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Fresh install - network problems

Posted by zirophyz on Tue, 01/24/2017

Hello,

I have just installed a fresh copy of the latest Multi-Tenant PBX demo, inside a VirtualBox VM. The networking is horrendous! It takes a while to successful connect via DHCP, yum package downloads start off fast but quickly drop to nonexistant speeds, half the time it cannot resolve mirrors, I cannot do WebMin updates and unable to download Handset firmware packages. I cannot ping out to anything (default gateway, google DNS, local DNS etc), and I cannot ping the server (even though, it looks like default iptables allows this).

So far, my trial is going stupendously bad.

I've never had issues with any other linux VM's, running in VirtualBox. I've assigned 20GB HDD and 1GB RAM - yes, this is low but as I said I am only doing evaluation so there won't be much happening on the box. Is this too slow? Would low system resources cause awful network connectivity?

Network is assigned by DHCP. DNS servers assigned manually.

Checking on my local machine, each of the failed mirrors resolves fine using the same DNS server, and responds to ping just fine - tbh, it's not the mirrors.

Have I missed some step here? I've never run into poor network performance on a linux install before so I'm not sure where to look. Is this a compatibility issue with Virtual Box NIC? (Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop). This is second install - yes, there are things that show FAILED and other errors during install which I couldn't get or miss because console. I wouldn't expect that to impact network performance though.

Scratching my head - I really want this to work but if this is how it is, then my evaluation will be extremely short!

Thanks in advance,


Submitted by thirdlane on Tue, 01/24/2017 Permalink

20GB HD is plenty, 1GB RAM is tight, but should not cause this "horrendous networking", after all it is just CentOS.

I wish I could be more helpful, but it looks like it has to do with your connections. Have you downloaded everything you needed? If so, perhaps the worst is over and you can just do some local testing? :)

Submitted by zirophyz on Tue, 01/24/2017 Permalink

Tried installing on my home server, which is running phpVirtualBox - so, it's similar.

This time, when the installation starts Asterisk it throws some crazy "trap invalid opcode" and "illegal instruction" errors. Makes me wonder if the RAM in my server has problems, however again this is the first time I've run into any problems and I am constantly spinning up VM's on this box as well.

At the moment, I can only assume a virtualization engine type compatibility issue with VirtualBox. I will see about getting this installed on VMWare...

Submitted by zirophyz on Tue, 01/24/2017 Permalink

Thanks for the reply. Nah, wasn't the connection (we're an ISP ;))...

Turns out it was VirtualBox. I installed into VMWare Fusion locally and everything was as smooth as expected!

The trap errors and stuff seemed like a virtualization incompatibility but the poor network performance didn't. Anyway, problem solved. If there is compatibility documentation (I couldn't find anything) then I would definitely put a big asterisk next to VirtualBox support :)

Submitted by zirophyz on Tue, 01/24/2017 Permalink

Well, it works much better under VMWare but I've royally broken it. Was getting Error -100 when trying to DL handset packages.. Okay, not important, it says it downloaded it regardless. I then went and turned off all services other than HTTP, under the Provisioning settings. Then some more errors, I think error -90 this time and/or "Unexpected Server Error". So, I'll log out and back in again see if that clears up anything that's stuck, the logout page started timing out so did everything else.

Alright, something is really stuck. I'll reboot the server and start again. After the reboot I cannot ping the server, no SSH, no web on HTTP or HTTPS. From the server console, all looks normal and I can ping default gateway and things out on the internet.

Restarted nginx, no change. Turned off fail2ban (I wasn't banned but hey), no change. Turned off iptables, no change.

Asterisk is running. Not sure what to look for to check if the PBX Communicator software is running. I *think* webmin is running.

Am i just having an unlucky day?!

Submitted by thirdlane on Thu, 01/26/2017 Permalink

First of all - thanks fro trying and not giving up.

It does look like an unlucky day - or something went wrong at some point and triggered a bunch of other problems. Ironically, I use VirtualBox for my testing all the time and it works - it could also be a version of VirtualBox (i am using a very old version 4.1.2) or some setting - who knows.

I am not sure what to suggest except for us to somehow look at your box and try to understand the root cause.