Category Archives: CLI

CLI, OS, Virtualization

Proxmox HA management script

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I was a bit frustrated at the lack of certain functions of ProxMox. I wanted an easy way to tag a VM and manage that tag as a group. My solution was to create HA groups for VMs with various functions. I can then manage the group and tell them to migrate storage or turn off & on.

I wrote a script to facilitate this. Right now it only covers powering on, powering off, and migrating the location of the primary disk, but more is to come.

Here’s what I have so far:

#!/bin/bash
#Proxmox HA management script
#Migrates storage, starts, or stops Proxmox HA groups based on the name and function passed to it.
#Usage: manage-HA-group.sh <start|stop|migrate> <ha-group-name> [local|remote]

#Change to the name of your local storage (for migrating from remote to local storage)
LOCAL_STORAGE_NAME="pve-1TB"

function get_vm_name() {
    #Determine the name of the VMID passed to this function
    VM_NAME=$(qm config "$1" | grep '^name:' | awk '{print $2}')
}

function get_group_VMIDs() {
    #Get a list of VMIDs based on the name of the HA group passed to this function
    group_VMIDs=$(ha-manager config | grep -B1 "$1" | grep vm: | sed 's/vm://g')
}

function group_power_state() {
    #Loop through members of HA group passed to this function
    for group in "$1" 
    do
        get_group_VMIDs "$group"
        for VM in $group_VMIDs
        do
            get_vm_name "$VM"
            echo "$OPERATION $VM_NAME in HA group $group"
            ha-manager set $VM --state $VM_STATE
        done
    done
}

function group_migrate() {
    #This function migrates the VM's first disk (scsi0) to the specified location (local/remote)
    #TODO String to determine all disk IDs:  qm config 115 | grep '^scsi[0-9]:' | tr -d ':' | awk '{print $1}'
    disk="scsi0"    

    #Loop through each VM in specified group name (second argument passed on CLI)
    for group in "$2" 
    do
        get_group_VMIDs "$group"
        for VM in $group_VMIDs
        do
            #Determine the names of each VM in the HA group
            get_vm_name "$VM"

            #Set storage location based on argument
            if [[ "$3" == "remote" ]]; then
                storage="$VM_NAME"
            else
                storage="$LOCAL_STORAGE_NAME"
            fi

            #Move primary disk to desired location
            echo "Migrating $VM_NAME to "$3" storage"
            qm move_disk $VM $disk $storage --delete=1

        done
    done
}

case "$1" in 
    start)
        VM_STATE="started"
        OPERATION="Starting"
        group_power_state "$2" 
        ;;
    stop)
        VM_STATE="stopped"
        OPERATION="Stopping"
        group_power_state "$2"
        ;;
    migrate)
        case "$3" in
            local|remote)
                group_migrate "$@"
                ;;
            *)
                echo "Usage: manage-HA-group.sh migrate <ha-group-name> <local|remote>"
                ;;
        esac        
    ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: manage-HA-group.sh <start|stop|migrate> <ha-group-name> [local|remote]"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

CLI

Find local accounts with shell login

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I spent some time building this query so I thought I’d write it down. To find out which accounts in /etc/passwd with a UID greater than 500 have anything other than nologin or false set as their login shell, combine grep & awk to print them out:

grep -v 'nologin\|false' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{if($3>500)print}'

grep -v: exclude results
awk -F: use colon as a field separator
{if($3>500)print: if the third column using the above colon separator is greater than 500, print the line

If running this command via salt cmd.run, you must use double quotes and escape the $ to get it to work properly:

salt <hostname> cmd.run "grep -v 'nologin\|false' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{if(\$3>500)print}'"
CLI, Web

apache reverse proxy with basic authentication

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I have an old Apache server that’s serving as a reverse proxy for my webcam. I swapped webcams out and unfortunately the new one requires authentication. I had to figure out how to get Apache to reverse proxy with the proper authentication. The best information I found was given by user ThR37 at superuser.com

Essentially you have to use an Apache module called headers to add an HTTP header to the request. On my Debian system this was not enabled, so I had to install it (thanks to Andy over at serverfault)

sudo a2enmod headers
#if you're on ubuntu then it's mod_headers

I then needed to generate the basic authentication hash for the header to pass. This was done via a simple python script:

#replace USERNAME:PASSWORD below with your credentials
import base64
hash = base64.b64encode(b'USERNAME:PASSWORD')
print hash

Save the above script into a file hash.py and then run it by typing 

python hash.py

With headers enabled and hash acquired I just needed to tweak my config by adding a RequestHeader line:

RequestHeader set Authorization "Basic <HASH>"
#Replace <HASH> with hash acquired above

After adding that one line and restarting apache, it worked!

