Tag Archives: scripting

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, Hardware, Networking

Automate USG config deploy with Ubiquiti API in Bash

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I have a new Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway Pro 4 which is pretty neat; however, the Unifi web interface is pretty limited. Most advanced firewall functions must be configured outside of the GUI. One must create a .json file with the configuration they need, copy that file to the Unifi controller, and then force a provision of the gateway to get it to pick up the new config.

I wanted a way to automate this process but very frustratingly Ubiquiti hasn’t documented their Unifi Controller API. I had to resort to reverse engineering their API by using my browser’s developer console to figure out which API calls were needed to do what I wanted. I then took the API functions from https://dl.ui.com/unifi/5.10.25/unifi_sh_api (the current unifi controller software download link which has unifi_sh_api) and embedded them into a bash script. Thanks to this forum post for the information on how to do this.

This bash script copies the specified config file to the Unifi controller via SCP, then uses curl to issue the API call to tell the controller to force a provision to the device having the supplied mac address. 

#!/bin/bash
# Written by Nick Jeppson 08/01/2019
# Inspired by posts made from ubiquiti forums: https://community.ui.com/questions/API/82a3a9c7-60da-4ec2-a4d1-cac68e86b53c
# API interface functions taken from unifi_sh_api shipped with controller version 5.10.25, https://dl.ui.com/unifi/5.10.25/unifi_sh_api
#
# This bash script copies the specified config file to the Unifi controller via SCP
# It then uses curl to issue an API call to tell the controller to force a provision to the device with the supplied mac address. 

#### BEGIN VARIABLES ####
#Fill out to match your environment

gateway_mac="12:34:56:78:90:ab" #MAC address of the gateway you wish to manage
config_file="your_config_file.json"   #Path to config file
unifi_server="unifi_server_name"         #Name/IP of unifi controller server
unifi_gateway_path="/usr/lib/unifi/data/sites/default/config.gateway.json"    #Path to config.gateway.json on the controller
ssh_user="root"                 #User to SSH to controller as
username="unifi_admin_username"             #Unifi username
password="unifi_admin_password" #Unifi password
baseurl="https://unifi_server_name:8443" #Unifi URL
site="default"                  #Unifi site the gateway resides in

#### END VARIABLES ####

#Copy updated config to controller
scp $config_file $ssh_user@$unifi_server:$unifi_gateway_path

#API interface functions
cookie=$(mktemp)
curl_cmd="curl --tlsv1 --silent --cookie ${cookie} --cookie-jar ${cookie} --insecure "
unifi_login() {
    # authenticate against unifi controller
    ${curl_cmd} --data "{\"username\":\"$username\", \"password\":\"$password\"}" $baseurl/api/login
}

unifi_logout() {
    # logout
    ${curl_cmd} $baseurl/logout
}

unifi_api() {
    if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then
        echo "Usage: $0 <uri> [json]"
        echo "    uri example /stat/sta "
        return
    fi
    uri=$1
    shift
    [ "${uri:0:1}" != "/" ] && uri="/$uri"
    json="$@"
    [ "$json" = "" ] && json="{}"
    ${curl_cmd} --data "$json" $baseurl/api/s/$site$uri
}

#Trigger a provision
unifi_login 
unifi_api /cmd/devmgr {\"mac\": \"$gateway_mac\", \"cmd\": \"force-provision\"}
unifi_logout

No more manually clicking provision after manually editing the config file on the controller!

CLI, OS

Export multiple resolutions in Lightroom

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I needed to one-click export multiple resolutions of pictures from Lightroom. Unfortunately there isn’t any kind of plugin available to do this. Fortunately I was able to find this guide on how to get an applescript script to do it for me (Mac only, sadly.)

The trick is to write a few bits of applescript and save it as an application. Then when exporting the pictures in lightroom, make sure the word “fullsize” is in the filename, and configure lightroom to run your applescript after export.

