Outbound Network Issue?

[kiwibean]

Hi all...complete n00b here on all things Linux and Amahi, but trying to learn.

I managed to setup a clean installation of Amahi per the instructions and all seemed to be working great for the few few days. I was able to connect to the HDA via the dashboard, add disks to the greyhole storage pool, setup shares using the pool, and access these shares from all windows computers on my network. Was even able to install and uninstall a couple applications via the dashboard.

Today, I noticed some issues that all seem related to an outbound connectivity problem:

1) When I login to the dashboard and navigate to the Available Apps tab, I see the message "There are no applications available at this time. This may be due to a network connectivity issue"

2) When I view the status of my HDA on Amahi.org Control Panel, it states "Stopped"

3) When I login to the HDA server itself, I'm not able to get out to the internet (e.g. Firefox cannot connect to any website).

The wierd thing is that I can still access my shares and the dashboard without any issue. I've rebooted the HDA several times to no avail.

Any thoughts on what I should be checking?

Thanks much!

[lou1z]

well, it don't look like amahi itself. so, simply without doing any cli etc, reboot your router.
just pull the power cord at the back out, give it a few seconds and plug it back in.
let us know how you get on with that before moving into anything a little more complex.

[kiwibean]

Thanks for the idea.

I just tried that, and no change. Did both a hard-reboot of the router as you suggested, and also a soft-reboot (i.e. clicked on "reboot" in one of router's admin screens). Also tried rebooting the Amahi server after each router reboot.

I should point out that I have both the DNS and DHCP services in Amahi turned off (stopped via the Dashboard). My router has a fixed IP address of 192.168.1.10 reserved for the Amahi server, meaning that it's guaranteed to assign that ip address to Amahi whenever either the router or the server is rebooted (based on MAC Address recognition, i think). After each reboot of the server and/or router I've verified that the Amahi server is assigned the expected IP address.

Any other thoughts? I really appreciate the feedback.

[lou1z]

ok, time to get a little bit more complex.

seeing as your hda is working, there's no need to check for the ip of the hda itself to confirm it's correct.
so the next step is to look at the gateway or dns.

from the cli or shell on the hda.....
type:

ping -c 4 192.168.1.1 (to make sure you can reach your router)

if you don't get a reply:
route add default gw 192.168.1.1 eth0 (to add a route only if you don't get a reply from above)
then:
ping -c 4 192.168.1.1 (to check that the route has taken)

if you get a reply:
ping -c 4 208.67.222.222 (to see if you can reach opendns)

if you get a reply:
nslookup google.com (to see if your dns is working correctly)
you should see something like google.com 129.125.126.123 which means that it's resolving addresses ok.
if you get replies at this stage from all the above pings, then there is something else blocking.

let us know the results of the above.
can your windows clients (i assume that is what you are using to access your hda) reach the internet ok? if so, it's more than likely a routing issue with your hda.

[kiwibean]

Per your advice, it would appear to be a DNS issue as I get the following error:

connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Here's the full sequence of steps:

[amahibean@Amahi ~]$ ping -c 4 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.402 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.365 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.355 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.385 ms

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.355/0.376/0.402/0.029 ms
[amahibean@Amahi ~]$ ping -c 4 208.67.222.222
PING 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=25.6 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=24.4 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=26.3 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=27.3 ms

--- 208.67.222.222 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3032ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 24.415/25.954/27.389/1.087 ms
[amahibean@Amahi ~]$ nslookup google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

[amahibean@Amahi ~]$

To your question about my clients' access...yes, they are all Windows 7 clients and can all access the internet just fine. Same goes for any iphone, ipad, android devices connected to the WiFi.

Any other thoughts? Thanks again for the direction.

[lou1z]

you need to check your resolv.conf file.

type:

vi /etc/resolv.conf

in there you should see something like:

search <yourdomainname>
nameserver 192.168.1.10

if it's empty, that's where your problem lies so you need to enter edit mode on vi:

type i & enter
now enter your details on each line (like above eg search yourdomain.com & nameserver 192.168.1.10)
when done, press esc (this will take you out of edit mode)
enter :
enter wq! (which writes and quits vi)

then restart your dns:
service named restart

then, check the dns again:
nslookup google.com

[kiwibean]

Woo Hoo!

That did the trick....sorta.

When I checked the /etc/named.conf file the required entries were already in there. So i just restarted the service as root and voila!

I would think that service should restart whenever the server gets rebooted...is that not true?

At any rate, thanks a million!

[lou1z]

chkconfig named --list (to see what level your dns server runs at eg runlevel 3)
chkconfig --level 35 named on (to turn it on automatically for runlevel 3&5)

[kiwibean]

Problem solved, once again.

And, once again, many thanks. Let me know where to send the check.

[NeverSimple]

Woo Hoo!

That did the trick....sorta.

When I checked the /etc/named.conf file the required entries were already in there. So i just restarted the service as root and voila!

I would think that service should restart whenever the server gets rebooted...is that not true?

Maybe not. A few posts back you stated you disabled the service yourself, for whatever reason:

I should point out that I have both the DNS and DHCP services in Amahi turned off (stopped via the Dashboard)

(named = DNS). Just curious: why did you turn it off in the first place, re-enabling doesn't seem to give you any worries? (and solves the problem)


Richard