CLI

GIT branch and merge from vs code

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I’ve configured VS Code to follow git best practices when it comes to creating branches and merging via pull requests. Here are my notes:

Install gitlens plugin

To open the command pallet: F1 or Command Shift P
CP is short for Command Pallet for following commands.

CP : git clone

  • Enter <repo URL> -> select destination
  • optional: add folder to workspace (bottom right)

CP: git add remote

  • select repository -> label upstream

CP: git fetch from all remotes

CP: git create branch from

  • select repo -> provide name -> select upstream/master

Click on a file in the repo, verify you’re in your new branch (bottom left)

Publish branch to your repo:

CP: git publish branch

  • select repo -> origin

Make your changes

Commit your changes to your branch (git icon on the left – type commit message, optionally compare files) – hit check mark to commit

— your changes are committed to your personal repo branch —

Log into gitlab, go to repo, click Compare & pull request

If you ever need to remove upstream URL:

CP: git remove remote

CLI

Add colors to bash scripts

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A quick note on how to easily add colors to your bash scripts. Thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5947742/how-to-change-the-output-color-of-echo-in-linux

Here are a few ANSI escape codes for reference

Black        0;30     Dark Gray     1;30
Red          0;31     Light Red     1;31
Green        0;32     Light Green   1;32
Brown/Orange 0;33     Yellow        1;33
Blue         0;34     Light Blue    1;34
Purple       0;35     Light Purple  1;35
Cyan         0;36     Light Cyan    1;36
Light Gray   0;37     White         1;37
#Set colors to variables
RED='\033[0;31m'
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
LIGHTBLUE='\033[0;34m'
NC='\033[0m' #No color

Reference the variables using echo -e like so:

echo -e "${RED} $instance is not a valid instance. Exiting. ${NC}"

Profit.

CLI, OS, Virtualization

proxmox 6 NVIDIA GPU passthrough fix

4 Comments

I upgraded to ProxMox 6.0 and to my dismay my Windows VM suddenly began receiving the dreaded Code 43 error. After much digging I finally found this post on the ProxMox forums which outlines what needs to happen.

In my case, all I needed to do was tweak my machine type. There is no GUI option to do this, so it had to be done in the command line:

qm set <VM_ID> -machine pc-q35-3.1

That was all it took!

The forum also suggested a few other things if that didn’t work. I didn’t end up needing them but I’ll put them here in case it’s helpful:

Add args to your VM config file:

args: -cpu 'host,+kvm_pv_unhalt,+kvm_pv_eoi,hv_vendor_id=NV43FIX,kvm=off'

Add a few options to the CPU line:

cpu: host,hidden=1,flags=+pcid,hv-vendor-id=proxmox

With the above settings I also discovered there is no need to have x-vga=on anymore. This allows you to have both the regular VM console and your graphics card if you so desire.

CLI, Hardware, OS, Virtualization

proxmox suspend & resume scripts

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Update 12/17/2019: Added logic to wait for VM to be suspended before suspending the shypervisor

Update 12/8/2019: After switching VMs I needed to tweak the pair of scripts. I modified it to make all the magic happen on the hypervisor; the VM simply needs to SSH into the hypervisor and call the script. The hypervisor now also needs access to SSH via public key to the VM to tell it to suspend.

