[Bloat] Can't Run Tests Against netperf.bufferbloat.net

[Rich Brown]

Toke and Jesper,

Thanks both for these responses. 

netperf.bufferbloat.net is running an OpenVZ VPS with a 3.10 kernel. Tech support at Ramnode tells me that I need to get to a KVM instance in order to use ipset and other fancy kernel stuff.

Here's my plan:

1) Unless anyone can recommend a better hosting service ...

2) Over the weekend, I'll stand up a new KVM server at Ramnode. They offer a 2GB RAM, 2 core, 65 GB SSD, with 3TB per month of data. It'll cost $10/month: adding 2x1TB at $4/month brings it to a total of $18/month, about what the current server costs. I can get Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as a standard install.

3) While that's in-flight I would request that an iptables expert on the list recommend a better strategy. (I was just makin' stuff up in the current setup - as you could tell :-)

4) I'd also accept any thoughts about tc commands for setting up the networking on the host to work best as a netperf server. (Maybe enable fq_codel or better...) 

Thanks

Rich

> On Feb 7, 2020, at 7:02 AM, Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 18:47:06 -0500
> Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> On Feb 6, 2020, at 12:00 PM, Matt Taggart wrote:
>>> 
>>> This smells like a munin or smokeping plugin (or some other sort of 
>>> monitoring) gathering data for graphing.  
>> 
>> Yup. That is a real possibility. The question is what we do about it.
>> 
>> If I understood, we left it at:
>> 
>> 1) Toke was going to look into some way to spread the
>> 'netperf.bufferbloat.net' load across several of our netperf servers.
>> 
>> 2) Can someone give me advice about iptables/tc/? to identify IP
>> addresses that make "too many" connections and either shut them off
>> or dial their bandwidth back to a 3 or 5 kbps? 
> 
> Look at man iptables-extensions and find "connlimit" and "recent".
> 
> 
>> (If you're terminally curious, Line 5 of
>> https://github.com/richb-hanover/netperfclean/blob/master/addtoblacklist.sh
>> shows the current iptables command to drop connections from "heavy
>> users" identified in the findunfilteredips.sh script. You can read
>> the current iptables rules at:
>> https://github.com/richb-hanover/netperfclean/blob/master/iptables.txt)
> 
> Sorry but this is a wrong approach.  Creating an iptables rule per
> source IP-address, will (as you also demonstrate) give you a VERY long
> list of rules (which is evaluated sequentially by the kernel).
> 
> This should instead be solved by using an ipset (howto a match from
> iptables see man iptables-extensions(8) and "set").  And use the
> cmdline tool ipset to add and remove entries.
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
>  Jesper Dangaard Brouer
>  MSc.CS, Principal Kernel Engineer at Red Hat
>  LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brouer
>