Posts Tagged ‘Cache’

How to clear ARP cache on Linux / Windows for a single IP address / Flush All IPs ARP cache

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

linux-how-to-delete-modify-arp-cache-entries-after-IP-is-migrated-from-one-server-or-VPN-host-to-another-resized

On times of Public Internet IP migration or Local IPs between Linux servers or especially in clustered Linux Application Services running on environments like Pacemaker / Corosync / Heartbeat with services such as Haproxy.
Once an IP gets migrated due to complex network and firewall settings often the Migrated IP from Linux Server 1 (A) to Linux Server 2 (B) keeps time until a request to reload the Internet server IP ARP cache with to point to the new IP location, causing a disruption of accessibility to the Newly configured IP address on the new locations. I will not get much into details here what are the ARP (Address Resolution protocol) and Network ARP records on a Network attached Computer and how they correspond uniquely to each IP address assigned on Ethernet or Aliased network Interfaces (eth0 eth0:1 eth0:2) . But in this article, I'll briefly explain once IP Version 4 address is migrated from one server Data Center location to another DC, how the unique corresponding ARP record kept in OS system memory should be flushed in the ARP corresponding Operating System so called ARP table (of which you should think as a logical block in memory keeping a Map of where IP addresses are located physically on a Network recognized by the corresponding Unique MAC Address.
 

1. List the current ARP cache entries do

Arp is part of net-tools on Debian GNU / Linux and is also available and installed by default on virtually any Linux distribution Fedora / CentOS / RHEL / Ubuntu / Arch Linux and even m$ Windows NT / XP / 2000 / 10 / whatever, the only difference is Linux tool has a bit of more functionality and has a bit more complex use.
Easiest use of arp on GNU / Linux OS-es is.
 

# arp -an 

sample-IP-address-list-with-the-assigned-ARP-cache-mac-addresses
The -a lists all records and -n flag is here to omit IP resolving as some IPs are really slow to resolve and output of command could get lagged.

2. Delete one IP entry from the cache


Assuming only one IP address was migrated, if you want to delete the IP entry from local ARP table on any interface:
 

# arp -d 192.168.0.8


It is useful to delete an ARP cached entry for IP address only on a certain interface, to do so:
 

# /usr/sbin/arp -i eth1 -d 10.0.0.1

 

3. Create ARP entry MAC address with a static one for tightened security


A useful Hack is to (assign) / bind specific Static MAC addresses to be static in the ARP cache, this is very useful to improve security and fight an ARP poisoning attacks.
Doing so is pretty easy, to do so:

Above will staticly make IP 192.168.0.8 to always appear in the ARP cache table to the MAC 00:50:ba:85:85:ca. So even if we have another system with the same MAC
trying to spoof our location and thus break our real record location for the Hostname in the network holding in reality the MAC 00:50:ba:85:85:ca, poisoning us
trying to make our host to recognize 192.168.0.8 to a different address this will not happen as the static ARP will be kept unchanged in ARP caching table.

 

 # arp -s 192.168.0.8 00:50:ba:85:85:ca

 

4. Flush all ARP records only for specific Ethernet Interface


After the IP on interface was migrated run:

 

# ip link set arp off dev eth0 ; ip link set arp on dev eth0

 

5. Remove a set of few IPs only migrated ARP cache entries

 

# for i in 192.168.0.1 10.0.0.1 172.168.0.3; do sudo arp -d $i; done


Once old ARP entries are removed the arp command would return as:

 

linux:~$ arp
? (192.168.0.8) at <incomplete>  on eth1
? (172.168.0.3) at <incomplete>  on eth2


The 192.168.0.8 / 172.168.0.3 entry now shows as incomplete, which means the ARP entry will be refreshed when it is needed again, this would also depend
on the used network switches / firewalls in the network settings so often could take up to 1 minute or so..

 

6. Flush all ARP table records on Linux

flush-all-arp-cache-addresses-on-linux-howto-with-ip-command

 

# ip -s -s neigh flush all

 

7. Delete ARP Cache on FreeBSD and other BSDs

# arp -d -a 

 

8.  Flush arp cache on Windows

Run command prompt as Administrator -> (cmd.exe)  and do:

C:\> ipconfig /all
netsh interface ip delete arpcache

 

9. Monitoring the arp table


On servers with multiple IP addresses, where you expect a number of IP addresses migrated to change it is useful to use watch + arp like so:
 

# watch -n 0.1 'arp -an'

The -n 0.1 will make the arp -an be rerun every 10 miliseconds and by the way is a useful trick to monitor stuff returned by commands that needs a higher refresh frequency.
 

Conclusion


In short in this article, was explained how to list your arp cache table.The arp command is also available both on Linux and Windows) and as integral part of OS networking it is useful to check thoroghfully to its man page (man arp).
Explained was how to create Static ARP table records to prevent ARP poisoning attacks on a server.
I went through how to delete only a single ARP records (in case if) only certain IPs on a host are changed and an ARP cache entry reload is needed, as well as how to flush the complete set of ARP records need to get refreshed, sometimes useful on networks with Buggy Network Switches or when completely changing the set of IP-addresses assigned on a server host.

For the School-examination

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Tell me which ideotic government would create a site based on php and would make the serverunder Windows?

Just Guess ours the Bulgarian ministry of Science and Knowledge has started a new site dedicated to helping graduating school pupils with the Future School-examinationthey have to make.

