I have been looking around to see if there is some simple, stand-alone(ish) agent/server setup that would allow a ping to be launched from a host with an agent on it. When I say "ping," I mean via icmp echo and/or tcp port check. I have Windows, Linux, and AIX systems that would get such an agent.
I would like to set up a central server with authentication that can issue pings from any device that has one of these agents. The primary use would be VPN testing, so that traffic can be initiated from a device that I don't necessarily have access to.
It seems that some monitoring software has this (e.g., Zabbix) but I don't want to go through the pain of installing a whole big piece of software like that just to get this functionality.
Almost all our AIX and Linux systems have perl installed, so that could be a nice option if I had to write my own. I would rather find something "tried-and-true" though...
I didn't realize that we already had SaltStack installed on almost all our servers (I'm a network guy, not a server guy). Once I talked to one of the server administrators, he showed me how this could be done using Salt.
Related
Some software we have developed, we have "encapsulated it" into a virtual machine, that we run with Virtualbox, in command line in a non interactive way (no graphical interface). We send some instructions to the virtual machine, and it outputs some resulting files. We have tested this locally in a Linux machine. Now we would like to send this to many people using Linux, but we realize they will have different distributions, system libraries versions, etc, and then our VM might fail. So my question, is, it is possible to have someething like a static binary version of Virtualbox (or any other similar system / VM / Container) that does not need to use the system libraries, so that it can be run like a static binary?
It would be important to know what are the 'special' requirements of your solution regarding system libraries and the kind.
If you are using a standard host configuration, a standard VirtualBox install should be able to run the VM on any host OS.
Since a VM runs its own kernel, for the most part, is not dependent on host libraries. The the exception to this is when accessing/controlling host resources (disk, net, etc.). This being said, VirtualBox provides ways to access the most common resources (disk, net, etc.) that are transparent for the VM. Meaning that the VM will be configured always in the same way, regardless of whether the host is Win, Linux or Mac, and you can export your VM on Linux and importing it in other platforms without having to tweak it.
A container (eg. dockers) is more complicated, since it shares the kernel of the host, and it depends on how the host kernel is configured.
Again, if your application doesn't depend on 'special' access to host resources, a Docker will run the same way on all host OSs (Linux provides a native kernel, while Win and Mac run a linux virtual machine and then dockers inside it)
If you feel this doesn't answer your question, please share more details about the 'special' needs/configurations of your application, so we can dive deeper into this.
Have you looked at providing portable instances of the VM that can run on different host systems?
This example show how to create one for a windows host, check it out here, but I'm sure it can be done for different host systems as well.
I am using MySQL workbench on windows, which I want to connect to a Node-Red running on the IBM cloud. Since I don't run them on the same server the host 127.0.0.1 and port 3306 does not seem to work. What permissions should I give?
I'm going to make a LOT of assumptions here, because there really isn't enough information in your question.
First assumption, by "running on IBM" you mean that Node-RED is running on the IBM Cloud hosting service.
The short answer is you can not do what you want.
The longer version is that you probably could actually make this work but doing it is a REALLY bad idea.
Second assumption, you are doing this from home (even if you are doing it from a office location the same problems are likely to apply). This means you are connected to a local LAN using RFC 1918 address range (e.g. 192.168.0.x), this means you are behind a router that is performing NAT (Network Address Translation). This means you are going to need to set up portforwarding on the router so that when traffic arrives at the router it will send it on to your Windows machine. How you do this will depend on your router.
Next problem, your broadband probably doesn't have a static IP address which means it will change every time your connection drops. There are work arounds for this using things like Dynamic DNS. But that's too complicated to get into here.
Assuming you get all of that sorted out you still have the problem that you have now exposed your mysql database to the internet, so you need to make sure you have enabled all the right security measures to prevent people logging in and at best seeing all your data.
There are 2 much better solutions to this
Run Node-RED on the same machine or at least on the same local network as the database.
Use one of IBM Clouds hosted database solutions, these are a lot easier to connect to a IBM Cloud instance of Node-RED.
If you do not want to open ports to your network I recommend using a free MYSQL remote server
A simple website is https://remotemysql.com
Just take the screenshot of the credentials of your database after registration.
Keep in mind if your database is empty it will get deleted after some time.
I made a simple Instant Message Chat Client and Server on TCP, that both run off Adobe AIR. It works great and it was a interesting way to learn basic networking programming.
My Question: Is it possible to change the data in the packet sent from the Chat Server before it arrives at the Client without using the Server or Client to do so? Like perhaps a program?
I am new to Network programming so I apologize if this is a dumb question.
Your question is very broad. So the answer is broad as well. Yes. It's possible.
For that you need to get the packets between the client and server to pass through a third program. There are quite a lot of ways to achieve that. Here's non-exhaustive list:
First, on your own machines (client/server) you could get access to the packet from the operating system using various low-level APIs. For instance iptables+nfqueue in Linux or the Windows Filtering Platform on Windows.
Second, you could get access to the packets by intentionally having them communicate through some proxy program which may or may not reside on the same server as the client or the server.
Third, you could get access to the packets by picking them up from the network itself. For instance, you could set up some Linux machine as a router and have it sit between the client and the server (as long as they're not on the same machine). That Linux machine will now have access to all of the packets that pass through it, and it can pass them to various user-space programs using hooks such as the previously mentioned nfqueue.
Simple question can a Java service layer running on Tomcat7 on a host machine connect to persistent data store (mySQL) running inside a virtual box with portforwarding? I want to know if the hibernate or Jdbc connection strings from host machine work if mySQL server is installed inside a VirtualBox.
Also if it does work can I expect behavioral deviations in terms of speed and connection pooling if everything is packaged into one single system and deployed in a real world web server in a single enviroment?
The short answer is yes, it is possible and will work. You will likely have to play with the firewall settings on your virtual box instance. You don't specify OS, so it's hard to tell you what exactly you'll need to tweak.
As far as deploying this in a real-world environment, if you mean production, you probably should NOT do that. This is a great setup to build on, but not something I would run in production.
To be clear, there won't be any issues behaviorally speaking, it will act as MySQL always acts, but it will absolutely be slower than running it on 'bare metal' -- how much slower will vary based on hardware, workload, etc. and it is generally not a great design for a production deployment..
Since our shared hosting server doesn't allow us to setup Tomcat I decided to install it on our local machine. The local Tomcat server allows us to listen to a certain port for Bancnet transactions which will then be processed and written to the remote site.
Question:
Is it safe for me to set the local PHP application to connect directly to the remote mySQL server? Any suggestions on how to make the connection secure. BTW, I have a self-signed certificate installed in the localhost but not sure how this applies to remote mySQL connection.
You could create a ssh tunnel between MySQL server and client. For more resiliency, use autossh.
If you don't connect over SSL or some other encrypted tunnel, I would absolutely assume that anything you send or receive from MySQL is done so in clear text that can be intercepted and used for malicious purposes from any link along the way. This might be fine for testing purposes with dummy data, but before you put this in production use or pull down live user data for testing, you really should either make arrangements for the data to be stored local to the web app or for there to be an encrypted connection.
Giving you a full overview of how to set up SSL connections to MySQL is beyond the scope of Stack Overflow and it's a bit complicated, but if you want to proceed, check out the documentation and do some research, there are some good informational resources out there.
I'm a bit confused as to the architecture you are trying to describe. What's running where?
If you can't install Tomcat then you probably won't be able to install anything like VPN software on the box.
MySQL can encrypt using SSL provided it has been enabled at compile time and at run time.
Alternatively, it should be fairly trivial to build a webservices tier on top of the remote database.
I would recommend switching to a VPS or managed host though.