DHCP issue

[murchball]

First of all, thanks for all of the great work on this project. I've been using raqcop for about the last 6 months. It's been working great, until just the other day. For some reason it just stopped giving out ip addresses. I've tried a number of things to reenable dhcp including enabling it and disabling it through both the web gui and the command line and I've even tried reinstalling from scratch, but no luck. My next step is to try installing on a different hard drive, but I was wondering if anyone had any idea what would dhcp to just quit like that. Could it be some sort of hardware thing (random number generator, bad nic)? I should note that besides this, it's working fine. It still passes traffic fine.

Thanks again!
 ChrisM

[Davesworld]

Hmm, I've never seen this behavior on any IPCop box Standard PC install or Raqcop as long as I allow it to dish out addys to the entire subnet, meaning that I have over 200 ip addys for it to dish out. I reserve my first 30 addys for manual and allow dhcp to dish out from .31 to .254. I'm baffled as to what could have changed? You installed from scratch so this would eliminate any corruption. Did you add anything to the lan lately or change how Red connects, IE switch isp's and or modems? Is there anything else on the lan that tries to act as a dhcp server as well? You'd be surprised how easy it is to create on such things as Win XP.

[murchball]

My scope had 50 addresses .150-.199 and it was working fine until just the other day. I was thinking the same thing as you, that another DHCP server had come online, but I nixed that idea since I hadn't changed anything, and none of my computers were getting addresses. I installed IpCop on another box and it seems to be working fine, so I'm pretty sure that the problem is definitely with the raq. If there were a bad sector on the hard drive, would winimage try to put the same info in the same location? Once I get another hard drive, I'll report back.

[Davesworld]

If there were a bad sector on the hard drive, would winimage try to put the same info in the same location?

Yes, it will blindly write sector for sector.

 I switched to CF for various reasons, one reason being that the slow old 20 gig drives that come with these are not going to last forever, the other is that the IPCop way of running a flash install is pretty clever and runs all the dynamic content in a mounted ramdisk rather than from the drive. The /var/log partition exists as /var/log_compressed and two tarballs exist there, one for all of /var/log minus proxy cache and the other for cron. These are backed up to once an hour and on proper shutdown. On boot they are untarred after the /ram partition is mounted. This allows the flash drive to be written to once an hour rather than almost constantly. The only issue is that you cannot run a huge proxy cache. These (Raq3/4 Qube3) units run nicely with a gig of ram though and a large /ram partition is possible. Low power, low heat, and all of /var/log as well as html graphs being read from /ram rather than a drive makes it run very nice.

The only difference between Raqcop and IPCop as far as flash goes is that I switched from the RD (ramdisk) filesystem to TMPFS on my latest -2 build a few months ago and submitted an RFE to IPCop itself for 1.4.x. Not sure if they will bother with it for the 1.4 branch though as it is already a part of the upcoming 2.0. Some fixes for 1.4.22/23 were accepted that Brian discovered as soon as he started selling bandwidth to his neighbor, namely a proxy log issue with flash installs. TMPFS was introduced with the 2.4 kernel several years ago and should be used in lieu of RD. A mounted ramdisk with the RD filesystem is a fixed size and has to be formatted every time it is mounted. TMPFS does not get formatted, just mounted and you can either mount as a percentage or a fixed size. You can also remount it while running at a different size with no data loss in the mounted TMPFS partition. Also, any ram unused by the TMPFS is still available to the system.

Pictures of my main daily firewall show the Syba direct port CF adapter. Unrelated to this is the fact that I am running a VFD display rather than the LCD. The German forum has an IPCop gallery and Tom Eichstaedt is very receptive to modded hardware and exotic hardware.

http://www.ipcop-forum.de/galerie/davesworld.php

[murchball]

Switching to compact flash isn't a bad idea. On kind of a different topic, are both of the fans the same on a raq3? Mine a pretty loud and I'm worried that they're going to die soon, especially the one for the power supply.

[Davesworld]

Yes they are the same. The exact model number was superseded by one that has a tiny bit more cfm but is also slightly louder than the original when it was new. Brian has them listed on the store for this site as well as Syba flash adapters. The power supply fan usually goes before the cpu one. These things barely need a fan. They sure don't draw much power either. I want to look into the possibility of having a thermistor activated fan or look for a quieter replacement. These things are not that loud but I see no reason why you can't quiet it down to barely audible.

