Segfaults are Cool: May 2011

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

MTU/Fragmentation Strikes Again

I have this strange setup:


A <---OpenVPN/TCP over SSH--> B <--localnet--> C
                              
                             :5432 ---DNAT---> :5432

in which host A is a VPS server somewhere in Illinois and hosts B & C are at home.

Host A needs to connect to a PostgresQL server running on C but for obscure reasons I do not want to run full routing/masquerading on B so I put a DNAT rule so A connecting to B:5432 in effect talks to C:5432

I had problems with a SQL insert A->C (it was the body of an e-mail). My test case message had just a few bytes in the body so the INSERT was completing A-OK.

However in real use this insert was taking forever and my Milter was timing out as a result (brr). Debugging on A was rather harsh as it's a VM with SElinux enabled so many things around ptrace(2) are borked.

After a few missteps I divined that the default MTU for the VPN interface (1500) was 1500 and since the link A->B is point-to-point (A is blissfully unaware of C's existence) A will never perform a path MTU discovery.

The fix was to lower the MTU to 1300 (be on the safe side as I did not bother to measure the overhead of the SSH envelope) on A and B.

-ulianov

Monday, May 16, 2011

Compressed Output from Bash CGI Scripts

I have blogged before on how to compress the output of Per CGIs. As I've started to use and Android phone I learned that some of my status pages dump a heck of a lot of output. A few are written ad Bash CGI scripts.

So here's how to repeat the trick in Bash:

#!/bin/sh

gz_pipe='cat';
echo $HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING | grep -qw gzip && {
  gz='ok'; gz_pipe='gzip -9f';
}

echo "Content-Type: text/html";
[ ! -z "$gz" ] && echo "Content-Encoding: gzip";
echo '';

{
  echo '<html><PRE>';
  set
  ps axf
  echo '</PRE></html>';
} | $gz_pipe

For user agents that do not accept gzip-encoded output we use cat(1) as a straight pass-thru as there is no 'nice way' to put nil afer a pipe sign (|) in Bash.

-ulianov