Behind the Eyes

Category: HowTo

  • Setting up Unreal Tournament 2004 Game server on Ubuntu 16.04

    Hey everybody.

    Been a while since I wrote here. Figured I would write up a howto to setting up a Unreal Tournament 2004 server. I really love this game. It brings back tons of memories, playing this when I was in the Navy with my friends on the sub.

    My boys have some break time off from school, and they played a little bit back in the day, so I decided to spin up a server so that we could play. I looked for a way to do this online, and couldn’t find anything so I figured I would write something up, so here you go.

    So, the good thing is that because the game is pretty old now, over 13 years old now, it doesn’t really require a lot of CPU or memory or storage. I deployed a KVM with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM and 20GB storage server running Ubuntu 16.04.3, and got all the updates installed. I then spent the next few hours searching for the ut2004 dedicated server package. Never could find it. Luckily, I had a backup copy, which I have uploaded to this server so you can download it here. You’ll also need the patch, which you can download here.

    I created a directory for the game in /usr/local/games/UT2004 and extracted the .zip here:

    sudo unzip -d /usr/local/games/UT2004 dedicatedserver3339-bonuspack.zip

    Once that was complete, I then untarred the patch and had to manually install it, since it creates a directory called UT2004-Patch so I had to actually go into each directory and move the files into their respective directories in the UT2004 directory. Once that was complete, you now have a system capable of running Unreal Tournament 2004 server. However, I needed to do a couple more things.

    Next, you need to install libstdc++5 package. This is required so that Unreal can run. Run the following command to install libstdc++5:

    sudo apt install libstdc++5

    One, I decided to start the web admin. In the /usr/local/games/UT2004/System/UT2004.ini. Find the UWeb.Webserver section and modify it:

    [UWeb.WebServer]
Applications[0]=xWebAdmin.UTServerAdmin
ApplicationPaths[0]=/ServerAdmin
Applications[1]=xWebAdmin.UTImageServer
ApplicationPaths[1]=/images
bEnabled=True
ListenPort=80

    You can change the ListenPort to what ever you want, you just need to change bEnabled=False to True to enable it.

    Next, I decided that I wanted this to run as a service using SystemD instead of just running in the background with me logged in to the server. Below is my UT2004-Server.service file:

    [Unit]
Description=Unreal 2004 Dedicated Server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=ut2004
WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/games/UT2004/System
ExecStart=/usr/local/games/UT2004/System/ucc-bin-linux-amd64 server CTF-BridgeOfFate?game=XGame.xCTFGame?AdminName=admin?AdminPassword=XXXXXXXX ini=UT2004.ini log=server.log -nohomedir
Restart=on-abort

    Just change the ?AdminPassword= to what you want I then copied the file into /lib/systemd/system and chmod 644 and chown root:root the ut2004-server.service file and now I can control the service with systemctl:

    systemctl start ut2004-server.service and I can get status with systemctl status ut2004-server.service

    One last thing I did as well is I included my cdkey from my game since I was getting errors about a missing cdkey, however, I have tested it, and it is not required. The game will still run, you just can’t advertise your server on the Internet and host Internet games without it, which means your stats also won’t work. You used to be able to download a CD-Key from Epic, but that service is no longer working. I emailed them about this on December 2, 2017 with no reply as to date.

    Happy gaming!

  • Deploying Whitebox Switch ONIE images with MAAS

    Hello,

    So I spend a lot of time deploying switches in my lab for my job. I also really like Canonical’s tools for managing infrastructure and bare metal servers called MAAS, or Metal-As-A-Service. It can deploy servers better than really any other solution I have used in the past, including Red Hat’s Satellite, Microsoft’s Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and Solaris’s Jumpstart server. The  thing I particularly like is that it is OS agnostic. Meaning even though it is a Canonical product, it is not restricted to just Ubuntu. I can setup MAAS to deploy any, Operating system to my bare metal, as long as I have an image for it. So I can deploy Red Hat and Windows as well.

    So I was thinking, how hard would it be to make MAAS deploy ONIE images on Bare Metal Whitebox switches? The answer is, really easy. Since MAAS is using a Web backend based on Apache2, it has the default directory structure for Apache2. So in /var/www/html I can put my ONIE images for my switches in that location. Also, becuase MAAS is the DNS and DHCP server for my managed devices and servers, it is a no brainer on using this to deploy whitebox switches.