I tweaked the script a bit to move the full size version to a different folder, then open Finder to the folder that the other resolutions were created in (thanks to this site for the guidance)

Here is my script below. It works!

on open of myFiles
	set newSizes to {5000}
	
	repeat with aFile in myFiles
		set filePath to aFile's POSIX path
		set bPath to (do shell script "dirname " & quoted form of filePath)
		tell application "System Events" to set fileName to aFile's name
		repeat with newSize in newSizes
			do shell script "sips " & quoted form of aFile's POSIX path & " -Z " & newSize & " --out " & quoted form of (bPath & "/" & rename(fileName, newSize) as text)
		end repeat
		do shell script "mv " & quoted form of aFile's POSIX path & " /path/to/folder/for/fullres/images"
	end repeat
	do shell script "open /path/to/folder/of/resized/images"
end open

on rename(fName, fSize)
	do shell script "sed 's/fullsize/" & fSize & "/' <<< " & quoted form of fName
end rename
CLI, OS

Flatten nested AD group memberships with powershell

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Several applications at my job do not know how to read nested security groups. This is annoying because we grant everything through security groups instead of individual entitlements.

I’ve recently finished writing a powershell script that will “flatten” a security group that has nested security groups. This script reads a security group’s membership, compares the individually assigned users with the nested security group membership, and then reconciles them so only members of the nested security group are individually added to the main group. It allows me to simply add a security group to another security group, and still be able to use the group to grant access to applications that don’t support nested groups. It also ensures that nobody has rogue access they shouldn’t have. Everything managed through groups like God intended.

I consulted a ton of different sites to accomplish this. Here are just a few:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/3f7iki/flatten_out_active_directory_groups_containing/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11526285/how-to-count-objects-in-powershell

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41658770/determining-object-type

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedirectory/

https://ss64.com/ps/syntax-compare.htmlhttps://ss64.com/ps/compare-object.html

#Nested Security Group flattener script
#Written by Nicholas Jeppson, 10/6/2018

#This script scans nested security groups and compares their membership to that of the base security group.
#It then reconciles membership so that the only members of this group are those who are members of the nested security groups.
#This is required for applications that cannot read nested security groups, such as mattermost.
#No more manually adding people to a group after you've already added their role to that same group!

#=============Variables section=============#

#Enter groups to reconcile here, separated by quotes and a comma:
$groups_to_flatten = @("group1","group2")

#==========End Variables Section=============#

#Loop through each group to flatten
foreach ($group in $groups_to_flatten) {

    Write-Host "`nProcessing group ""$group"""

    #Read current individually added users
    $individually_added_users = get-ADGroupMember -Identity $group | Where-Object {$_.objectClass -eq 'user'}

    #Read group membership of nested groups - Ignore specific user (optional)
    $nested_group_members = get-ADGroupMember -Identity $group | Where-Object {$_.objectClass -eq 'group'} | Get-ADGroupMember -Recursive | Where-Object {$_.name -ne 'USER_TO_IGNORE'}

    #Compare current individually added users with that of nested security groups
    $users_to_add = Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $individually_added_users -DifferenceObject $nested_group_members -PassThru | Where-Object {$_.SideIndicator -eq "=>"}
    $users_to_remove = Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $individually_added_users -DifferenceObject $nested_group_members -PassThru | Where-Object {$_.SideIndicator -eq "<="}
    
    #loop through each user to remove and remove them
    foreach ($user in $users_to_remove) {
        Remove-ADGroupMember -Identity $group -Member $user -Confirm:$false
        Write-Host "Removed: $user"
    }
    
    #loop through each user to add and add them
    foreach ($user in $users_to_add) {
        #Add nested group membership individually back to the parent group
        #Write-Host "Adding individual members to ""$group""`n`n"
        Add-ADGroupMember -Identity $group -Members $user -Confirm:$false 
        Write-Host "Added: $user"   
    }
}
CLI

Powershell equivalent of “find -exec”

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I recently found myself on a Windows 10 system needing to do the equivalent of “find . -name *.mdi -exec mdiconvert -source {} -log log.txt \;” I knew what to do instantly on a Unix system, not so on a Windows system

I finally figured it out and am now writing it down because I know I’ll forget! Thanks to these several sites for pointing me in the right direction.

