In the last article, we saw how Cockpit can manage storage devices. This article will focus on the networking functionalities within the UI. We’ll see how to manage the interfaces attached to the system in Cockpit. We’ll also look at the firewall and demonstrate how to assign a zone to an interface, and allow/deny services and ports.

To access these controls, verify the cockpit-networkmanager and cockpit-firewalld packages are installed.

To start, log into the Cockpit UI and select the Networking menu option. As is consistent with the UI design we see performance graphs at the top and a summary of the logs at the bottom of the page. Between them are the sections to manage the firewall and interface(s).

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Firewall

Cockpit’s firewall configuration page works with FirewallD and allows admins to quickly configure these settings. The page has options for assigning zones to specific interfaces, as well as a list of services configured to those zones.

Adding a zone

Let’s start by configuring a zone to an available interface. First, click the Add Zone button. From here you can select a pre-configured or custom zone. Selecting one of the zones will display a brief description of that zone, as well as the services, or ports, allowed, or opened, in that zone. Select the interface you want to assign the zone to. Also, there’s the option to configure the rules to apply to the Entire Subset, or you can specify a Range of IP addresses. In the example below, we add the Internal zone to an available network card. The IP range can also be configured so the rule is only applied to the specified addresses.

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Adding and removing services/ports

To allow network access to services, or open ports, click the Add Services button. From here you can search (or filter) for a service, or manually enter the port(s) you would like to open. Selecting the Custom Ports option provides options to enter the port number or alias into the TCP and/or UDP fields. You can also provide an optional name to label the rule. In the example below, the Cockpit service/socket is added to the Internal zone. Once completed, click the Add Services, or Add Ports, button. Likewise, to remove the service click the red trashcan to the right, select the zone(s), and click Remove service.

For more information about using Cockpit to configure your system’s firewall, visit the Cockpit project’s Github page.

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Interfaces

The interfaces section displays both physical and virtual/logical NICs assigned to the system. From the main screen we see the name of the interface, the IP address, and activity stats of the NIC. Selecting an interface will display IP related information and options to manually configure them. You can also choose to have the network card inactive after a reboot by toggling the Connect automatically option. To enable, or disable, the network interface, click the toggle switch in the top right corner of the section.

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Bonding

Bonding network interfaces can help increase bandwidth availability. It can also serve as a redundancy plan in the event one of the NIC’s fail.

To start, click the Add Bond button located in the header of the Interfaces section. In the Bond Settings overlay, enter a name and select the interfaces you wish to bond in the list below. Next, select the MAC Address you would like to assign to the bond. Now select the Mode, or purpose, of the bond: Round Robin, Active Backup, Broadcast, &c. (the demo below shows a complete list of modes.)

Continue the configuration by selecting the Primary NIC, and a Link Monitoring option. You can also tweak the Monitoring Interval, and Link Up Delay and Link Down Delay options. To finish the configuration, click the Apply button. We’re taken back to the main screen, and the new bonded interface we just created is added to the list of interfaces.

From here we can configure the bond like any other interface. We can even delve deeper into the interface’s settings for the bond. As seen in the example below, selecting one of the interfaces in the bond’s settings page provides details pertaining to the interface link. There’s also an added option for changing the bond settings. To delete the bond, click the Delete button.

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Teaming

Teaming, like bonding, is another method used for link aggregation. For a comparison between bonding and teaming, refer to this chart. You can also find more information about teaming on the Red Hat documentation site.

As with creating a bond, click the Add Team button. The settings are similar in the sense you can give it a name, select the interfaces, link delay, and the mode or Runner as it’s referred to here. The options are similar to the ones available for bonding. By default the Link Watch option is set to Ethtool, but also has options for ARP Ping, and NSNA Ping.

Click the Apply button to complete the setup. It will also return you to the main networking screen. For further configuration, such as IP assignment and changing the runner, click the newly made team interface. As with bonding, you can click one of the interfaces in the link aggregation. Depending on the runner, you may have additional options for the Team Port. Click the Delete button from the screen to remove the team.

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Bridging

From the article, Build a network bridge with Fedora:

“A bridge is a network connection that combines multiple network adapters.”

One excellent example for a bridge is combining the physical NIC with a virtual interface, like the one created and used for KVM virtualization. Leif Madsen’s blog has an excellent article on how to achieve this in the CLI. This can also be accomplished in Cockpit with just a few clicks. The example below will accomplish the first part of Leif’s blog using the web UI. We’ll bridge the enp9s0 interface with the virbr0 virtual interface.

Click the Add Bridge button to launch the settings box. Provide a name and select the interfaces you would like to bridge. To enable Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), click the box to the right of the label. Click the Apply button to finalize the configuration.

As is consistent with teaming and bonding, selecting the bridge from the main screen will display the details of the interface. As seen in the example below, the physical device takes control and the virtual interface will adopt that device’s IP address.