    Typically, when deploying ONIE images on to a Whitebox switch, Network Administrators have a couple options. They can either use a USB thumb drive with the ONIE image burnt on it and restore it via the ONIE Rescue option in the ONIE GRUB Boot menu and then typing install_url file:///path/to/onie-installerand then it install, but that is only efficient if you are deploying maybe 1-5 switches. As a Network Engineer, if I have to leave my seat to reset and update my switches, that is unsat. And if I’m carrying my “serial leash” over my shoulder, that is a walk of shame…

    The other option is to use the Network Boot option, which is the default way of deploying a NOS onto a Whitebox switch. This is the automatic option, but it does depend on a couple of things:

    1. The ONIE image is named specifically for the device, of example, a Celestica Redstone XP switch has the default ONIE installer image name of onie-installer-x86_64-cel_rxp_sxp-r0 and if it can’t find that specific image, it starts decrementing down to onie-installer-x86_64-cel_rxp_sxp to onie-installer-x86_64 until it can find an image. Then it checksums that image to make sure that it will work on the device based on the machine.conf.
    2. That the DHCP server is also the web server that is hosting the image. Now this is subjective, because you can have the default-url set in your DHCP server to point to the location of the ONIE images.

    As you can see, there a pros and cons to both deployments. Now to get why I like MAAS to do this.

    1. MAAS is a DHCP, DNS, and Web server all in one pretty package. I can plug my whitebox switch’s management port into the network that is managed by MAAS and set it up as a Device in MAAS so that I know what the IP address will be.
    2. I can put the ONIE image directly on MAAS in the /var/www/html directory and ONIE will automagically pick it up and install

    One thing to note, is that I cannot directly manage the switch from MAAS. Meaning that I cannot use MAAS to configure the NIC ports, and I cannot use MAAS to setup local users on the device or use MAAS to deploy an OS from the list of installed images on my MAAS server. Now there are plans that this functionality will come in the future, but it will not be based on ONIE images, and instead be PXE installed and managed by MAAS and specific images that are switch supported. This is outside of the scope of this blog entry, but as soon as they do become available, you can bet I will write a blog entry on how to do that.

    So, to get MAAS to deploy your whitebox switches, these are the steps:

    1. Copy your ONIE installer images to /var/www/html on the MAAS server.
    2. Under the Node tab, there is a Devices option at the top of the Web page, click that and enter the MAC address of the switch, as well as the name you want to give the device and the IP address if you don’t want to have a dynamic address assigned to the switch. I highly recommend that you set a static so that you don’t have to guess what the address is of your switch to manage it in the future.
    3. Power on (ie, plug in) the switch
    4. On the serial console of the switch, watch as the device comes online and starts ONIE, it will by default go into ONIE Install OS and start the install process
    5. When complete, the switch will reboot and the NOS will start up
    6. SSH into the switch via the static IP address that MAAS assigned to it
    7. You’re done.

    So now you can use MAAS to not only manage your servers, but it can deploy your NOS on to your Whitebox switches. You can also use this procedure for upgrading the NOS using ONIE on your Whitebox switches.

    DISCLAIMER: This is not supported by Canonical. If you try this and it doesn’t work, you cannot contact Canonical for support. They do not support ONIE or  the NOS’s that are deployed on the switches that are not running Ubuntu. This article is just showing that you can use MAAS to do this if you so wish to be able to have this and not have to have a separate server to deploy ONIE images from and have a one stop shop for your infrastructure deployments. While this should not impact MAAS functionality or deploying other services through MAAS, you are making changes to the directory structure that is not supported by Canonical.

    I wrote this article because I have had many Network Engineers and Admins ask if they could use MAAS to deploy ONIE images, which yes, you can, but Canonical will not support it since it is not a Canonical supported deployment method.

    If you have any questions, or just want to say “Great article” leave a comment!

    Thanks!

  • Converting and Resizing KVM Hard Drives

    Hello everyone! I have been rebuilding my network and servers due to a major outage that I had with my ISP, which we are still meddling with. However, during the outage, I had to rebuild my servers. So I lost a lot of my build machines. Luckily, I still had copies running on my Mac running VMware Fusion. However, I don’t run on there so my machines just sit powered down, but if I need to bring them up for anything, I can.

    Well, I have a build machine that was running out there before I brought it into my KVM environment, but it was out of hard drive space and under utilized. This blog post is going to show how I moved the hard drive to my kvm server and then how I resized it and got it up and running.