#!/bin/sh
#ProxMox suspend script part 1 of 2
#To be run on the VM 
#All this does is call the suspend script on the hypervisor
#This could also just be a bash alias

####### Variables #########
HYPERVISOR=        #Name / IP of the hypervisor
SSH_USER=          #User to SSH into hypervisor as
HYPERVISOR_SCRIPT= #Path to part 2 of the script on the hypervisor

####### End Variables ######

#Execute server suspend script
ssh $SSH_USER@$HYPERVISOR "$HYPERVISOR_SCRIPT" &
#!/bin/bash
#ProxMox suspend script part 2 of 2
#Script to run on the hypervisor, it waits for VM to suspend and then suspends itself
#It relies on passwordless sudo configured on the VM as well as SSH keys to allow passwordless SSH access to the VM from the hypervisor
#It resumes the VM after it resumes itself
#Called from the VM

########### Variables ###############

VM=             #Name/IP of VM to SSH into
VM_SSH_USER=    #User to ssh into the vm with
VMID=           #VMID of VM you wish to suspend

########### End Variables############

#Tell guest VM to suspend
ssh $VM_SSH_USER@$VM "sudo systemctl suspend"

#Wait until guest VM is suspended, wait 5 seconds between attempts
while [ "$(qm status $VMID)" != "status: suspended" ]
do 
    echo "Waiting for VM to suspend"
    sleep 5 
done

#Suspend hypervisor
systemctl suspend

#Resume after shutdown
qm resume $VMID

I have a desktop running ProxMox. My GUI is handled via a virtual machine with physical hardware passed through it. The challenge with this setup is getting suspend & resume to work properly. I got it to work by suspending the VM first, then the host; on resume, I power up the host first, then resume the VM. Doing anything else would cause hardware passthrough problems that would force me to reboot the VM.

I automated the suspend process by using two scripts: one for the VM, and one for the hypervisor. The first script is run on the VM. It makes an SSH command to the hypervisor (thanks to this post) to instruct it to run the second half of the script; then initiates a suspend of the VM.

The second half of the script waits a few seconds to allow the VM to suspend itself, then instructs the hypervisor to also go into suspend. I had to split these into two scripts because once the VM is suspended, it can’t issue any more commands. Suspending the hypervisor must happen after the VM itself is suspended.

Here is script #1 (to be run on the VM) It assumes you have already set up a private/public key pair to allow for passwordless login into the hypervisor from the VM.

#!/bin/sh
#ProxMox suspend script part 1 of 2
#Tto be run on the VM so it suspends before the hypervisor does

####### Variables #########
HYPERVISOR=HYPERVISOR_NAME_OR_IP
SSH_USER=SSH_USER_ON_HYPERVISOR
HYPERVISOR_SCRIPT_LOCATION=NAME_AND_LOCATION_OF_PART2_OF_SCRIPT

####### End Variables ######

#Execute server suspend script, then suspend VM
ssh $SSH_USER@$HYPERVISOR  $HYPERVISOR_SCRIPT_LOCATION &

#Suspend
systemctl suspend

Here is script #2 (which script #1 calls), to be run on the hypervisor

#!/bin/bash
#ProxMox suspend script part 2 of 2
#Script to run on the hypervisor, it waits for VM to suspend and then suspends itself
#It resumes the VM after it resumes itself

########### Variables ###############

#Specify VMid you wish to suspend
VMID=VMID_OF_VM_YOU_WANT_TO_SUSPEND

########### End Variables############

#Wait 5 seconds before doing anything to allow for VM to suspend
sleep 5

#Suspend hypervisor
systemctl suspend

#Resume after shutdown
qm resume $VMID

It works on my machine 🙂

CLI, Hardware, OS, Virtualization

Primary VGA passthrough in ProxMox

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I recently decided to amplify my VFIO experience by experimenting with passing my primary display adapter to a VM in proxmox. Previously I had just run tasksel on the proxmox host itself to install a GUI. I wanted better separation from the server side of proxmox and the client side. I also wanted to be able to distro-hop while maintaining the proxmox backend.

