Yearly Archives: 2022


Rough notes on setting up an Ubuntu 22.04LTS server with docker and snap 1

IP allocations

First, we set up a static IP on the network device that would handle all external traffic and a DHCP on the network device that would access the management network, which is connected for maintenance.

To do so, we created the following file:

/etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml

using the following command:

sudo nano /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml;

and added the following content to it:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# For more information, see netplan(5).
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    eth0:
      dhcp4: no
      addresses: [192.168.45.13/24]
      gateway4: 192.168.45.1
      nameservers:
          addresses: [1.1.1.1,8.8.8.8]
    eth1:
      dhcp4: yes

To apply the changes, we executed the following:

sudo netplan apply;

Update everything (the operating system and all packages)

Usually, it is a good idea to update your system before making significant changes to it:

sudo apt update -y; sudo apt upgrade -y; sudo apt autoremove -y;

Install docker via snap

In this setup, we did not use the docker version available on the Ubuntu repositories, we went for the ones from the snap. To install it, we used the following commands:

sudo apt install snapd;
sudo snap install docker;

Increase network pool for docker daemon

To handle the following problem:

ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

We modified the following file

/var/snap/docker/current/config/daemon.json

using the command:

sudo nano /var/snap/docker/current/config/daemon.json;

and set the content to be as follows:

{
    "log-level":        "error",
    "storage-driver":   "overlay2",
    "default-address-pools": [
        {
            "base": "172.80.0.0/16",
            "size": 24
        },
        {
            "base": "172.90.0.0/16",
            "size": 24
        }
    ]
}

We executed the following command to restart the docker daemon and get the network changes applied:

sudo snap disable docker;
sudo snap enable docker;

Gave access to our user to manage the docker

We added our user to the docker group so that we could manage the docker daemon without sudo rights.

sudo addgroup --system docker;
sudo adduser $USER docker;
newgrp docker;
sudo snap disable docker;
sudo snap enable docker;

After that, we made sure that the access rights to the volumes were correct:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /volumes/*
sudo chown -R tux:tux /volumes/letsencrypt/ /volumes/reverse/private/

Deploying

After we copied everything in place, we executed the following command to create our containers and start them with the appropriate networks and volumes:

export COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=600;
docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans;

We had to increase the timeout as we were getting the following error:

ERROR: for container_a  UnixHTTPConnectionPool(host='localhost', port=None): Read timed out. (read timeout=60)
ERROR: An HTTP request took too long to complete. Retry with --verbose to obtain debug information.
If you encounter this issue regularly because of slow network conditions, consider setting COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT to a higher value (current value: 60).

Updating the databases and performing any repairs

First, we connected to a terminal of the database container using the following command:

docker exec -it mariadb_c1 /bin/bash;

From there, we executed the following commands:

mysql_upgrade --user=root --password;
mysqlcheck -p -o --all-databases;

Bulk / Batch stopping docker containers

The following commands will help you stop many docker containers simultaneously. Of course, you can change the command stop to another, for example rm or whatever suits your needs.

You need to keep in mind that if you have dependencies between containers, you might need to execute the commands below more than once.

Stop all docker containers.

docker container stop $(docker container ls -q);
#This command creates a list of all containers.
#Using the -q parameter, we only get back the container ID and not all information about them.
#Then it will stop each container one by one.

Stop specific docker containers using a filter on their name.

docker container stop $(docker container ls -q --filter name=_web);
#This command finds all containers that their name contains _web.
#Using the -q parameter, we only get back the container ID and not all information about them.
#Then it will stop each container one by one.

A personal note

Check the system for things you might need to configure, like a crontab or other services.

A script that handles privileges on the docker volumes

To avoid access problems with the various external volumes we created the mysql user and group on the host machine as follows:

sudo groupadd -g 999 mysql;
sudo useradd -u 999 mysql -g mysql;

Then we execute the following to repair ownership issues with our containers. Please note that this script is custom to a particular installation and might not meet your needs.

#!/bin/bash

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ~/volumes/*;
sudo chown -R bob:bob ~/volumes/letsencrypt/ ~/volumes/reverse/private/;
find ~/volumes/ -maxdepth 2 -type d -name mysql -exec sudo chown -R mysql:mysql '{}' \;;

Extend LVM space to the rest of the free space on the disk

Recently, we formatted a server with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. While selecting the disk settings, we selected the encrypted LVM partition scheme, and even though we selected the whole disk, we did not notice that the LVM would only allocate, by default, 100GB out of the 600GB available on the raid volume.

So, we proceeded with the installation, and at some point, we noticed that we ran out of space which should not have happened.

Using the command df -h we quickly spotted the problem:

$ df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                      3,2G  3,9M  3,2G   1% /run
/dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root  100G   83G   17G  83% /
tmpfs                       16G   40M   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                      5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
/dev/sda5                  703M  257M  395M  40% /boot
/dev/sda1                  511M   24K  511M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs                       16G     0   16G   0% /run/qemu
tmpfs                      3,2G  156K  3,2G   1% /run/user/1000

/dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root was only 100GB instead of the 600GB that we would expect it to be.

Using the command vgdisplay we verified that the space allocated to the logical volume group was not what we wanted.

To fix the problem, we issued the following commands:

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv;
resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv;

lvextend instructed our logical volume to consume all the available space on the hosting disk.

Then resize2fs allocated all the available space to our partition.


How to Disable Google Ad ID Tracking on Android

The key that permits the majority of third-party tracking on mobile devices is the ad identifier, also known as “IDFA” on iOS or “AAID” on Android. Disabling it will reduce the quantity of your personal data that is available for sale and make it much more difficult for advertisers and data brokers to monitor and profile you.

Here’s how you may immediately deny trackers access to your ad ID using Android:
With the introduction of Android 12, Google started enabling consumers to permanently erase their ad IDs. You can launch the Settings app on a device with this feature enabled and go to Privacy > Ads. On the following page, touch “Delete advertising ID” once more for confirmation. Any app on your phone won’t be able to access it again after doing this.