Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Fuck ClearOS, I think I’m done

I am starting to get really tired of this distro. Their “support” forums are about the worst on the web. The forum software fucking sucks too, I have never seen a support forum that arranges posts the way they do. The shit is far from in order, the posts feel like Facebook – you know how they constantly rearrange shit for no good fucking reason. yeah like that so fuck that place. Not to mention there is no help there, all the posts that show up in searches are YEARS old and/or only apply to a version a few years old.

Besides the extreme lack of any public community support the shit isn’t stable’ish. Every the system reboots (usually due to a power failure or Comcast sucking ass) I have to spend hours trying to get my internet connection back. Clear does NOT play well with any fucking cable modem or NIC I have yet to come upon. That’s a serious fucking problem. Now lets get to why I am typing this post. I’m fucking irritated. My UPS battery decided to take a shit, so I lost power to the server. Upon reboot I actually happened to have an internect connection, which is really fucking odd – cause that has never ever ever ever ever happened before… But nooo, can’t just leave it at that nope. After the server came back up something happened to Transmission and its permissions. I’m not sure what, but it’s fucking bullshit. Transmission, a module available via the marketplace but it doesn’t configure itself properly. Permissions are a fucking nightmare trying to get it all to work, which I had until Clear rebooted. It won’t let me add the transmission user to the group, the group doesn’t show up everywhere, the users are where they are suppose to be. Fucking ridiculous.

Any other options instead of ClearOS? I was using Zentyal which was great until they removed every module I actually found useful, now Clear is giving me more headaches than I care for. A GUI is required, I am not messing with CLI shit all day long for a home box.

Double your speed double your fun

I was at one of my in-laws neighbors homes the other day, he needed some help setting up Rabbit.TV and his Chromecast. I had never heard of Rabbit.TV, while it is cheap, $10 for the year, I found it very hokey and very difficult to navigate. Plus I believe it just links you to all the free content, but places it all in one convenient spot – I don’t know and not the point.

When I was all finished he asked if I wanted an extra cable modem he had. He had been mailed the modem in error or ended up not needing it after he bought it, I can’t remember which. I hesitated at first as I really need to stop collecting ewaste, but I took it and I am glad I did. I looked it up when I got home, nothing fancy just a Motorola SB6141. I was using a Ubee DDM3513 at the time. I originally has some Motorola Dinosaur but it had died, the Ubee is what was given to us in its stead. I haven’t had a lot of issues but I do feel it was sluggish at time. Not evidence to back it up thats just the overall feeling I was given from The Family. They two modems are both DOCSIS 3.0 the difference is (that would make a difference) that the SB6141 can handle “channel bonding of up to eight downstream channels and four upstream channels” (up to 300 Mbps downstream, 100 Mbps upstream). The Ubee is 4/4 (up to 171Mbps downstream, 122Mbps upstream). I Googled the hell out of the Motorola for a few hours and I came up with a lot of posts and forum comments on the performance. Most people advertised they were getting a higher Mbps with the SB6141 than other modems for their current speed tier (hitting 12Mbps on a 6Mbps account for example). So I decided to swap the modems out.

It actually went very smoothly, on Comcast’s side. I connected the new modem (SB6141) in place of the Ubee and plugged my netbook directly into it. It connected to the net within about 3 minutes or so. When I transferred the modem to the server/router is when I hit a snag. My ClearOS box wouldn’t grab a new IP address from the modem. If I watched it closely I could see it get the local 192.168.100.10 address, then drop it, then switch to the ISP public and then drop it 10 seconds later. Then I got to stare at the spinning loading logo forever. The netbook would grab it no problem every time. I power cycled the modem and the server/router many times, made no difference. I even tried cloning the MAC of the netbook on the server/router, it did take the clone but it made no difference either. What worked for me was to delete the ethernet card under “IP settings”. Mine is eth11 so I just deleted eth11 and then added it back in again. Voila it worked.

Speed tests ran from speedtest.net and speakeasy both report 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Prior to the modem switch I was only hitting 6.5Mbps, which is my speed tier cap. So 12Mbps on a 6Mbps speed tier – score, at least for now.

