whelp

[solarbird]

definitely a kill everyone day

isc-dhcp-server isn't relaying packets properly after the power outage. why? WHO THE FUCK KNOWS, IT'S LINUX. (current Debian, to be specific.)

* Packets to door (the server) from DHCP machines get there 100% of the time. (Also true for packets from the fixed-IP LAN.)
* Packets originating on door get to all destinations 100% of the time.
* Packets to the fixed-IP LAN from DHCP machines (going though door) get there about 50% of the time.
* Packets to the modem itself (which has a fixed IP address on the same subnet as the fixed-IP LAN) from the same sources get through 10%-20% of the time. This is also the same card as the fixed-IP LAN. Why one address on the fixed-IP LAN is getting special treatment? FUCKIN' GOT ME. I presume it has something to do with being the gateway. But if we take out the exceptions in the router table for the servers, and send everything through said gateway, nothing changes. Packet failure at about the same rate across the same classes.
* No DHCP client packets get past the points described. (Zero packets to internet, even ones that reach the internet modem.)
* All servers (fixed-IP LAN) talk to the internet just fine.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

eta: It gets stupider. door drops half of DHCP-sourced packets to newmoon (fixed-IP lan), but drops none to lodestone (web server). Didn't think to play with that there is zero reason for them to be different. And yet.

eta2: it's not the NICs. or the switches. don't ask. yes, three hardware iterations later, I'm sure. It's not hardware.

eta3: apt-get remove and apt-get install of isc-dhcp-server changed NOTHING. what. the. fuck.

Comments

[rmd]

If it's a modern Debian, I'll just reflexively blame systemd.

[solarbird]

No.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Are the machines on the dhcp-client lan getting assigned IP addresses? If so, then maybe I'm confused about what role isc-dhcp-server is playing, because I don't think of that as something that routes traffic itself, except insofar as it's sitting on a box on your network which also, through some other mechanism such as iptables, routes traffic.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Does current debian use iproute2? I'm out of practice. I think it does, though. What's the output of the following commands on door?

ip route show
ip rule show

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

I ask because I've seen similar-ish behavior in a network where the router had some policy-based routing going on, and that was a bugger to troubleshoot. Although I don't know why a power outage would have affected it for you; in my case it was definitely an initial misconfiguration problem, and started off broken.

It sounds to me like the routing engine is having trouble determining which NIC to send which traffic to, sometimes, and that wouldn't be something isc-dhcp-server was responsible for. But it could be something policy-based routing was messing up.

Oh, also worth double-checking that the subnet mask on the dhcp-assigned machines is sensible. I can't think of a reason a bad subnet mask would cause intermittent routing problems, but I've seen it cause other mysterious-seeming problems, so it's worth verifying.

[solarbird]

We've been running this configuration for months. We've taken it down before and brought it back up and been fine. This is some serious SURPRISE FUCK YOU, but it's the kind of SURPRISE FUCK YOU NOTHING WORKS NOW I expect out of software. It's part of why I don't work in software anymore.

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
   range 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.210;
   option routers 192.168.1.1;
}


door# ip route show
default via 173.160.243.46 dev eth2 
173.160.243.0/24 dev eth2  proto kernel  scope link  src 173.160.243.41 
192.168.0.0/24 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 192.168.0.1 
192.168.1.0/24 dev eth1  proto kernel  scope link  src 192.168.1.1 

door# ip rule show
0:	from all lookup local 
32766:	from all lookup main 
32767:	from all lookup default 

door# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         murkworks.net   0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth2
173.160.243.0   *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth2
192.168.0.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth1

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Huh.

You don't have a full /24 reservation from Comcast, do you? I don't think that could have anything to do with this problem, but that looks wrong to me, unless they gave you all of 173.160.243.0/24, in which case them putting your gateway on .46 is a weird choice.

So, your servers on static addresses are somewhere in 173.160.243.42-45, I'm guessing, with door being .41 and the modem being .46. They're all plugged into a switch connected to eth2? And then eth1 has dynamically assigned machines behind them, with isc-dhcp-server listening on that interface.

There must be something on door doing NAT for the 192.168.1.x machines, right? Is that iptables?

As for the difference between lodestone and newmoon, do their routing tables look the same?

[solarbird]

No, we don't, we handed over our Class C a long time ago. But it was a desperate attempt to get routing going, and isn't normally a thing. I route the individual servers individually usually. Or that's the intent.

door is only gatewaying for the DHCP side, due to Idiotic Comcast Reasons which makes me want to Murder. The fundamental topology is:

modem -> netgear switching hub
netgear switching hub -> all fixed-IP servers including door
door (DHCP server) -> DHCP devices switching hub
DHCP devices switching hub -> wifi bridge, various other clients.

