Inappropriate Ioctl for Device

After disconnecting a serial USB cable from my Ubuntu Server 20.04, I would often receive “Inappropriate ioctl for device” error when trying to redirect output to serial port.

stty -F /dev/ttyACM0 -echo -onlcr
 stty: /dev/ttyACM0: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Quick search yielded multiple results but nothing that actually worked for me. Most promising were restarting udev and manual driver unbind but they didn’t really solve anything end-to-end. The only solution was to reboot.

However, after a bit of playing with unloading drivers, I did find solution that worked. Unload driver, manually delete device, and finally load driver again.

modprobe -r cdc_acm
rm -f /dev/ttyACM0
modprobe cdc_acm

I am not sure why unloading driver didn’t remove device link itself, but regardless, I could finally get it to work without waiting for reboot.

Watching Sector Count - Take 2

As I shucked my 12 TB drive and got it working, I noticed my reporting script was reporting it as 11997 GB. What the heck. Even with power-of-two shenanigans, I would expect capacity to follow LBA Count for Disk Drives Standard (LBA1-03) I already wrote about.

When I checked disk, I saw the following:

Based on my calculator, I expected to see size of 12,002,339,414,016 bytes. Was WDC placing non-standard capacity drives in their enclosures? Or did I miss something? Well, I missed something. :)

There is a later version of sector count standard coming from SFF Committee as SFF-8447. And this standard makes a difference between low capacity (80 - 8,000 GB) and high capacity (>8,000 GB) disk drives.

For lower capacity drives, formulas are ones we already know (first one is for 512-byte, second one for 4K sector):

97,696,368 + (1,953,504 * (CapacityInGB - 50)) -or- 12,212,046 + (244,188 * (CapacityInGB - 50))

Drives larger than 8 TB have the following formulas (512-byte, 4K sector sizes):

ceiling(CapacityInBytes / 512, 221) -or- ceiling(CapacityInBytes / 4096, 218)

Armed with both formulas, we can update the sector count calculator - find it below.

Killing a Connection on Ubuntu Server 20.04

If you really want to kill a connection on a newer kernel Ubuntu, there is a ss command. For example, to kill connection toward 192.168.1.1 with dynamic remote port 40000 you can use the following:

ss -K dst 192.168.1.1 dport = 40000

Nice, quick, and it definitelly beats messing with routes and waiting for a timeout. This is assuming your kernel was compiled with CONFIG_INET_DIAG_DESTROY (true on Ubuntu).

To get a quick list of established connections for given port, one can use netstat with a quick’n’dirty grep:

$ netstat -nap | grep ESTABLISHED | grep ^^<port>^^

Cleaning Disk

Some time ago I explained my procedure for initializing disks I plan to use in ZFS pool. And the first step was to fill them with random data from /dev/urandom.

However, FreeBSD /dev/urandom is not really the speed monster. If you need something faster but still really secure, you can go with a random AES stream.

openssl enc -aes-128-ctr -pass pass:"$(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=128 count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump)" \
    -pbkdf2 -nosalt </dev/zero | dd of=/dev/diskid/^^DISK-ID-123^^ bs=1M

Since the key is derived from random data, in theory it should be equally secure but (depending on CPU), multiple times faster than urandom.

Basic XigmaNAS Stats for InfluxDB

My home monitoring included pretty much anything I wanted to see with one exception - my backup NAS. You see, I use embedded XigmaNAS for my backup server and getting telegraf client onto it is problematic at best. However, who needs Telegraf client anyhow?

Collecting stats themselves is easy enough. Basic CPU stats you get from Telegraf client usually can be easily read via command line tools. As long as you keep the same tags and fields as what Telegraf usually sends you can nicely mingle our manually collected stats with what proper client sends.

And how do we send it? Telegram protocol is essentially just a set of lines pushed using HTTP POST. Yes, if you have a bit more secure system, it’s probably HTTPS and it might even be authenticated. But it’s still POST in essence.

And therein lies XigmaNAS’ problem. There is no curl or wget tooling available. And thus sending HTTP POST on embedded XigmaNAS is not possible. Or is it?

Well, here is the beauty of HTTP - it’s just a freaking text over TCP connection. And ancient (but still beloved) nc tool is good at exactly that - sending stuff over network. As long as you can “echo” stuff, you can redirect it to nc and pretend you have a proper HTTP client. Just don’t forget to set headers.

To cut the story short - here is my script using nc to push statistics from XigmaNAS to my Grafana setup. It’ll send basic CPU, memory, temperature, disk, and ZFS stats. Enjoy.