  • Get-ChildItem is the find equivalent
    • -Filter is the -name equivalent
    • -Recurse must be specified otherwise it only looks in the one directory
  • % is an alias for “ForEach-Object
  • Put the command you want run in brackets {}
  • Put an ampersand in front of the command you wish to run so you can properly pass arguments containing dashes
  • $_.FullName turns the powershell object into a text string (which my command required.) FullName is the full path of the item found with Get-ChildItem
    • $_ is the rough equivalent of find’s {} (the item that was found)

The command I ended up using is below (find any .mdi files and use Microsoft’s mdi2tif utility to convert the result to .tif files)

Get-ChildItem "C:\Users" -Recurse -Filter *.mdi | % { & 'C:\Program
Files (x86)\modiconv\MDI2TIF.EXE' -source $_.FullName -log log.txt }
CLI, OS

Mount encfs folder on startup with systemd

2 Comments

A quick note on how to encrypt a folder with encfs and then mount it on boot via a systemd startup script. In my case the folder is located on a network drive and I wanted it to happen whether I was logged in or not.

Create encfs folder:

encfs <path to encrypted folder> <path to mount decrypted folder>

Follow the prompts to create the folder and set a password.

Next create a file which will contain your decryption password

echo "YOUR_PASSWORD" > /home/user/super_secret_password_location
chmod 700 /home/user/super_secret_password_location

Create a simple script to be called by systemd on startup using cat to pass your password over to encfs

#!/bin/bash
cat super_secret_password_location | encfs -S path_to_encrypted_folder path_to_mount_decrypted_folder

Finally create a systemd unit to run your script on startup:

vim /etc/systemd/system/mount-encrypted.service
[Unit] 
Description=Mount encrypted folder 
After=network.target 

[Service] 
User=<YOUR USER> 
Type=oneshot 
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 20 
ExecStart=PATH_TO_SCRIPT
TimeoutStopSec=30 
KillMode=process 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable the unit:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable mount-encrypted.service
CLI, Virtualization

CPU Pinning in Proxmox

3 Comments

Proxmox uses qemu which doesn’t implement CPU pinning by itself. If you want to limit a guest VM’s operations to specific CPU cores on the host you need to use taskset. It was a bit confusing to figure out but fortunately I found this gist by ayufan which handles it beautifully.

Save the following into taskset.sh and edit VMID to the ID of the VM you wish to pin CPUs to. Make sure you have the “expect” package installed.

#!/bin/bash

set -eo pipefail

VMID=200

cpu_tasks() {
	expect <<EOF | sed -n 's/^.* CPU .*thread_id=\(.*\)$/\1/p' | tr -d '\r' || true
spawn qm monitor $VMID
expect ">"
send "info cpus\r"
expect ">"
EOF
}

VCPUS=($(cpu_tasks))
VCPU_COUNT="${#VCPUS[@]}"

if [[ $VCPU_COUNT -eq 0 ]]; then
	echo "* No VCPUS for VM$VMID"
	exit 1
fi

echo "* Detected ${#VCPUS[@]} assigned to VM$VMID..."
echo "* Resetting cpu shield..."

for CPU_INDEX in "${!VCPUS[@]}"
do
	CPU_TASK="${VCPUS[$CPU_INDEX]}"
	echo "* Assigning $CPU_INDEX to $CPU_TASK..."
	taskset -pc "$CPU_INDEX" "$CPU_TASK"
done

Update 9/29/18: Fixed missing done at the end. Also if you want to offset which cores this script uses, you can do so by modifying  the $CPU_INDEX variable to do a bit of math, like so:

        taskset -pc "$[CPU_INDEX+16]"

The above adds 16 to each process ID, so instead of staring on thread 0 it starts on thread 16.

CLI

Accept multiple SSH RSA keys with ssh-keyscan

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I came across a new machine that needed to connect to many SSH hosts via ansible. I had a problem where ansible was prompting me for each post if I wanted to accept the RSA key. As I had dozens of hosts I didn’t want to type yes for every single one; furthermore the yes command didn’t appear to work. I needed a way to automatically accept all SSH RSA keys from a list of server names. I know you can disable RSA key checking but I didn’t want to do that.

I eventually found this site which suggested a small for loop, which did the trick beautifully. I modified it to suit my needs.

This little two-liner takes a file (in my case, my ansible hosts file) and then runs ssh-keyscan against it and adds the results to the .ssh/known_hosts file. The end result is an automated way to accept many SSH keys.

