remote Management Card

January 28th, 2012

I recently acquired the Remote Management card for my HP Microserver, which allows remote KVM & power control, IPMI management and hardware monitoring through temperature & fan sensors.

Note the extra connector on the card in addition to the standard PCI-e x1 connector which matches the dedicated slot on the Microserver motherboard. This presented a bit of a problem as I was using the space for the battery backup module for the RAID controller in the neighbouring slot.

Thankfully the long ribbon cable meant I could route the battery up to the space behind the DVD burner freeing the slot again. Once the card was installed and everything screwed back together I booted straight back into CentOS. Given IPMI is touted as a feature I figured that was the first thing to try so I installed OpenIPMI: 

# yum -y install OpenIPMI ipmitool
...
# service ipmi start
Starting ipmi drivers:                                     [  OK  ]
# ipmitool chassis status
Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0 or /dev/ipmidev/0: No such file or directory
Error sending Chassis Status command

Hmm, not good. Looking at dmesg shows the following is output when the IPMI drivers get loaded: 

ipmi message handler version 39.2
IPMI System Interface driver.
ipmi_si: Adding SMBIOS-specified kcs state machine
ipmi_si: Adding ACPI-specified smic state machine
ipmi_si: Trying SMBIOS-specified kcs state machine at i/o address 0xca8, slave address 0x20, irq 0
ipmi_si: Interface detection failed
ipmi_si: Trying ACPI-specified smic state machine at mem address 0x0, slave address 0x0, irq 0
Could not set up I/O space
ipmi device interface

From reading the PDF manual it states that the IPMI KCS interface is at 0xCA2 in memory, not 0xCA8 that the kernel is trying to probe. Looking at the output from dmidecode shows where this value is probably coming from: 

# dmidecode --type 38
# dmidecode 2.11
SMBIOS 2.6 present.
 
Handle 0x001B, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
	Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
	Specification Version: 1.5
	I2C Slave Address: 0x10
	NV Storage Device: Not Present
	Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
	Register Spacing: Successive Byte Boundaries

This suggests a minor bug in the BIOS.

Querying the ipmi_si module with modinfo shows it can be persuaded to use a different I/O address so I created /etc/modprobe.d/ipmi.conf containing the following: 

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options ipmi_si type=kcs ports=0xca2

Then bounce the service to reload the modules and try again: 

# service ipmi restart
Stopping all ipmi drivers:                                 [  OK  ]
Starting ipmi drivers:                                     [  OK  ]

As of CentOS 6.4, the above won’t work as the ipmi_si module is now compiled into the kernel. Instead, you need to edit /etc/grub.conf and append the following to your kernel parameters: 

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ipmi_si.type=kcs ipmi_si.ports=0xca2

Thanks to this post for the info. Instead of bouncing the service you’ll need to reboot, then try again: 

# ipmitool chassis status
System Power         : on
Power Overload       : false
Power Interlock      : inactive
Main Power Fault     : false
Power Control Fault  : false
Power Restore Policy : always-off
Last Power Event     : 
Chassis Intrusion    : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout  : inactive
Drive Fault          : false
Cooling/Fan Fault    : false
# ipmitool sdr
Watchdog         | 0x00              | ok
CPU_THEMAL       | 32 degrees C      | ok
NB_THERMAL       | 35 degrees C      | ok
SEL Rate         | 0 messages        | ok
AMBIENT_THERMAL  | 20 degrees C      | ok
EvtLogDisabled   | 0x00              | ok
System Event     | 0x00              | ok
SYS_FAN          | 1000 RPM          | ok
CPU Thermtrip    | 0x00              | ok
Sys Pwr Monitor  | 0x00              | ok

Success! With that sorted, you can now use ipmitool to further configure the management card, although not all of the settings are accessible such as IPv6 network settings so you have to use the BIOS or web interface for some of it.

Overall, I’m fairly happy with the management card. It has decent IPv6 support and the Java KVM client works okay on OS X should I ever need it but I couldn’t coax the separate virtual media client to work, I guess only Windows is supported.

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Posted in CentOS | 13 Comments »

OpenBSD PPPoE and RFC 4638

January 20th, 2012

I upgraded my Internet connection from ADSL 2+ to FTTC a while ago. I’m with Eclipse as an ISP, but it’s basically the same product as BT Infinity, right down to the Openreach-branded modem, (a Huawei Echolife HG612 to be exact).

With this modem, you need to use a router or some software that can do RFC 2516 PPPoE so I simply kept using OpenBSD on my trusty Soekris net4501 and set up a pppoe(4) interface, job done. However what became apparent is the 133 MHz AMD Elan CPU couldn’t fully utilise the 40 Mb/s bandwidth I now had, at best I could get 16-20 Mb/s with a favourable wind. An upgrade was needed.

Given I’d had around 8 years of flawless service from the net4501, another Soekris board was the way to go. Enter the net6501 with comparatively loads more CPU grunt, RAM and interestingly Gigabit NIC chips; not necessarily for the faster speed, but because they can naturally handle a larger MTU.

The reason for this was that I had read that the Huawei modem and BT FTTC network fully supported RFC 4638, which means you can have an MTU of 1,500 bytes on your PPPoE connection which matches what you’ll have on your internal network. Traditionally a PPPoE connection only allowed 1,492 bytes on account of the overhead of 8 bytes of PPPoE headers in every Ethernet frame payload. Because of this it was almost mandatory to perform MSS clamping on traffic to prevent problems. So having an MTU of 1,500 bytes should avoid the need for any clamping trickery, but means your Ethernet interface needs to cope with an MTU of 1,508 bytes, hence the Gigabit NIC (which can accommodate an MTU of 9,000 bytes with no problems).

One small problem remained, pppoe(4) on OpenBSD 5.0 didn’t support RFC 4638. While I sat down and started to add support I noticed someone had added this to the NetBSD driver already, (which is where the OpenBSD driver originated from), so based on their changes I created a similar patch and with some necessary improvements based on feedback from OpenBSD developers it has now been committed to CVS in time for the 5.1 release.

To make use of the larger MTU is fairly obvious, simply set the MTU explicitly on both the Ethernet and PPPoE interfaces to 8 bytes higher than their default. As an example, my /etc/hostname.em0 now contains: 

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mtu 1508 up

And similarly my /etc/hostname.pppoe0 contains: 

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inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE mtu 1500 \
        pppoedev em0 authproto chap \
        authname 'user' authkey 'secret' up
dest 0.0.0.1
!/sbin/route add default -ifp \$if 0.0.0.1

I also added support to tcpdump(8) to display the additional PPPoE tag used to negotiate the larger MTU, so when you bring the interface up, watch for PPP-Max-Payload tags going back and forth during the discovery phase.

With that done the remaining step is to remove any scrub max-mss rules in pf.conf(5) as with any luck they should no longer be required.

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Posted in Networks, OpenBSD | 15 Comments »

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