It happens from time to time that at some point it is hard to recall the familiar commands used before, meanwhile it is somewhat annoying and time consuming to find them again. As the old saying goes, “the palest ink is better than the best memory”. Instead of relying on muscle memory, this post serves as a growing memo for those handy commands.

Network Configuration

  • ip addr to show all addresses related info
  • ip -s link to view statistics (RX/TX pkts, dropped, bytes etc) of all interfaces
  • ip link set enp101s0f0 up or ifconfig enp101s0f0 up to bring the interface up
  • ip link set enp101s0f0 down: bring the interface down
  • ip link set enp101s0f0 promisc on: set the interface in promisc mode
  • ip addr add 10.1.1.3/8 dev enp101s0f1: assign ip to the device interface — very important!!!
  • ip route add 10.1.1.0/24 dev enp101s0f1: add new route entry
  • ip route del default and ip route add default [via 192.168.1.1] dev enp101s0f1 to change the default gateway
  • ip neigh or ip n as a replacement of arp -a to view the arp table

  • ip n add 10.1.1.2 lladdr ec:0d:9a:6d:e1:6d dev enp101s0f0 nud perm as a replacement of arp -s 10.1.1.2 ec:0d:9a:6d:e1:6d to set a permanant arp entry

  • traceroute <ip/url> is useful to gain knowledge of the network topology

iptables is an interface to operate on top of netfilter. iptables defines chains as when rules will be evaluated, including PREROUTING, INPUT, FORWARD, OUTPUT, POSTROUTING, mirroring the corresponding hooks in netfilter (NF_IP_PRE_ROUTING, NF_IP_LOCAL_IN, NF_IP_FORWARD, NF_IP_LOCAL_OUT, NF_IP_POST_ROUTING). Example usage:

Network Traffic Monitoring and Manipulation

  • tshark -s 64 -B 1024 -i enp101s0f1 > tmp: capture high-speed traffic (with 64B cap of packet size and 1024MB buffer) at the specified interface and redirect the outputs for future analysis
  • tshark -c 100 -i enp101s0f1: stop capture after specified number of pkt count, useful when only a small snapshot is needed
  • tshark -Y option allows an expressive specification of the filter, example filters:
    • tshark -Y 'icmp'
    • tshark -Y ip.addr == 10.0.0.1
    • tcp.dstport != 80
    • ip.addr == 8.8.8.8 and !(icmp or dns)
  • tshark -V option shows verbose pkt output (including all layers)
  • tshark -i enp5s0 -Tfields -E separator=, -e eth.dst -e eth.src prints only the dst and src address delimitered by “,”
  • tshark -i ens1 -Y "eth.type == 0x4321" -Tfields -E separator=, -e eth.dst -e eth.src similar to above, but filters the ether types being non 0x4321

sudo tshark -s 256 -B 10240 -i ens1 -x

As a prerequisite for installing DPDK and pktgen, Mellanox NIC Linux driver installation steps:

  • lspci -v | grep Mellanox verifies the existence of Mellanox network adapter
  • Install a compatible mellanox NIC driver version, e.g., MLNX_OFED_LINUX-4.9-0.1.7.0-ubuntu18.04-x86_64.tgz for ConnectX-4, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, arch x86. md5sum <file> before the actual installation
  • Verification
    • /etc/init.d/openibd restart loads/restarts the driver
    • Double check the driver version installed using MST (Mellanox Software Tools): mst start; ofed_info -s
    • Check that Mellanox kernel modules are loaded: lsmod | grep mlx
    • ibdev2netdev -v maps the adapter port to the net device

.pcap manipulation:

  • editcap -F pcap -i 60 bigfile.pcap tmp.pcap splits bigfile.pcap into 60s chunks
  • tshark [-V] -r bigfile.pcap -Y "frame.time_relative <= 1.0" reads 1s chunk of bigfile.pcap
  • tcpdump -r bigfile.pcap -c <num> -w firstnum.pcap saves first packets
  • tshark -r bigfile.pcap -Y "frame.time_relative <= 60.0" -w tmp.pcap saves first 1min packets
  • tshark -r <original.pcap> -Y "eth.type == 0x0800" -w clean.pcap focuses on ether type 0x0800
  • tshark -r 1s_chunk.pcap -Y "ip.proto == 6 or ip.proto == 17" -w tcpudp_1s_chunk.pcap filters non TCP, UDP packets