    First thing I did was scp the vmdk file from my Mac to my KVM server:

    scp ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/Precise-build.vmwarevm/Virtual\ Disk.vmdk kvm2:/data/VMS/precise-build.vmdk

    After 40 minutes, the vmdk was copied. I then converted it to qcow2:

    qemu-img convert -O qcow2 precise-build.vmdk precise-build.qcow2

    After that finished, I was able to get info on it:

    qemu-img info precise-build.qcow2
image: precise-build.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 80G (85899345920 bytes)
disk size: 73G
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 1.1
    lazy refcounts: false
    refcount bits: 16
    corrupt: false

    I wanted to grow it to 200GB in size:

    qemu-img resize precise-build.qcow2 +120G

    I then got info on it to verify that it grew:

    qemu-image info precise-build.qcow2
image: precise-build.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 200G (214748364800 bytes)
disk size: 75G
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 1.1
    lazy refcounts: false
    refcount bits: 16
    corrupt: false

    I was now ready to build the VM, which I used Virtual-Manager to build. I told it to use an existing disk, and then set it up to use more memory and processors then previously so I could get better performance out of it. I then told it to boot from a CD image of Parted-Magic so I could grow the file system. Luckily, this server only had two partitions, the root partition at the swap partition. However, the swap was on an extended partition and at the end of the disk. So I had to delete it and the extended partition so I could used parted to extend the file system. I extended it to the end minus 6GB, and then created at extended partition at the end and added a swap partition back and then saved it and rebooted. The machine rebooted, ran fsck and started up normally.

    I was then able to delete the vmdk file from my server to reclaim the 73GB of space it was using:

    rm /data/VMS/precise-build.vmdk

    Thats it. I hope this guide helps you migrating VM’s and growing their file systems from VMware or even Virtual Box to KVM.

    Let me know in the comments.

    Thanks!

  • Install Ubuntu-Touch on BQ Aquaris M10 FHD

    Hello everyone! This blog entry is mostly for those of you that want to play with Ubuntu-Touch on the BQ Aquaris M10. You can actually purchase this tablet from BQ directly, but they have been sold out for a while, and I really wanted to have one.

    So, I bought the Android version, which isn’t too different in specs. However, it comes running Android Marshmallow. I played around with it for a day just because I haven’t played with Android in a while, and realized a lot has changed since Froyo, which was the last version I played with. After the nostalgia ran off, I decided to start trying to install Ubuntu on my device.

    First thing I did was go to Installing Ubuntu on Devices website. I found all the details of setting up my build machine to handle this.

    First thing I did was install the ppa for the Ubuntu SDK and for the phablet-tools package.

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa

    Then run sudo apt update to get my repo locations updated to use the ppa.

    It than install the ubuntu-device-flash which is what does all the heavy lifting and getting the image on the device. I also install adb, which is Android Debug Bridge application which is needed to manage the device and get access to the internal bits of the device, and fastboot which manages the device when its in the bootloader.

    sudo apt install ubuntu-device-flash phablet-tools

    After I had all the required tools on my laptop, I was ready to start. First thing I did was I had to put my M10 into Developer Mode. To do this, Click on System and go to About. Click the Build seven times. It will start a countdown on the screen saying “Press x time to enable Developer Mode.” Once done, go back and you will see Developer Options on the screen next to About. Select it and enabled OEM Unlock Bootloader, which it will bring up a prompt asking if you are sure since this does void the warranty, and it warms you every time you reboot the device saying it is in Orange State and can’t be protected and delays the boot by five seconds. Select Yes and then Enable USB Debug and turn off Protect ADB APK uploads. Probably isn’t necessary, but I did it anyways.

    Now, plug your USB cable into your laptop and your device, You will get a prompt on the tablet asking if you trust this device, click the check to always trust and say Yes. You can now use the adb command on the laptop to control the tablet.

    First, check that your laptop sees everything:

    adb devices

    You should get a return of the M10’s serial number and the word device next to it. We are now ready to go into the Bootloader. Do this from adb:

    adb reboot bootloader

    The device will reboot, give you the warning that I mentioned above about being Unlocked and unprotected, and then a blank screen with Fastboot Loader on the bottom. This is the fastboot bootloader. We now have to unlock the device:

    Make sure you can communicate with the device with fastboot:

    fastboot devices

    You should get a return of the M10’s serial Number and fastboot on the same line.

    You unlock the device by typing:

    fastboot oem unlock

    You will get a prompt on the device saying Press Volume + to Unlock and Volume – to cancel. Press Volume + on the device and you will get a confirmation saying device unlocked and on your Laptop it will say OKAY and exit. Now we can reboot the device again.

    fastboot reboot

    Now, it will start back up in Android, after about 10 minutes. You will have to reconfigure the device, basically I skip everything until I can get to the point where I can turn the device off. I turn it off and then I turn it back on, but when I press the power button, I also hold down the Volume + button at the same time. This will cause the M10 to go into Recovery Mode. Once The Screen comes up saying Powered by Android and you get the Unlocked Warning again, you can release the power button, but keep pressing the Volume + button until you get the Fastboot screen. Verify you can communicate to the device:

    fastboot devices

    You should get the serial number and fastboot on the same line. Now we can install Ubuntu….kind of.

    First, you need to download the recovery image from Ubuntu since the built in one on the device does not allow adb. Depending if you have the M10 FHD or just the M10, you need a specific image. Since I was using the FHD, I need the frieza image. You can download them by clicking the appropriate link from this page.

