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Checkpoint: Gaia Web User Interface Fails to Load

This article details how to solve one issue that may be stopping the Gaia web user interface from loading.

The login screen appears but after submitting your username and password, you get stuck on the spinning “flower of death”!

This can be down to a few different things but #1 is disk space – if the disk is full then temp files cannot be created and the webui will not load.

A simple “df -h” will tell you what’s going on:

[Expert@fw2:0]# df -h
Filesystem                        Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_current   11G  11G  0G  100% /
/dev/sda1                         145M   19M  118M  14% /boot
tmpfs                             980M     0  980M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_log       11G  986M  9.2G  10% /var/log
[Expert@fw2:0]#

Highlighted in red above we see the offender. Use “du -h” to find the directory which is taking up all the space – my issue was due to backups not being FTP’d off the machine from the “/var/CPbackup/backups/” folder. Once they were removed to free up disk space, everything was back to normal.

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VMWare: How to Change the ESXi System Time and HW Clock on the CLI

This article details how to change the ESXi system time and HW clock on your ESXi hypervisor machine via the CLI.

Ideally we want to use NTP to set the system time but if your clock is too far out from the actual time then this will fail and you may see something like this in the syslog file:
ntpd[263140]: synchronized to <46.249.47.127>, stratum 1
ntpd[263140]: time correction of <54423> seconds exceeds sanity limit (1000); set clock manually to the correct UTC time.
[info 'ha-eventmgr'] Event 91 : NTP daemon stopped. Time correction 1206 > 1000 seconds. Manually set the time and restart ntpd.
The situation was that my VMs were synchronising their time to the ESXi host’s on every reboot, meaning that some important secure system services (in Windows 2008 in particular) were not starting. There isn’t the facility to do this on the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface – the yellow and black screen) so here’s the gen on how to achieve this using the command line.

My first endeavours were using the “date” command, as I’m used to doing in Linux, unfortunately these were met with the error:

~ # date 100410112014
date: can't set date: Function not implemented
Sat Oct  4 10:11:00 UTC 2014

OK, it’s being pernickety so lets use the “-s” flag to SET the time:

~ # date -s 041010112014
date: Setting date not supported; use <esxcli system time set>

Now we’re getting somewhere. The command takes the following parameters:

Usage: esxcli system time set [cmd options]
Description:
set                   Set the system clock time. Any missing parameters will default to the current time
Cmd options:
-d|--day=<long>       Day
-H|--hour=<long>      Hour
-m|--min=<long>       Minute
-M|--month=<long>     Month
-s|--sec=<long>       Second
-y|--year=<long>      Year

So, to set the system time to 10th April 2014, 10:18 (am):
~ # esxcli system time set -d 10 -H 10 -m 18 -M 04 -y 2014

Also, make sure that we also set the hardware clock time as the system time will revert to this on a reboot:

~ # esxcli hardware clock set -d 10 -H 10 -m 18 -M 04 -y 2014     <- sets the hardware clock to 10th April 2014, 10:18 (am)

To check the hardware and system time we can use the following commands:

esxcli hardware clock get
esxcli system time get

Job done! Now move on to setting the time automatically using NTP.

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Checkpoint: Change the Default Shell for “admin” in Gaia and SecurePlatform

This article details how to change the default shell for both Gaia and SecurePlatform (SPlat) systems.

SecurePlatform

In SecurePlatform, all we need to do is log in to expert mode and use the change shell command – chsh:

myfirewall > expert
Enter expert password:
myfirewall # chsh -s /bin/bash admin<

Shell changed.

This permanently changes the shell and will survive a reboot.

Gaia

The above will also work in Gaia but will not survive a reboot – the shell will default back to clish. Doing a “cat” on /etc/shells in expert mode will show you what is available:

myfirewall> expert
Enter expert password:

Warning! All configuration should be done through clish
You are in expert mode now.

[Expert@myfirewall:0]# cat /etc/shells
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/sbin/nologin
/usr/bin/scponly
/bin/tcsh
/bin/csh
/etc/cli.sh
[Expert@myfirewall:0]#

To effect the change we use the “set user” command, in this example we will set it to the bash shell:

myfirewall> set user admin <tab to show options:>
force-password-change - Force the user to change their password
gid - User's group ID
homedir - User's home directory
info - DEPRECATED synonym for 'realname'
lock-out - Unlock a locked out user
newpass - User's new password
password - User's password
password-hash - User's password hash
realname - User's real name or other informative label
shell - User's login shell
uid - User's numeric user ID
myfirewall> set user admin shell /bin/bash
myfirewall> save config
myfirewall>

 

** Don’t forget the “save config” at the end!! **

 

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