Going low and slow with bochs

 Computing, Public Syndication  No Responses »
Jan 302018
 

So, today I had a problem… I needed to solve a race condition in a test case for my workplace’s WideSky system.  The test case was meant to ensure that, if the AMQP broker crashed or was restarted, it would re-connect and resume operations as quickly as possible.

On my desktop (an 8-core AMD Rysen 7), the test case always passed.  On the CI server (a VM running on a dual-core Core i3), it failed.  I figured the desktop here was running too quickly for me to see the problem.  I needed a machine that ran more like the CI server to see the problem.

Looking around, I couldn’t see any way to reliably slow down QEMU, KVM or VirtualBox… but I do remember one old project from the mid-late 90s that could: Bochs.

Bochs in action… emulating a P4 Prescott on a Rysen 7

Turns out, far from what it could do back in 1998 when it was strictly a 386 emulator (and a slow one at that!) it now has AMD64 emulation capabilities.  Thus, I can run the software stack inside this VM, and have it throttle the CPU speed down so that hopefully, the problem arises.  The first problem I needed to solve was trying to get the network running.  We have a PXE boot server which can serve up Ubuntu, no problem.  I just needed to bridge the Bochs VM onto the network somehow.

I already have bridge interfaces configured on my two physical network interfaces, and these work great with KVM.  Sadly, Bochs is rather primitive in what it supports… tap-mode networking just did not work, it complained that tap0 was not “running” even if created beforehand by iproute2, but I did find I could bind it directly to one of the enslaved network interfaces (enp36s0.200; yes, a VLAN interface).

e1000 worked for network booting, but then Ubuntu couldn’t retrieve an IP address for whatever reason. ne2k is working fine, and presently, I have the VM installing.  To make it network bootable, you need a boot ROM image, which you can download from the iPXE rom-o-matic service.  The magic PCI IDs you need are 10ec 8029 for ne2k, or (if it gets fixed) 8086 10de for e1000.

The following is my Bochs config file:

# configuration file generated by Bochs
plugin_ctrl: unmapped=1, biosdev=1, speaker=1, extfpuirq=1, parallel=1, serial=1, gameport=1, ne2k=1
config_interface: textconfig
display_library: x
debug: action=report
memory: host=2048, guest=2048
romimage: file="/usr/share/bochs/BIOS-bochs-latest", address=0x0, options=none
vgaromimage: file="/usr/share/bochs/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest"
boot: disk, network
floppy_bootsig_check: disabled=0
# no floppya
# no floppyb
ata0: enabled=1, ioaddr1=0x1f0, ioaddr2=0x3f0, irq=14
ata0-master: type=disk, path="/tmp/wstest.raw", mode=flat, cylinders=0, heads=0, spt=0, model="Generic 1234", biosdetect=auto, translation=auto
ata0-slave: type=none
ata1: enabled=1, ioaddr1=0x170, ioaddr2=0x370, irq=15
ata1-master: type=none
ata1-slave: type=none
ata2: enabled=0
ata3: enabled=0
optromimage1: file=none
optromimage2: file=none
optromimage3: file=none
optromimage4: file=none
optramimage1: file=none
optramimage2: file=none
optramimage3: file=none
optramimage4: file=none
pci: enabled=1, chipset=i440fx, slot1=ne2k, slot2=cirrus
vga: extension=cirrus, update_freq=5, realtime=1
cpu: count=1:1:1, ips=40000000, quantum=16, model=p4_prescott_celeron_336, reset_on_triple_fault=1, cpuid_limit_winnt=0, ignore_bad_msrs=1, mwait_is_nop=0
print_timestamps: enabled=0
port_e9_hack: enabled=0
private_colormap: enabled=0
clock: sync=none, time0=local, rtc_sync=0
# no cmosimage
# no loader
log: -
logprefix: %t%e%d
debug: action=ignore
info: action=report
error: action=report
panic: action=ask
keyboard: type=mf, serial_delay=250, paste_delay=100000, user_shortcut=none
mouse: type=ps2, enabled=0, toggle=ctrl+mbutton
speaker: enabled=1, mode=system
parport1: enabled=1, file=none
parport2: enabled=0
com1: enabled=1, mode=null
com2: enabled=0
com3: enabled=0
com4: enabled=0
ne2k: enabled=1, mac=fe:fd:de:ad:be:ef, ethmod=linux, ethdev=enp36s0.200, script=/bin/true, bootrom="/tmp/10ec8029.rom"

Create your hard drive image using qemu-img, then run bochs -f yourfile.cfg and it should, hopefully, work.

Ahh… SEO Spam

 Public Syndication, Rants  No Responses »
Jan 132018
 

Part of my day job involves being the technical contact for their website, which means we get lots of offers from people offering to put us on the “first page of Google”.

Hmm, last time I checked, the first page of Google was, strangely, Google.  Somehow, I don’t think they outsource their SEO strategy to get there… they wrote the bloody code!

These emails go straight to Spamcop generally… and they send nastygrams to the people hosting the email servers they used.  In some cases, I’ve taken the extraordinary step of blocking frequently abused hosts.

# Block Centrilogic and SmartMailer because they don't act on spam reports.
-A INPUT -s 173.240.14.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 199.43.203.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
# Block OVH because they don't act on spam reports.
# List taken from https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=asn%3aAS16276&run=toolpage
-A INPUT -s 5.39.0.0/17 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 5.135.0.0/16 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 5.196.0.0/16 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.7.244.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.128.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.136.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.172.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.20.110.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.21.41.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.24.8.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.26.94.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.29.224.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.30.208.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.33.96.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
…

That is not an exhaustive list.  Sorry to people who use OVH for hosting and were trying to contact VRT/CETA legitimately, but OVH have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent with regard to management of network abuse.  Centrilogic/SmartMailer are more recent additions.

Of course, they keep trying, and thankfully, it takes longer for them to write the email than it does for me to deal with it. This doesn’t stop them claiming little gems like this:

Note: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind. If you are not interested then you can reply with a simple “NO”.

Errm, hate to disagree (actually no, in this case, I love disagreement)… but a few points:

  1. Your sending me an unsolicited content…
  2. … without my consent… (no listing in domain registration or scraping from a website is not consent)
  3. … that is advertising a paid-for service or otherwise something you’re hoping to make money from…
  4. … by electronic messaging.

That by definition is an Unsolicited Commercial Email… aka SPAM.  If you claim to be an Australian business, you better have a look at this.  If your ISP is complaining that you are abusing their services by sending spam, then perhaps you need to realise the people you are contacting are not interested!  You have your NO.