SERVER_LIST=$(cat /etc/ansible/hosts)
for host in $SERVER_LIST; do ssh-keyscan -H $host >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts; done
CLI, Virtualization

VGA Passthrough with Threadripper

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An unfortunate bug exists for the AMD Threadripper family of GPUs which causes VGA Passthrough not to work properly. Fortunately some very clever people have implemented a workaround to allow proper VGA passthrough until a proper Linux Kernel patch can be accepted and implemented. See here for the whole story.

Right now my Thrdearipper 1950x successfully has GPU passthrough thanks to HyenaCheeseHeads “java hack” applet.  I went this route because I really didn’t want to try and recompile my ProxMox kernel to get passthrough to work. Per the description “It is a small program that runs as any user with read/write access to sysfs (this small guide assumes “root”). The program monitors any PCIe device that is connected to VFIO-PCI when the program starts, if the device disconnects due to the issues described in this post then the program tries to re-connect the device by rewriting the bridge configuration.” Instructions taken from the above Reddit post.

  • Go to https://pastebin.com/iYg3Dngs and hit “Download” (the MD5 sum is supposed to be 91914b021b890d778f4055bcc5f41002)
  • Rename the downloaded file to “ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java” and put it in a new folder somewhere
  • Go to the folder in a terminal and type “javac ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java”, this should take a short while and then complete with no errors. You may need to install the Java 8 JDK to get the javac command (use your distribution’s software manager)
  • In the same folder type “sudo java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery”
  • Make sure that the PCIe device that you intend to passthru is listed as monitored with a bridge
  • Now start your VM

In my case (Debian Stretch, ProxMox) I needed to install openjdk-8-jdk-headless

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk-headless
javac ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java

Next I have a little script on startup to spawn this as root in a detached tmux session, so I don’t have to remember to run it (If you try to start your VM before running this, it will hose passthrough on your system until you reboot it.) Be sure to change the script to point to wherever you compiled ZenBridgeBaconRecovery

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/nicholas  #change me to suit your needs
sudo java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery

And here is the command I use to run on startup:

tmux new -d '/home/nicholas/passthrough.sh'

Again, be sure to modify the above to point to the path of wherever you saved the above script.

So far this works pretty well for me. I hate having to run a java process as sudo, but it’s better than recompiling my kernel.

Update 6/27/2018:  I’ve created a systemd service script for the ZenBaconRecovery file to run at boot. Here is my file, placed in
/etc/systemd/system/zenbridge.service:  (change your working directory to match the zenbridgebaconrecovery java file location. Don’t forget to do systemctl daemon-reload.)

[Unit] 
Description=Zen Bridge Bacon Recovery 
After=network.target 

[Service] 
Type=simple 
User=root 
WorkingDirectory=/home/nicholas 
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery 
Restart=on-failure # or always, on-abort, etc 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target 
~

Update 8/18/2018 Finally solved for everyone!

Per an update on the reddit thread motherboard manufactures have finally put out BIOS updates that resolve the PCI passthrough problems. I updated my X399 Tachi to the latest version of its UEFI BIOS (3.20) and indeed PCI passthrough worked without any more wonky workarounds!

CLI, Networking

Update /etc/hosts with current IP for ProxMox

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ProxMox virtual environment is a really nice package for managing KVM and container visualization. One quirk about it is you need to have an entry in /etc/hosts that points to your system’s IP address, not 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.1.1. I wrote a little script to grab the IP of your specified interface and add it to /etc/hosts automatically for you. You may download it here or see below:

#!/bin/bash
#A simple script to update /etc/hosts with your current IP address for use with ProxMox virtual environment
#Author: Nicholas Jeppson
#Date: 4/25/2018

###Edit these variables to your environment###
INTERFACE="enp4s0" #the interface that has the IP you want to update hosts for
DNS_SUFFIX=""
###End variables section###

#Variables you shouldn't have to change
IP=$(ip addr show $INTERFACE |egrep 'inet '| awk '{print $2}'| cut -d '/' -f1)
HOSTNAME=$(hostname)

#Use sed to add IP to first line in /etc/hosts
sed -i "1s/^/$IP $HOSTNAME $HOSTNAME$DNS_SUFFIX\n/" /etc/hosts