Running DNS Probe¶

It is recommended to run DNS Probe as a systemd service. Alternatively, it is possible to start it from the command line using shell scripts that are part of the DNS Probe distribution. These shell scripts can also be used as a basis for integration with other init systems.

Running as systemd service¶

Installation packages include a systemd unit file dns-probe-<BACKEND>@.service, where <BACKEND> is either af or dpdk depending on the backend that the package installs.

The systemd service can be run like this:

sudo systemctl start dns-probe-<BACKEND>@<instance-id>.service

Other systemctl subcommands can be used to stop, enable or restart the service.

The instance-id service parameter specifies what configuration to load from YAML configuration file at /etc/dns-probe-<BACKEND>/dns-probe.yml. With default configuration DNS Probe doesn’t have any network interface to process traffic from configured. User should therefore modify the YAML configuration file before running the systemd service for the first time. For example like this:

inst1:
    interface-list:
        - 'eth0'
        - 'eth1'
    log-file: '/var/log/dns-probe-af@inst1.log'

inst2:
    interface-list:
        - 'eth2'
    log-file: '/var/log/dns-probe-af@inst2.log'

This configuration will have inst1 instance of DNS Probe process traffic from eth0 and eth1 interfaces and write its logs to /var/log/dns-probe-af@inst1.log file. inst2 instance of DNS Probe will process traffic from eth2 and write its log to /var/log/dns-probe-af@inst2.log file. After this modification is done the systemd service can be started as shown above with either inst1 or inst2 as instance-id service parameter. If desired both instances can be run at the same time via two separate systemd services.

For more information about configuring the YAML file see Configuration and Default YAML file.

Running from command line¶

For each backend, one binary program and one shell script is installed. Their names are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Installed binaries and wrapper scripts¶
Backend	Binary program	Wrapper script
AF_PACKET	`dns-probe-af`	`dp-af`
DPDK	`dns-probe-dpdk`	`dp-dpdk`

The binary programs accept several command-line options described in their manual pages.

The wrapper shell scripts accept the same options as the corresponding backend binary, and start the binary with these options. If the running binary program receives the restart operation through remote management API, it exits with return code 1. The wrapper script then starts the same binary again.

For other codes returned by the binary, the wrapper script just exits and returns the same code.

DPDK backend¶

For running DNS Probe with the DPDK backend, a portion of memory with huge pages has to be allocated. This is done in two steps, both requiring root privileges:

mount the huge pages file system
allocate huge pages

On some systems, the huge pages FS is mounted automatically, so step #1 can be omitted. It can be checked by running the command

mount | grep -E ^hugetlbfs

If the command prints something similar to

hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)

then the huge pages FS is already mounted.

The following script automatically mounts huge pages file system (if necessary) and allocates 4 GB of memory for huge pages.

# Mounts huge page file system
if ! (mount | grep -q -E ^hugetlbfs); then # Check if the hugepages is mounted
    mkdir -p /mnt/huge
    mount -t hugetlbfs nodev /mnt/huge # Mount the hugepages
fi

function set_pages() {
    # Requires one argument specifying number of gigabytes allocated for hugepages.
    # If the first parameter is zero then all hugepages are deallocated.

    if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
        echo "Required one argument"
    fi

    pagesize=$(mount | sed -Ene "/^hugetlbfs/s/.*pagesize=(.+[MG]).*/\1/p")
    if [ "$pagesize" == "2M" ]; then
        pages=$((500 * $1))
    elif [ "$pagesize" == "1G" ]; then
        pages=$1
    else
        echo "Unsupported page size of huge page filesystem." > 2
        exit 1
    fi

    sysctl vm.nr_hugepages=$pages # Allocate huge pages
}

set_pages 4 # Allocates 4 GB as huge pages

Network cards used with the DPDK backend have to be bound to DPDK-compatible drivers. The easier way of doing this is to run dns-probe-dpdk or dp-dpdk with the -i parameter(s) specifying the NIC name such as eth0. DNS probe will then attempt to automatically bind these interfaces to the uio_pci_generic driver and, when it exits, it will bind the interfaces back to their original driver. For this to work, the uio_pci_generic module needs to be loaded manually like this:

sudo modprobe uio_pci_generic

The other way is to bind the NICs to DPDK-compatible drivers manually before running DNS Probe. In this case, the NICs have to be identified by their PCI IDs in -i options. Details about binding network interfaces manually are described in the DPDK documentation.