Select the individual interface in the bridge’s detail screen for more options. And once again, click the Delete button to remove the bridge.

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Adding VLANs

Cockpit allows admins to create VLANs, or virtual networks, using any of the interfaces on the system. Click the Add VLAN button and select an interface. Furthermore, in the Parent drop-down list, assign the VLAN ID, and if you like, give it a new name. By default the name will be the same as the parent followed by a dot and the ID. For example, interface enp11s0 with VLAN ID 9 will result in enp11s0.9). Click Apply to save the settings and to return to the networking main screen. Click the VLAN interface for further configuration. As always, click the Delete button to remove the VLAN.

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As we can see, Cockpit can help admins with common network configurations when managing the system’s connectivity. In the next article, we’ll explore how Cockpit handles user management and peek into the add-on 389 Directory Servers.

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 31 Beta, the next step towards our planned Fedora 31 release at the end of October.

Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site:

• Get Fedora 31 Beta Workstation
• Get Fedora 31 Beta Server

Or, check out one of our popular variants, including KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other desktop environments, as well as images for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3:

• Get Fedora 31 Beta Spins
• Get Fedora 31 Beta Labs
• Get Fedora 31 Beta ARM

Beta Release Highlights

GNOME 3.34 (almost)

The newest release of the GNOME desktop environment is full of performance enhancements and improvements. The beta ships with a prerelease, and the full 3.34 release will be available as an update. For a full list of GNOME 3.34 highlights, see the release notes.

Fedora IoT Edition

Fedora Editions address specific use-cases the Fedora Council has identified as significant in growing our userbase and community. We have Workstation, Server, and CoreOS — and now we’re adding Fedora IoT. This will be available from the main “Get Fedora” site when the final release of F31 is ready, but for now, get it from iot.fedoraproject.org.

Read more about Fedora IoT in our Getting Started docs.

Fedora CoreOS

Fedora CoreOS remains in a preview state, with a planned generally-available release planned for early next year. CoreOS is a rolling release which rebases periodically to a new underlying Fedora OS version. Right now, that version is Fedora 30, but soon there will be a “next” stream which will track Fedora 31 until that’s ready to become the “stable” stream.

Other updates

Fedora 31 Beta includes updated versions of many popular packages like Node.js, the Go language, Python, and Perl. We also have the customary updates to underlying infrastructure software, like the GNU C Library and the RPM package manager. For a full list, see the Change set on the Fedora Wiki.

Farewell to bootable i686

We’re no longer producing full media or repositories for 32-bit Intel-architecture systems. We recognize that this means newer Fedora releases will no longer work on some older hardware, but the fact is there just hasn’t been enough contributor interest in maintaining i686, and we can provide greater benefit for the majority of our users by focusing on modern architectures. (The majority of Fedora systems have been 64-bit x86_64 since 2013, and at this point that’s the vast majority.)

Please note that we’re still making userspace packages for compatibility when running 32-bit software on a 64-bit systems — we don’t see the need for that going away anytime soon.

Testing needed

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in #fedora-qa on Freenode. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F31 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the final release. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Every bug you find and report doesn’t just help you, it improves the experience of millions of Fedora users worldwide! Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can. Your feedback improves not only Fedora, but Linux and free software as a whole.

More information

For more detailed information about what’s new on Fedora 31 Beta release, you can consult the Fedora 31 Change set. It contains more technical information about the new packages and improvements shipped with this release.

There is a notion that a lot of people working in the IT industry often copy and paste from internet howtos. We all do it, and the copy-and-paste itself is not a problem. The problem is when we run things without understanding them.

Some years ago, a friend who used to work on my team needed to copy virtual machine templates from site A to site B. They could not understand why the file they copied was 10GB on site A but but it became 100GB on-site B.

The friend believed that rsync is a magic tool that should just “sync” the file as it is. However, what most of us forget is to understand what rsync really is, and how is it used, and the most important in my opinion is, where it come from. This article provides some further information about rsync, and an explanation of what happened in that story.

About rsync

rsync is a tool was created by Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras who were motivated by the following problem:

Imagine you have two files, file_A and file_B. You wish to update file_B to be the same as file_A. The obvious method is to copy file_A onto file_B.

Now imagine that the two files are on two different servers connected by a slow communications link, for example, a dial-up IP link. If file_A is large, copying it onto file_B will be slow, and sometimes not even possible. To make it more efficient, you could compress file_A before sending it, but that would usually only gain a factor of 2 to 4.

Now assume that file_A and file_B are quite similar, and to speed things up, you take advantage of this similarity. A common method is to send just the differences between file_A and file_B down the link and then use such list of differences to reconstruct the file on the remote end.