Initially I tried following my guide for passing through a secondary graphics card but ran into a snag. It did not work with my primary card and kept outputting these errors:

device vfio-pci,host=09:00.0,id=hostdev0,bus=pci.4,addr=0x0: Failed to mmap 0000:09:00.0 BAR 1. Performance may be slow

After much digging I finally found this post which explained I needed to unbind a few things for it to work properly: 

echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/bind
echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind
echo efi-framebuffer.0 > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/efi-framebuffer/unbind

After more searching I found this post on reddit which had a nifty script for automating this when VM startup is desired. I tweaked it a bit to suit my needs.

Find your IDs for GPU by doing lspci and looking for your adapter. Find the IDs by running lspci -n -s <GPU location discovered with lspci>. Lastly VMID is the promxox ID for the VM you wish to start.

#!/bin/sh
#Script to launch Linux desktop
#Adapted from from https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/abfjs8/cant_seem_to_get_vfio_working_with_qemu/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

GPU=09:00
GPU_ID="10de 1c82"
GPU_AUDIO="10de 0fb9"
VMID=116

# Remove the framebuffer and console
echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/bind
echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind
echo efi-framebuffer.0 > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/efi-framebuffer/unbind

# Unload the Kernel Modules that use the GPU
modprobe -r nvidia_drm
modprobe -r nvidia_modeset
modprobe -r nvidia
modprobe -r snd_hda_intel

# Load the vfio kernel module
modprobe vfio
modprobe vfio_iommu_type1
modprobe vfio-pci

#Assign card to vfio-pci
echo -n "${GPU_ID}" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id
echo -n "${GPU_AUDIO}" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id

#Start desktop
sudo qm start $VMID

#Wait here until the VM is turned off
while [ "$(qm status $VMID)" != "status: stopped" ] 
do
 sleep 5
done

#Reassign primary graphics card back to host
echo -n "0000:${GPU}.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/unbind
echo -n "0000:${GPU}.1" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/unbind
echo -n "${GPU_ID}" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/remove_id
echo -n "${GPU_AUDIO}" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/remove_id
rmmod vfio-pci
modprobe nvidia
modprobe nvidia_drm
modprobe nvidia_modeset
modprobe snd_hda_intel
sleep 1
echo -n "0000:${GPU}.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/nvidia/bind
echo -n "0000:${GPU}.1" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/snd_hda_intel/bind
sleep 1
echo efi-framebuffer.0 > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/efi-framebuffer/bind
echo 1 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/bind
echo 1 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind

With my primary adapter passed through I realized I also want other things passed through, mainly USB. I tried Proxmox’s USB device passthrough options but it doesn’t work well with USB audio (stutters and choppy.) I wanted to pass through my whole USB controller to the VM.

This didn’t work as well as I had planned due to IOMMU groups. A great explanation of IOMMU groups can be found here. I had to figure out which of my USB controllers were in which IOMMU group to see if I could pass the whole thing through or not (some of them were in the same IOMMU group as SATA & network controllers, which I did not want to pass through to the VM.)

Fortunately I was able to discover which USB controllers I could safely pass through first by running lspci to see the device ID, then running find to see which IOMMU group it was in, then checking against lspci to see what other devices were in that group. The whole group comes over together when you pass through to a VM.

First determine the IDs of your USB controllers

lspci | grep USB

01:00.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 43ba (rev 02)
08:00.0 USB controller: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)
0a:00.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 145c
43:00.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 145c

Next get which IOMMU group these devices belong to

find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/ -type l|sort -h|grep '01:00.0\|08:00.0\|0a:00.3\|43:00.3'

/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:01:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/15/devices/0000:08:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/19/devices/0000:0a:00.3
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/37/devices/0000:43:00.3

Then see what other devices use the same IOMMU group (the group is the number after /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/)

find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/ -type l|sort -h | grep '/14\|/15\|/19\|/37'

/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:01:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:01:00.1
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:01:00.2
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:02:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:02:04.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:02:05.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:02:06.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:02:07.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:04:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:05:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/14/devices/0000:06:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/15/devices/0000:08:00.0
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/19/devices/0000:0a:00.3
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups/37/devices/0000:43:00.3

As you can see one of my USB controllers (01:00.0) has a whole bunch of stuff in its IOMMU group, so I don’t want to use it lest I bring all those other things into the VM with it. The other three, though, are isolated in their groups and thus are perfect for passthrough.