Update 10-22-2015: I have come to find an easier solution (other than not using Comcast and therefor not needing a cable modem). If you SSH into the box you can simply release and renew the IP of the ethernet port.

sudo dhclient -r your_nic followed by
sudo dhclient your_nic

For example my card is enp3s0 so I would type:

sudo dhclient -r enp3s0

That should release and renew the IP for you. I found this out after upgrading to ClearOS 7. The old trick of deleting and re-adding the NIC wasn’t working anymore. So it appears that it is not just Comcast and their cable modems, ClearOS has something to do with it.

ClearOS and FTP

Getting that same problem? Well apparently you are not alone, seems ProFTP and ClearOS don’t really work well out of the box. FileZilla would constantly timeout on listing the directories, so it would never actually connect. Transmit would timeout too, but it would spit out different errors, usually Error 162 Port Fail. After hours of digging I did find the problem, and the solution. It was actually pretty easy to fix (makes you wonder why the fix is not implemented?). Depending on your ClearOS setup YMMV and other steps may be required. I am running my ClearOS box in gateway mode, it is my server and router.

Start by forwarding all those ports required. Clear uses different ports for different things with FTP.
21 standard ftp port (internet say this is for home folders, but it connects me to flexshares). 60,000-61,000 are used for port 21 PASSIVE connections 2121 standard ftp port (internet says its for flexshares). 65,000-65,100 are used for port 21 PASSIVE connections. 989/990 SFTP ports.

To ditch the unroutable address warning toss this in your proftpd.conf file:
sudo nano /etc/proftpd.conf MasqueradeAddress ftp.mydomain.com  # using a DNS name

This did allow me to finally connect with Transmit with no issues. A friend of mine was able to connect with FileZilla after I made the changes. I had to change my FileZilla settings to use an Active connection versus a Passive or mine would refuse to connect. Odd.

I found these sites to be helpful, and thats where I got my information.
http://www.proftpd.org/docs/howto/NAT.html
https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/remote-ftp-access-through-nat-router-solved
https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/ftp-problem
http://forum.slicehost.com/index.php?p=/discussion/4491/ftp-error-162-port-failed/p1
http://www.theserverpages.com/articles/servers/cpanel/tweaks/Getting_passive_FTP_connections_to_work_through_a_firewall_properly.html
https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=7315

ClearOS – broken system updates, thanks hal

So during my Plex not working NIC rearranging fiasco I was doing some digging to try and find the cause. It may have been related to some broken system update, not 100% sure. I did do a system update the other day, which had some broken dependencies,

This was the command that updated my broken hal dependency and got my system updated. Apparently the system was not configured to update with the clearos-core? Anywho, this did the job, and as soon as the update was finished Plex was working.

yum --enablerepo=clearos-core,clearos-contribs upgrade hal* libvirt* yum -y update

After doing a bit of searching I came up on this post that had the answer. I find the ClearOS forums search function to be horrible, and Google doesn’t seem to pick up on it much. Maybe this helps?

ClearOS and Plex hate me today

Everything worked fine 100% last night. Zero issues. Apparently technology is giving me a big middle finger today. My cellphone provider is telling me I used 15gb of data in just a few hours and then Plex decided to stop working out of the blue – won’t load at all. So I logged into my ClearOS 6.5 server to see what’s going on, no its not disabled, apparently Plex decided it didn’t want to be here anymore and deleted itself. Sweet! So I had to browse the market at reinstall Plex (I have had to do this once before if I remember correctly).

Plex reinstalled all is well? Hahaha NO. So after the reboot of the server ClearOS also decided to change its primary NIC. What the fuck is wrong with you Clear? I have five (5) ethernet ports (two cards). One 1000gb on-board and another Intel Pro/1000 Quad-Port PCI-E ethernet card. The on-board is the NIC for the modem and the quad card was all my internal stuff. Was using one port to go to the switches and I have been trying to get a Hot-LAN to work with no success – won’t give me DHCP. My internal IP is X.X.X.1 (others are .11-14), after the reboot the system decided to dump everything on .13 as if it were my primary. Why did you do that? I had to delete ALL of the active NIC settings on the ClearOS machine boot screen and re-add them back in. I only added the .1 address to speed things up and not cause issue. And then another reboot.

Now things appear to finally be back to where they were last night – working. After reconfiguring the NICs and waiting a few minutes after the reboot Plex is back as well. Now…what the fuck happened? Wasn’t an update, Plex is still complaining about needed one…