The problem is that the normal methods for creating a set of differences between two files rely on being able to read both files. Thus they require that both files are available beforehand at one end of the link. If they are not both available on the same machine, these algorithms cannot be used. (Once you had copied the file over, you don’t need the differences). This is the problem that rsync addresses.

The rsync algorithm efficiently computes which parts of a source file match parts of an existing destination file. Matching parts then do not need to be sent across the link; all that is needed is a reference to the part of the destination file. Only parts of the source file which are not matching need to be sent over.

The receiver can then construct a copy of the source file using the references to parts of the existing destination file and the original material.

Additionally, the data sent to the receiver can be compressed using any of a range of common compression algorithms for further speed improvements.

The rsync algorithm addresses this problem in a lovely way as we all might know.

After this introduction on rsync, Back to the story!

Problem 1: Thin provisioning

There were two things that would help the friend understand what was going on.

The problem with the file getting significantly bigger on the other size was caused by Thin Provisioning (TP) being enabled on the source system — a method of optimizing the efficiency of available space in Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storages (NAS).

The source file was only 10GB because of TP being enabled, and when transferred over using rsync without any additional configuration, the target destination was receiving the full 100GB of size. rsync could not do the magic automatically, it had to be configured.

The Flag that does this work is -S or –sparse and it tells rsync to handle sparse files efficiently. And it will do what it says! It will only send the sparse data so source and destination will have a 10GB file.

Problem 2: Updating files

The second problem appeared when sending over an updated file. The destination was now receiving just the 10GB, but the whole file (containing the virtual disk) was always transferred. Even when a single configuration file was changed on that virtual disk. In other words, only a small portion of the file changed.

The command used for this transfer was:

rsync -avS vmdk_file syncuser@host1:/destination

Again, understanding how rsync works would help with this problem as well.

The above is the biggest misconception about rsync. Many of us think rsync will simply send the delta updates of the files, and that it will automatically update only what needs to be updated. But this is not the default behaviour of rsync.

As the man page says, the default behaviour of rsync is to create a new copy of the file in the destination and to move it into the right place when the transfer is completed.

To change this default behaviour of rsync, you have to set the following flags and then rsync will send only the deltas:

--inplace               update destination files in-place
--partial               keep partially transferred files
--append                append data onto shorter files
--progress              show progress during transfer

So the full command that would do exactly what the friend wanted is:

rsync -av --partial --inplace --append --progress vmdk_file syncuser@host1:/destination

Note that the sparse flag -S had to be removed, for two reasons. The first is that you can not use –sparse and –inplace together when sending a file over the wire. And second, when you once sent a file over with –sparse, you can’t updated with –inplace anymore. Note that versions of rsync older than 3.1.3 will reject the combination of –sparse and –inplace.

So even when the friend ended up copying 100GB over the wire, that only had to happen once. All the following updates were only copying the difference, making the copy to be extremely efficient.

Today the GNOME project announced the release of GNOME 3.34. This latest release of GNOME will be the default desktop environment in Fedora 31 Workstation. The Beta release of Fedora 31 is currently expected in the next week or two, with the Final release scheduled for late October.

GNOME 3.34 includes a number of new features and improvements. Congratulations and thank you to the whole GNOME community for the work that went into this release! Read on for more details.

Notable features

The desktop itself has been refreshed with a pleasing new background. You can also compare your background images to see what they’ll look like on the desktop.

There’s a new custom application folder feature in the GNOME Shell Overview. It lets you combine applications in a group to make it easier to find the apps you use.

You already know that Boxes lets you easily download an OS and create virtual machines for testing, development, or even daily use. Now you can find sources for your virtual machines more easily, as well as boot from CD or DVD (ISO) images more easily. There is also an Express Install feature available that now supports Windows versions.

Now that you can save states when using GNOME Games, gaming is more fun. You can snapshot your progress without getting in the way of the fun. You can even move snapshots to other devices running GNOME.

More details

These are not the only features of the new and improved GNOME 3.34. For an overview, visit the official release announcement. For even more details, check out the GNOME 3.34 release notes.

The Fedora 31 Workstation Beta release is right around the corner. Fedora 31 will feature GNOME 3.34 and you’ll be able to experience it in the Beta release.

TFTP, or Trivial File Transfer Protocol, allows users to transfer files between systems using the UDP protocol. By default, it uses UDP port 69. The TFTP protocol is extensively used to support remote booting of diskless devices. So, setting up a TFTP server on your own local network can be an interesting way to do Fedora installations, or other diskless operations.

TFTP can only read and write files to or from a remote system. It doesn’t have the capability to list files or make any changes on the remote server. There are also no provisions for user authentication. Because of security implications and the lack of advanced features, TFTP is generally only used on a local area network (LAN).

TFTP server installation

The first thing you will need to do is install the TFTP client and server packages:

dnf install tftp-server tftp -y

This creates a tftp service and socket file for systemd under /usr/lib/systemd/system.