In my case I passed through 0a:00.3 & 43:00.3 as 08:00.0 is a PCI card I want passed through to my Windows VM. This passed through about 2/3 of the USB ports on my system to my guest VM.

CLI, Networking

Migrating from OPNSense to Ubiquiti Unifi Secure Gateway

1 Comment

I love the Ubiquiti Unifi interface. The only thing missing in my environment was the gateway. I had no complaints with my OPNSense firewall, but that missing section on the Unifi controller homepage haunted me, so I took the plunge and got a Unifi Secure Gateway Pro 4.

Basic Configuration

Initial setup

Official documentation is pretty detailed. Before you install your USG you will want to go into your controller and define your current network by going to Settings / Networks / LAN. This is where you specify DHCP scope and settings. I did not do this and struggled to get DHCP running properly as a result. Be sure to also set NTP settings, as these will also be applied to your USG.

To configure your USG for adoption, hop on the 192.168.1.0/24 network and sign into 192.168.1.1 via a web browser. Username and password are both ubnt. On this screen you can specify WAN and LAN settings. Configure your USG to match the network and gateway settings you’ve defined in your controller and hit apply. Now you can go into your controller and adopt the firewall into your environment.

Firewall

Basic port forwarding rules, static routes, and firewall rules can all be handled in the controller GUI via settings / Routing & Firewall. The GUI assumes your gateway only has one public IP address going to it. If you have multiple public IPs then you will need to configure them in config.gateway.json (see the Advanced Configuration section below.)

DHCP

As stated in the Initial Setup section, this is handled by the controller. You can specify a DHCP scope in the USG’s limited web interface but any settings there are quickly overwritten by the controller pushing out its configuration.

DHCP reservations are handled in the controller via the clients tab (on the left.) Open the client you want to make a reservation for, click the settings cog (top right), click Network, then click “Use Fixed IP Address” and specify the IP you want that device to use.

You can also specify advanced DHCP settings under Settings / Services / DHCP.

Seeing active DHCP leases requires dropping to the CLI on the USG. SSH into the USG and run:

show dhcp leases

Traffic limiting

You can create User Groups in the Unifi interface which define maximum bandwidth usage. You can then assign that User group to a specific client in the Unifi interface.

NAT

The Unifi GUI only supports Destination NAT (DNAT) and only supports the gateway’s WAN IP. You can configure this via settings / Routing & Firewall / Port Forwarding. For more advanced configuration, see below.

Advanced Configuration

A major downside of the USG is that the Unifi interface, while awesome, is extremely limited when it comes to Firewall functions. Thus, most configuration has to be done in the command line to get it to compete with OPNSense.

The core concept with the Unifi ecosystem is that devices are controlled by the Unifi Network Management controller. Thus, with the USG, any changes made to the firewall itself are overwritten by the controller on next provision.

In order to persist any command line changes you make, you must create a config.gateway.json file as outlined here, then copy it to your controller, which will then push the config to your USG on each provision. You will run into problems if you get this json file wrong (reboot loops) so you want to be very sure everything is correct in that file. I recommend a json validator (or an IDE like VS Code.)

One good shortcut I’ve found when googling how to do things is to simply use “edgerouter” instead of “USG” for the search term. The syntax to configure the edgerouter is identical (they both run EdgeOS.)

The most foolproof way to get a config.gateway.json that works is to run the configure commands manually on your USG, then when everything is how you want it, run this command to generate the running config in json format:

mca-ctrl -t dump-cfg > config.txt

You can then read config.txt and look for the specific settings you configured and save them into your config.gateway.json. The JSON syntax follows the CLI commands, with each part of the command broken into different brackets and quotes. An example config.gateway.json looks like this:

{
  "service": {
    "nat": {
      "rule": {
        "4500": {
          "description": "port_forward_WAN2",
          "destination": {
            "address": "100.64.100.100",
            "port": "22"
          },
          "inbound-interface": "eth3",
          "inside-address": {
            "address": "192.168.1.100"
          },
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "type": "destination"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "vpn": {
    "ipsec": {
      "site-to-site": {
        "peer": {
          "yyyy.ignorelist.com": {
            "authentication": {
              "id": "xxxx.ignorelist.com"
            },
            "local-address": "xxxx.ignorelist.com"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