BTW, using a Transcend industrial flash card, the throughput is actually better than the slow old 20 gig drive. Only matters on boot anyway if even then. My test box that I test 1.4.23cvs builds on has a cheapo 512MB flash and I can't tell the difference in boot time, once running it's mostly ram that matters. Anything over 512MB is wasted on CF installs because the only variable is the root partition, whether you use 128MB or 4GB, the boot partition is still 8MB and the /var/log_compressed is still 30MB. A typical install uses a bit over 100MB used on the root partition. One of the reasons why I like the Transcend Industrial is because they are available in the smaller sizes and I paid only 17 dollars for the 512 model. They also make a DOM that weizen42 proved can fit under the cover even in the secondary ide slot which is vertical. You can use the flash images on any combination that plugs into IDE except for one I know of. I have a MD/SD to IDE adapter and I can not get any Cobalt unit to boot from it including a Raq 550 but a standard PC install that uses a bootloader will boot from it. Something about the second sector. MMC/SD cards are not IDE natively like CF cards are and as such the adapters have a small chip or two to provide the IDE interface. I was even able to boot a standard PC install of IPCop from a 1GB Micro SD smaller than my thumbnail. I'm not sure if using the Addonics model will work on a Cobalt either.

[Davesworld]

Something I just found out about IPCop and DHCP. If you use long leases, it will eventually fail and a new fresh install will not alleviate it. If this is indeed happening due to a long lease, shorten it and force the clients to renew. Happened to Brian many times on IPCop not specific to Raqcop.

[murchball]

Interesting. I had left my lease time to the default (1 hour, I think). What is considered a long lease? On my temporary replacement box, I bumped it up to 600 minutes.

You've sold me on CF! With the Syba adapter, do you need a power cable? I see a connector for a floppy power cable, but I'm wondering if this really needs power.

[Davesworld]

Yes, the only devices that do not need a power cable are some of the Via mini ITX boards that use pin 20 to supply the needed 5v. The Raqs have a pin 20 but it is not hot unfortunately.

As far as the lease goes, long leases are more like a year or something. I've always left mine at the default. I have a mix of fixed leases and occasionally when I plug new things into the network, the default dhcp gets used.

[weizen_42]

For DHCP you'd want to check wether the service is running and watch for any log messages in the DHCP section.

[murchball]

Yup it shows that DHCP failed to start in the logs and on the services page, yet the service is enabled. Waiting for the hardware to try a CF install.

[weizen_42]

The log should also state *why* DHCP failed and give a clue to fix it.

[murchball]

All signs seemed to point to a bad hard drive. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe the original error said something about not being able to find file dhcp.leases. Trying to list the contents of that directory (as root) resulted in an input/output error. I reimaged the hard drive and still was unable to get DHCP to work, but I think the error was different, but it seemed like the simplest solution was to try a different hard drive. Once I get the parts to install my cf card, I'll let you know if it's any better.

[murchball]

I started playing with the flash install last night. Interestingly, the 2GB image was a tiny bit too big for my 2GB flash card, the 1GB image worked fine. Is there any way to use the rest of this space? Could I just use something like Gparted to resize the partition or is that a bad idea on a flash card? It sounds like 1GB is plenty anyways.

[Davesworld]

Anything bigger than 512MB is wasted anyway. You no longer have a /var/log partition that is normally quite large on an HD install, it is replaced with /var/log_compressed which is fixed at 30MB and contains compressed logs to be uncompressed at next boot. /var/log is linked to /ram/var/log which runs entirely in memory. The only thing that changes with larger flash installs is the size of the root / partition and you only use 110MB of that anyway, you do not want anything that reads and writes too much to the card, as it is, it writes to the compressed log and cron tarballs once an hour. If you want more proxy cache you need more ram. I have used various 512MB sticks in these and they handle 1GB of ram no problem. The fact that the flash does rely on and use ram much more than a disk install is one of the reasons I like flash installs, ram is much much faster than even a 15,000rpm drive.