/usr/lib/systemd/system/tftp.service
/usr/lib/systemd/system/tftp.socket

Next, copy and rename these files to /etc/systemd/system:

cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/tftp.service /etc/systemd/system/tftp-server.service

cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/tftp.socket /etc/systemd/system/tftp-server.socket

Making local changes

You need to edit these files from the new location after you’ve copied and renamed them, to add some additional parameters. Here is what the tftp-server.service file initially looks like:

[Unit]
Description=Tftp Server
Requires=tftp.socket
Documentation=man:in.tftpd

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/in.tftpd -s /var/lib/tftpboot
StandardInput=socket

[Install]
Also=tftp.socket

Make the following changes to the [Unit] section:

Requires=tftp-server.socket

Make the following changes to the ExecStart line:

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/in.tftpd -c -p -s /var/lib/tftpboot

Here are what the options mean:

• The -c option allows new files to be created.
• The -p option is used to have no additional permissions checks performed above the normal system-provided access controls.
• The -s option is recommended for security as well as compatibility with some boot ROMs which cannot be easily made to include a directory name in its request.

The default upload/download location for transferring the files is /var/lib/tftpboot.

Next, make the following changes to the [Install] section:

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Also=tftp-server.socket

Don’t forget to save your changes!

Here is the completed /etc/systemd/system/tftp-server.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Tftp Server
Requires=tftp-server.socket
Documentation=man:in.tftpd

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/in.tftpd -c -p -s /var/lib/tftpboot
StandardInput=socket

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Also=tftp-server.socket

Starting the TFTP server

Reload the systemd daemon:

systemctl daemon-reload

Now start and enable the server:

systemctl enable --now tftp-server

To change the permissions of the TFTP server to allow upload and download functionality, use this command. Note TFTP is an inherently insecure protocol, so this may not be advised on a network you share with other people.

chmod 777 /var/lib/tftpboot

Configure your firewall to allow TFTP traffic:

firewall-cmd --add-service=tftp --perm
firewall-cmd --reload

Client Configuration

Install the TFTP client:

yum install tftp -y

Run the tftp command to connect to the TFTP server. Here is an example that enables the verbose option:

[client@thinclient:~ ]$ tftp 192.168.1.164
tftp> verbose
Verbose mode on.
tftp> get server.logs
getting from 192.168.1.164:server.logs to server.logs [netascii]
Received 7 bytes in 0.0 seconds [inf bits/sec]
tftp> quit
[client@thinclient:~ ]$ 

Remember, TFTP does not have the ability to list file names. So you’ll need to know the file name before running the get command to download any files.

Photo by Laika Notebooks on Unsplash.

When you install the Fedora Workstation, you’ll find the world-renowned Firefox browser included. The Mozilla Foundation underwrites work on Firefox, as well as other projects that promote an open, safe, and privacy respecting Internet. Firefox already features a fast browsing engine and numerous privacy features.

A community of developers continues to improve and enhance Firefox. The latest version, Firefox 69, was released recently and you can get it for your stable Fedora system (30 and later). Read on for more details.

New features in Firefox 69

The newest version of Firefox includes Enhanced Tracking Protection (or ETP). When you use Firefox 69 with a new (or reset) settings profile, the browser makes it harder for sites to track your information or misuse your computer resources.

For instance, less scrupulous websites use scripts that cause your system to do lots of intense calculations to produce cryptocurrency results, called cryptomining. Cryptomining happens without your knowledge or permission and is therefore a misuse of your system. The new standard setting in Firefox 69 prevents sites from this kind of abuse.

Firefox 69 has additional settings to prevent sites from identifying or fingerprinting your browser for later use. These improvements give you additional protection from having your activities tracked online.

Another common annoyance is videos that start in your browser without warning. Video playback also uses extra CPU power and you may not want this happening on your laptop without permission. Firefox already stops this from happening using the Block Autoplay feature. But Firefox 69 also lets you stop videos from playing even if they start without sound. This feature prevents unwanted sudden noise. It also solves more of the real problem — having your computer’s power used without permission.

There are numerous other new features in the new release. Read more about them in the Firefox release notes.

How to get the update

Firefox 69 is available in the stable Fedora 30 and pre-release Fedora 31 repositories, as well as Rawhide. The update is provided by Fedora’s maintainers of the Firefox package. The maintainers also ensured an update to Mozilla’s Network Security Services (the nss package). We appreciate the hard work of the Mozilla project and Firefox community in providing this new release.

If you’re using Fedora 30 or later, use the Software tool on Fedora Workstation, or run the following command on any Fedora system:

$ sudo dnf --refresh upgrade firefox

If you’re on Fedora 29, help test the update for that release so it can become stable and easily available for all users.

Firefox may prompt you to upgrade your profile to use the new settings. To take advantage of new features, you should do this.