DNS

Use the static-host-mapping parameter to specify static DNS entries. Make sure the fqdn is listed in your config, otherwise they may or may not work. Example snippet:

{
...
  "system": {
    "static-host-mapping": {
      "host-name": {
        "firewall": {
          "alias":[
            "firewall.jeppsonlocal"
          ],
          "inet": [
            "192.168.1.1"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }
...
}

Live traffic graphs

Sadly there is no live / realtime graphs in the UniFi interface. It’s still possible to get that information if you drop to CLI; however the utilities to see this are not installed by default – you will need to install them (iftop & bmon in my case.) Thanks to this helpful reddit post that got me going.

As of this writing the USG PRO 4 is based in Debian Wheezy, so you will need to add those repositories to the device in order to use apt-get to install iftop & bmon.

Be sure not to get the wrong Debian version. Also be sure not to issue apt-get upgrade – bad things will happen in both cases and you will need to hard reset your device to fix them.

You can add the repositories using the firewall configure command. These can be translated into a config.gateway.json if desired, but I decided not to since this is a pretty low level change that you might not want to happen on future devices. Also note that you will have to re-install these tools after a firmware upgrade.

configure
#Main wheezy archive
set system package repository wheezy components 'main contrib non-free'
set system package repository wheezy distribution wheezy
set system package repository wheezy url 'http://archive.debian.org/debian/'
commit
save
exit

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install iftop bmon

If you want to undo the above changes, substitute set with delete:

#to remove:
configure
delete system package repository wheezy
commit

1:1 NAT

For 1:1 NAT you need 3 NAT rules (Destination NAT, Source NAT, and Hairpin NAT) and a corresponding firewall rule. Example:

{
    "service": {
        "nat": {
            "rule": {
                "1000": {
                    "description": "Mail 1:1 DNAT",
                    "destination": {
                        "address": "1.1.1.1",
                        "port": "25,80,443,465,587,993,995"
                    },
                    "inbound-interface": "pppoe0",
                    "inside-address": {
                        "address": "192.168.1.1"
                    },
                    "protocol": "tcp",
                    "type": "destination"
                },
                "3000": {
                    "description": "Mail 1:1 Hairpin NAT",
                    "destination": {
                        "address": "1.1.1.25",
                        "port": "25,80,443,465,587,993,995"
                    },
                    "inbound-interface": "eth0",
                    "inside-address": {
                        "address": "192.168.1.25"
                    },
                    "protocol": "tcp",
                    "type": "destination"
                },
                "5000": {
                    "description": "Mail 1:1 SNAT",
                    "type": "source",
                    "source": {
                        "address": "192.168.1.25"
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        "firewall": {
            "name": {
                "WAN_IN": {
                    "rule": {
                        "1000": {
                            "action": "accept",
                            "description": "Mail 1:1 DNAT",
                            "destination": {
                                "address": "192.168.1.25",
                                "port": "25,80,443,465,587,993,995"
                            },
                            "protocol": "tcp",
                            "log": "enable"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

OpenVPN Site to Site

My OPNSense router had a site-to-site OpenVPN going with an OpenWRT router. Details on how to configure this are in a separate blog post here.

That covers the basics of what my OPNSense firewall was doing. It’s a bit of a learning curve but once I got past that it’s been working really well.

CLI, Gaming

sideload Gears of War 5 on Windows 10

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Sideloading Gears 5 is similar to sideloading Gears 4. You need to grab the URL the store is using to download the game with a proxy tool like fiddler, then download that URL with a download manager.

Gears 5 is an msixvc file instead of an eappx file. You can still install this via the add-appxpackage command.

I ran into issues trying to run add-appxpackage from a network drive. It worked after copying to a local drive and running the command again.

Why go through the trouble? Because the Microsoft store’s DRM is so bad it requires complete re-installs when anything goes wrong. This is very annoying for those of us on less than gigabit internet connections trying to reinstall a 60+ GB game.