  • tcprewrite --dlt=enet --enet-dmac=00:11:22:33:44:55 --enet-smac=66:77:88:99:AA:BB --infile=<chunk_file> --outfile=output.pcap adds fake Ether header

  • Configure the interface ip, arp/route table etc a priori for the client/server pair(s)

File Management

  • find / -name "libpython3.4m.so.*" finds recursively the file with the specified name regex starting from the file system root
  • grep -r "bf_tm_ppg_hdl" . -I fines the files with the specified content, skipping binary files
  • tar -xvzf <resource tarball>.tar.gz is commonly used to unzip a tar.gz file
  • fdisk -l views all disk partitions
  • sudo dd if=<.iso file path> of=/dev/sdb1 creates a bootable image on a USB device partition (which appears to be file/dir in Linux) on Ubuntu.

Shell Execution

  • sudo -E ./script.sh to launch the script with sudo while keeping the current env variables, one could compare the output among env, sudo env, and sudo -E env

Compilation/Linkling

  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH env var specifies a set of dirs to search for shared libraries by the dynamic linker during run time rather than compilation time. E.g., sudo env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path1:/path2 ./prog will enables the dynamic linker to search path1 and path2 for the shared libraries needed by the executable prog.

Hotkey

  • Ctrl-Alt-F1: the terminal prompt display
  • Ctrl-Alt-Del: reboot

Kernel

dmesg is a powerful tool to debug by monitoring the kernel ring buffer:

  • dmesg -T prints the ring buffer with human readable time (rather than default time showing the time since the machine boot)
  • dmesg -x appends the message level (info, err, debug, warn…)
  • dmesg --level=err,warn prints only the message with the specified level
  • dmesg output is often combined with pipes, e.g., dmesg | head -30 prints the first 30 lines of dmesg original output, similarly dmesg | tail -20 prints the last 20 lines of the output, dmesg | grep -i dma prints messages with dma substring (case insensitive with -i option)

Authentication

RSA is similar to Diffie–Hellman key exchange in that they both leverage the property of the one-way function. RSA secretly picks 2 distinct prime numbers p, q and releases the modulus \(n=pq\). The public exponent e and private exponent d are chosen such that \(ed\equiv 1 \mod \phi(n)\) where \(\phi(n)=N-p-q+1=(q-1)(p-1)\) denotes the Euler’s totient function. The magic here is that \((m^{e})^{d}\mod n = m^{k\times \phi(n)+1}\mod n=(m^{\phi(n)})^{k}\times m\mod n\) and with Euler’s theorem, \((m^{e})^{d}\equiv m \mod n\). One could also show such equivalence using Fermat’s little theorem. This indicates that by applying both encryption and decryption (order doesn’t matter), we would recover the original message \(m\).

  • ssh -i <privkey path> <user>@<server ip> to ssh with the specified private key when it is absent in ssh-agent
  • ssh-add -l prints the currently added private keys, ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa adds the specified private key to ssh-agent (needs appropriate access permissions, e.d., 600), and ssh-add -d ~/.ssh/id_rsa deletes an added identity

  • passwd [user name] to update the password for the current/specified user

  • openssl genrsa [-aes128|-aes192|-aes256] -out private.pem 512 generates a 1024b private key (with optional AES encryption in CBC mode of PEM output)
  • openssl rsa -in private.pem -pubout > public.pem derives the corresponding public key for the specific private key
  • openssl rsa -in private.pem -text -noout displays the modulus and the private exponent
  • openssl dgst -sha1 -sign private.pem -out sha1.sign msg.txt signs the specified file using SHA-1 digest algorithm using PKCS1v1.5, one could read the signature hexdump sha1.sign
  • openssl dgst -sha1 -verify public.pem -signature sha1.sign msg.txt verifies the signature

Signature generation workflow under the hood:

  • A cryptographic-hash function generates a digest (160 bit hash with SHA-1) for the message alice says hello to bob. E.g., run shasum -a 1 msg.txt on MAC or sha1sum msg.txt on Linux to generates SHA-1 digest f669524891e50a82cb6e355af792b0a8f6351241 for the message (cut -d ' ' -f1).
  • The digest is padded to RSA key size k bits w.r.t. a padding scheme (why? because it is deterministic otherwise), e.g., PKCS1v1.5 or a latest version PKCS1v2.2. In PKCS1v1.5, 00||01||PS||00||T||MD where 01 is the mode for digital signature, PS is a variable number of FF bytes (\(k/8-38\)), T is a a string of magic ASN.1 (nothing but a specification to describe data structure, example below) bytes specifying which digest mechnism to use, for SHA-1, it is 3021300906052b0e03021a05000414 (see P46 of PKCS1v2.2), and MD is the previously generated digest. 
    DigestInfo ::= SEQUENCE {
digestAlgorithm DigestAlgorithmIdentifier,
digest Digest }
  • To summarize, the padded message in the example above is 
    0001ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff003021300906052b0e03021a05000414f669524891e50a82cb6e355af792b0a8f6351241
  • Now we can sign the padded msg via \(c=(PKCS1V1\_5(MD))^{d}\mod n\) leveraging Python’s big number arithmetic. One could verify that the resulting sign should be identical to sha1.sign using openssl direcly. 
    md_padded = int('0001ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff003021300906052b0e03021a05000414f669524891e50a82cb6e355af792b0a8f6351241', 16)
n = int('00bb78017b6de556689dfd97f737003ab49fc5e463a73f02d6adf6cb725aebbe8db9f49fb45b5d56b9d9fe68309ccead978e33f8f03a43e4e40686a7078ac9db57', 16)
d = int('0090ef9ad5be850c651da0ae18a7213a41e334affa8b971faeb21897f9f569458c223adf2bb8bb9a23aa7522d95495e50b2f87095e5b9c461cc7d5764c8dcbbde1', 16)
sign = hex(pow(md_padded, d, n))[2:] # Remove the 0x prefix
  • The verification of a signature is similar. \(MD=PKCS1V1\_5^{-1}((c)^{e}\mod n)\)
  • Note that though the scheme under PKCS1V1_5 is IND-CPA (semantically secure), it turns out to be vulnerable to Bleichenbacher attacks. PKCS1V2_2 addresses the issue using a more sophisticated padding scheme for both signature/encryption to achieve IND-CCA.

Version Control

  • git reset --hard <commit hash> points HEAD to a history commit AND rolls back the files
  • To mirror an existing Git repo A to another Git repo B, deletes the existing remote via git remote rm origin and adds a new remote via git remote add origin https://github.com/liangcheng-yu/another.git. Then overwrites repo B with git push -f --set-upstream origin master.

Cables and Wiring

  • Breakout/fanout cables are often used to split the port bandwidth, e.g., a QSFP28-4SFP28 breakout cable split a 100G port of a switch to 4x25G server ports.
  • Ethernet cables that run inside walls and crawl spaces are different from those meant to plugged in/out the computer repeatedly. The former is fragile to rewire and ideally settled once while the latter is more flexible to bent.
  • Fixed Optical Attenuator, Variable Optical Attenuator
  • Video Graphics Array (VGA) cable
  • Transceiver: Fibre Channel and Ethernet Transceiver both have their own targeting use cases
  • Common form factors (a set of specifications (size, shape…) during hardware design, in this context, for transceivers): 1G SFP, 10G SFP+, 25G SFP28, 40G QSFP+, 50G QSFP28, 100G QSFP28, 200G QSFP56, 400G QSFP-DD.

    A nice FiberStore (FS.COM) post on the differences and backward compatibility of common form factors. E.g., SFP28 supports only one channel with 25 Gbit/s, while QSFP28 supports 4 separate lanes, each of 25 Gbps. In 100G networks, one could use QSFP28 to SFP28 breakout cables to connect a 100G switch with a 25G switch.