Pauldy's House of Geek

Ok so I finally did the config at the house everything looked good on paper so I loaded the machine up and set off to upgrade the server. Once I had it setup though I noticed some weird things like not being able to hit the webserver, and some other oddities that didn’t make sense. My providers crash cart was sans a working monitor so I was left without a way to look at the machine directly. Once I realized I could get in remote via ssh on the ns ip I came home only to discover one of the weirdest issues I have ever run across in any linux distro. The current os is ubuntu server.

Here is the interface map

br0 216.87.144.154
br0:1 216.87.144.155
br0:2 216.87.144.156
br0:3 216.87.144.157
br0:4 216.87.144.158

br0:2 and br0:4 are unable to communicate with the internet in any way shape or form. The rest br0 br0:1 br0:3 all send and receive traffic just fine. But it isn’t linked to the interface, after further testing I found that the ips ending in .156 and .158 are unable to communicate with the network. These used to be the interface ips I used to keep mail and web separate and where the highest traffic ips on the box so I figured something with my provider kept these ips from working so I called them up for resolution. While on hold I decided to fire up the windows VM and assign it one of the broken ips. A quick ping and it was alive. I tried the same with the 158 ip and it worked as well. So now what I have is something I can only imagine is a bug in the bridging code that is preventing those two ips from working on a virtual interface. I’m hopping someone who reads this blog can throw me a bone. I have spent all day with it and am at an utter loss.

For the records iptables where disabled, all proc options where returned to defaults, the route was checked for an inadvertent bitmask, all virtual interfaces where removed except for one and it was assigned to one of the dead ips and it wouldn’t work changing it to any of the ips that had worked previously worked fine. Multiple reboots later and here we are, windows gets 156, and 158 the rest I’m leaving with the host os until this is all sorted out.

Aside from the previous issue everything went smooth, I was forced to abandon the original setup in favor of a single linux host, with a windows server guest. So far the configuration is most stable like this. Using some fancy shell scripting, I will post later, I have a VM that starts and stops with the system and is able to save the machine state between reboots. This is great for those moments when I forget about the VM and simply issue a reboot command to the host.