    Run the following to start the process:

    ubuntu-device-flash -v touch \
--channel=ubuntu-touch/stable/bq-aquaris-pd.en \
--device=frieza --bootstrap \
--recovery-image=recovery-frieza.img

    It will download and start copying all the required files for the device. Unfortunately, it will fail. The Android partition layout is way to small for Ubuntu recovery. So, after it fails, you can wipe the cache from the device. Next, you will use adb to manage the partitions.

    First, you need to download parted for Android. Luckly, I have a version here you can use. Download this and untar it and then move it to the /sbin directory on your device:

    tar xf parted-android-32.tgz
adb push parted /sbin
adb shell chmod +x /sbin/parted

    Now we are ready to do some “damage” to the device.

    NOTE: Word of caution here. We are going to delete and grow 3 file systems on the device. Please follow these directions closely and watch out for typos. You don’t want that otherwise we have to start all over again.

    First, run adb shell. You are now on the console of the device as root. If you run df -h you’ll notice that /cache is out of space, and it’s only a little over 400MB in size. No where near the size we need since we have a little over 870MB of files we need to upload before we can install Ubuntu. The other thing you’ll notice once we get into the partitioning, is that the /system directory is only 1.5GB in size, and Ubuntu needs at least 4GB for the installation. However, the userdata partition is 15GB in size, so we are going to steal from there to repurpose to these other partitions.

    First thing to do is run parted /dev/block/mmcblk0

    Type p to list the partitions, there are 24 partitions. We are only concerned with 21, 22, and 23. First change the unit to bytes, unit b and then run p again to get that readout:

    p
Model: MMC 016G70 (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0: 15758000128B
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 524288B 3670015B 3145728B proinfo
2 3670016B 8912895B 5242880B nvram
3 8912896B 19398655B 10485760B protect1
4 19398656B 29884415B 10485760B protect2
5 29884416B 80216063B 50331648B persist
6 80216064B 80478207B 262144B seccfg
7 80478208B 80871423B 393216B lk
8 80871424B 97648639B 16777216B boot
9 97648640B 114425855B 16777216B recovery
10 114425856B 120717311B 6291456B secro
11 120717312B 121241599B 524288B para
12 121241600B 129630207B 8388608B logo
13 129630208B 140115967B 10485760B expdb
14 140115968B 141164543B 1048576B frp
15 141164544B 146407423B 5242880B tee1
16 146407424B 151650303B 5242880B tee2
17 151650304B 153747455B 2097152B kb
18 153747456B 155844607B 2097152B dkb
19 155844608B 189399039B 33554432B metadata
20 189399040B 201326591B 11927552B custram
21 201326592B 1811939327B 1610612736B ext4 system
22 1811939328B 2256535551B 444596224B ext4 cache
23 2256535552B 15616966655B 13360431104B userdata
24 15616966656B 15757983231B 141016576B flashinfo

    Note the start and ends for the partitions 20 and 24. Partition 21 will start with 201326592 which is +1 from the end of the previous partition. We need to do this for each partition we are growing so that they are uniform and not overlapping and cause problems.

    First we need to delete the three partitions:

    rm 21
rm 22
rm 23

    Now we are ready to recreate them, only larger in size. Since we are using bytes, the numbers are quite large, and need to equal logical sizes. Basically, do the math of starting byte, add the amount of more space you want, make that the end byte, then the next partition starts on the +1 of the last end byte until you get to partition 23, which you will end -1 byte of where partition 24 starts. So partition 23 will end with 15616966655. If you use the values that I did, you will end up with a system partition of 4.3GB, cache of 1.07GB, and a userdata of 9.6GB:

    mkpart primary 201326592 4496294399
mkpart primary 4496294400 5570036224
mkpart primary 5570036736 15616966655
name 21 system
name 22 cache
name 23 userdata
quit

    We now need to format the volumes:

    mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk0p21
mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk0p22
mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk0p23

    Now, on the device, use the Volume – to select reboot into bootloader and press the Power button to select it. The device will reboot and you will be brought back to the screen where it just says FASTBOOT on the bottom.

    Now we can start the flash again, and this time it will work:

    ubuntu-device-flash -v touch \
--channel=ubuntu-touch/stable/bq-aquaris-pd.en \
--device=frieza --bootloader \
--recovery-image=~/frieza-recovery.img

    Once the installation is done, you will have Ubuntu running on your device. It takes about 10 minutes to install, but after the reboot, the initial splash screen will have the BQ logo but say powered by Ubuntu and you won’t have the annoying Unlocked Device unprotected alert any more.

    Let me know in the comments if you have any issues! Happy Hacking!