So again, door does no routing for fixed-IP devices.

eth0 on door is the motherboard NIC and was the uplink to the fixed-IP hub, but as part of the Is This Hardware? game, it's been moved around. I could move it back.

eth1 is currently running the DHCP server (isc-dhcp-server)

eth2 is currently the uplink to the fixed-IP switching hub which is connected to the Comcast modem.

(There are three NICs in door because I'd wanted it to do the fixed-IP subnet routing, but again, Idiotic Comcast Reasons. One has just been sitting in there unused for a while. It has an IP address which is not in any of the other subnets and is not routed to.)

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Man, I'm at a bit of a loss. Had the configuration which had been working until now survived a reboot of door since it started working? All I can think of to explain the power outage causing a network failure would be a configuration implemented from the command line on door and not made persistent in a config file somewhere.

If the fixed-IP machines aren't using door as a gateway, then this has got to be a problem with NAT somehow. What do you get for:

iptables -t nat -L
iptables -L
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

on door?

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Oh, I see you've taken it down and brought it up before, and it survived. So... huh. I still think it's got to be NAT related, but I've got no idea how.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

To confirm it isn't somehow an issue with dhcp itself, you could statically assign one of the dhcp-net machines an address above 192.168.1.210, if you haven't tried that yet.

[solarbird]

I've tried that. They can't talk to the net anymore either.

It does occur to me that I haven't specifically reset masquerading. So I'll do that tomorrow. Maybe it fell out of iptables somehow.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

And I know you've repeatedly said it's not hardware, and that you've tried cutting out the switch on the dhcp-lan side with no change. But just to double check, have you tried cutting out the switch on the fixed-ip side? Plug the modem (or newmoon) straight into door?

I only ask because the most recent time I had a baffling packet loss situation on my home network with perfectly fine connections between some pairs of machines and 20-90% packet loss between others, it was a consumer switch that was the problem. I'd never seen a switch fail like that, but picking up a $30 replacement solved my issue.

[solarbird]

Yeah, I did that. No change.

The thing I can't figure out is, if it's dropped masquerade, how is it ever working at all?

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Yeah, that's what's throwing me, too. It should work or not. This partial failure, I'm stumped.

[solarbird]

it was masquerading working sometimes

HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN FUCK IDK

but I flushed all the things and rebuilt it from scratch and it's going like a champ again.

I have a theory that requires ip tables and our switches to be smart in kind of stupid ways and a couple of other things just to be stupid and the one that just has to be stupid is the comcast modem so I think that's a safe bet.

Thanks for chatting with me and stuff, it helped this fall out of my brain. I appreciate it.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

Wow, what the hell? I mean, I'm glad you've got it resolved, but now I'm worried that things I've set up are going to break in unusual and intermittent ways.

[solarbird]

I have a long history of just the battiest shit happening to computers around me. Sometimes, it's like I am a walking chaos field. Like, I used to be a dev at Microsoft, and I had a rep for that there. If Some Damn Weird Thing was going to happen in the software, I would be the one to find it, and I wouldn't even be looking.

My long-term fix is an if-up.d script that just throws everything the fuck out and does it over again in ways that shouldn't be necessary but fuck that we're doin' this thing. :D

[solarbird]

WHEN IT DOUBT NAIL IT DOWN. IF THAT DOESN'T WORK, TRY BOLTS.

[solarbird]

door.murkworks.net is .41 (dhs, dhcp, mush)

newmoon is .42 (mail and related server)

lodestone is .43 (web and related server)

all of this is discoverable through DNS so.

.44 was supposed to be the third card in door, to gateway to a fixed-IP subnet, but Fuck You Comcast. .45 is currently my PS4 Pro because OVERWATCH IS LIFE.

[solarbird]

Oh, yeah, and iptables handles the masquerading.

[solarbird]

(I should say: we've been running the configuration that fell over for months. I've been screwing around with it all today trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, and we're now in that state, which at least has the good graces to behave exactly the same way as before.)

[solarbird]

yes, they are being assigned addresses, that's pretty much the first thing i checked.

door has two cards. one connecting to the modem, one serving dhcp. DHCP devices live off the second card. door bridges between them.

I'm pretty sure it has to be something down in route. But route looks right. And nothing I do makes it work any better/differently, so.

[rjl20.wordpress.com]

What's the third card, eth0, doing?