[Rack] [Noisebridge-discuss] Internet down.

Jonathan Lassoff jof at thejof.com
Thu Aug 23 21:36:07 UTC 2012


On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Rubin Abdi <rubin at starset.net> wrote:
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> Danny O'Brien wrote, On 2012-08-23 12:16:
>> We should maybe get status.noisebridge.net back up and running if
>> this a new or recurring problem.
>
> status.noisebridge.net is rather useless in my option when diagnosing
> problems from the inside.

Yeah, being external, it's useless from the inside unless you have
some other path out. I've more found it useful to track historical
latency and see when the queues are getting backed up.

> A simple web page script running on minotaur in conjunction with a
> smokeping would be better, hooked up to a display bolted to the side
> of Penisland.
>
> The standard use case of if the internet is up or down should be
> something like...
>
> "A ping to DNSable address can be completed from minotaur's wifi
> interface, to something else on the internet"
>
> At the top of the page/screen should be a light. If it's green,
> everything works. If it's yellow, some bit of the Noisebridge internal
> infrastructure is borked, if it's red, our connection via MB or Sonic
> is down.

This would be _awesome_, and far more useful towards getting people to
troubleshoot on their own.

> I don't know if we're still doing any sort of load balancing or fall
> back between our two links, but it would be nice to display that
> current information on the screen, along with our internal IP space if
> folks don't want to use DHCP, wifi networks (and their health), local
> DNS status, etc. Eventually the page could possibly recommend how to
> fix the problem.

We are, and its hella hacky. 9/10 connections outbound take
Monkeybrains and 1/10 take Sonic.net.
This is just for client NAT paths. Pony and minotaur to the internet
are direct via Sonic only (static IPs are there).

> The Mac Mini that was running Zebra is completely fucked and I
> honestly don't want to waste any time trying to resurrect it. Might be
> time for us to re-appropriate the screen it's connect to and attach it
> to Penisland under the wall of tubes and use it to display this page
> via minotaur.

Love it.

> I could do some of this in fugly PHP.

Less excited about potentially fixing/securing PHP in the future, but
by all means!

I think we'd need to setup that wireless adapter on Minotaur and pick
Internet IPv4 destinations that we don't care about minotaur talking
to reliably. Then, setup the client adapter to hop on the WiFI and
static route those Internet destinations over the WiFi path (to avoid
the default via Sonic).
Then, probe around and test.
We can add some policy on bikeshed that permanently routes some
destinations over sonic and some over monkeybrains, so that you can
test each path independently as well.

--j



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