It’s pretty easy to see that just observe:

jericho% telnet zamaturite.bg 80

Trying 212.122.183.208…

Connected to zamaturite.bg.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:10:18 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Win32) PHP/5.2.5X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=fn5jtjbet7clrapi0a5e5kgvt7; path=/
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection closed by foreign host.
jericho%

Just great our Bulgarian government spend money on buying proprietary software OS to run a Free Software based solution.

This example is pretty examplary of what our country looks like. Sad …

END—–

Possible way to Improve wordpress performance with wp-config.php 4 config variables

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Wordpress improve performance wp-config.php logo chromium effect GIMP

Nowdays WordPress is ran by million of blogs and websites all around the net. I myself run wordpress for this blog in general wordpress behaves quite well in terms of performance. However as with time the visitors tend to increase, on frequently updated websites or blogs. As a consequence, the blog / website performance slowly starts to decrease as result of the MySQL server read / write operations creating I/O and CPU load overheads. Buying a new hardware and migrating the wordpress database is a possible solution, however for many small or middle size wordpress blogs en sites like mine this is not easy task. Getting a dedicated server or simply upgrading your home server hardware is expensive and time consuming process… In my efforts to maximize my hardware utilization and increase my blog decaying performance I've stumbled on the article Optimize WordPress performance with wp-config.php

According to the article there are 4 simple wp-config.php config directvies useful in decreasing a lot of queries to the MySQL server issued with each blog visitor.

define('WP_HOME','http://www.yourblog-or-siteurl.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.yourblog-or-siteurl.com');
define('TEMPLATEPATH', '/var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default');
define('STYLESHEETPATH', '/var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default');

1. WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL wp-config.php directvies

The WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL variables are used to hard-code the address of the wordpress blog or site url, so wordpress doesn't have to check everytime in the database on every user request to know it is own URL address.

2. TEMPLATEPATH and TEMPLATEPATH wp variables

This variables will surely improve performance to Wodpress blogs which doesn't implement caching. On wp install with enabled caching plugins like WordPress Super Cache, Hyper Cache or WordPress Db Cache is used, I don't know if this variables will have performance impact …

So far I have tested the vars on a couple of wordpress based installs with caching enabled and even on them it seems the pages load faster than before, but I cannot say this for sure as I did not check the site loading time in advance before hardcoding the vars.

Anyways even if the suggested variables couldn't make positive impact on performance, having the four variables in wp-config.php is a good practice for blogs or websites which are looking for extra clarity.
For multiple wordpress installations living on the same server, having defined the 4 vars in different wordpress seems like a good idea too.

How to renew IP address, Add Routing and flush DNS cache on Windows XP / Vista / 7

Friday, November 25th, 2011

There are two handy Windows commands which can be used to renew IP address or flush prior cached DNS records which often create problems with resolving hosts.

1. To renew the IP address (fetch address from DHCP server) C:> ipconfig /release
C:> ipconfig /renew

In above cmd ipconfig /release will de-assign the IP address configured on all Windows LAN and Wireless interfaces, whether ipconfig /renew will send request for IP address to the DNS server.

To unassign and assign again IP address from DHCP server only for a particular LAN or WLAN card:

C:> ipconfig /release LAN
C:> ipconfig /renew LAN
C:> ipconfig /release WLAN
C:> ipconfig /renew WLAN

2. Adding specific routing to Windows

Windows has a Route command similar by syntax to Linux’s route command.
To add routing via a specific predefined IP addresses on Windows the commands should be something like:

C:> Route add 192.168.40.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.41.253
C:> Route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.41.254
The first command adds IP 192.168.40.0 in the network of 255 hosts to be routed via 192.168.41.253
The second one adds 192.168.41.254 as a default gateway for all outbound traffic from the Windows host.
To make permanent routing -p switch is used.
3. To clear Windows DNS cache (flush DNS cached records) C:> ipconfig /flushdns
This will clear all IP records corresponding to hostnames previously cached on the Windows host. Using ipconfig /flushdns is especially handy when IP address for a specific DNS host is changed. Flushing the Windows DNS cache can save us a lot of waiting before the domain example.com starts resolving to the new IP address let’s say 1.2.3.4 instead of the old one 2.2.2.2

Fix to a problem with Varnish Cache not showing Apache’s .htm files extension on FreeBSD

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I’m running my Apache server behind a Varnish Cache server. At most of the time all works okay, however today I’ve noticed a significant problem.
The problem consists in the fact that whenever I have directory listing enabled for some directory and I have dropped some .htm files, the htm files wouldn’t open as a proper html but instead the following message appears on click over some of the htm files:.

You have choosen to open 1.htm
which is a: PTHML file
from: http://myurl.com/
What should firefox do with this file?
(*) Open With (Browse ...)
( ) Save File ...

Here is also a screenshot of the error You have choosen to open … which is a: PHTML file:
you have choosen to open ... which is a PHTML file

At the beginning I though the error is caused by Apache and it was kind of weird since Apache my Apache serves a bunch of .html files without any issues.
It took me a while to realize that actually the problem is caused by the Varnish Cache server.
I digged my head into Varnish configuration, in hope to find something mentioned in the documentation but I couldn’t find anything meaningful there.
So after a while I decided to start experimenting with Apache.
Invoking the files directly on the port where I have Apache listening prooved me that Apache doesn’t have any problems with passing the .htm files content with a proper Application Type.
But anyways since I couldn’t find nothing in Varnish documentation, I’ve tried changing some stuff into my Apache configuration until finally I solved it!
The whole issue got solved by simply adding the following line in my Apache configuration file httpd.conf in my case on my FreeBSD

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .html .phtml

A simple Apache and Varnish restart and Hoooray, It Works again! 😀