SystemdServiceControl

Overview

When I come to help students we often find that they can’t start a program because a port is busy. Frequently, it is busy because a systemd service is running on it. The system-service-control script is meant to be a first step toward helping you find out which of your programs are running on systemd. That way you will know which program to shut down so you can open up a port.

Create a single script called system-service-control. Your code should do two things:

• Show any ports in the range 30025-30235 that are currently being used.
• Show if any of the programs you typically run under systemd are currently active.
  • Just call sudo systemctl show -p ActiveState -p SubState -p Environment awsprov.service or similar.

The Specs

Remember, our goal is to track the status of the programs you run on systemd.

Sample menu allowing you to check a range of ports and the status of five specific programs:

===============================
--- Menu ---
===============================
  a) Check Ports 30025-30225
  b) SystemCheck
  c) SystemCheckRefactor
  d) AWS Provision
  e) Midterm
  f) EC2-Copy-File
  x) Exit

For instance, when I check for open ports (option a), I get this feedback:

Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-11-29 11:14 PST
Nmap scan report for elf-path.lan (192.168.86.26)
Host is up (0.0000080s latency).
Not shown: 209 closed ports
PORT      STATE SERVICE
30031/tcp open  unknown
30200/tcp open  unknown

This tells me that of 211 ports I’m checking two are being used:

• 30031
• 30200

The rest are not being used.

The next step is to see the status of one of our five programs. All we want to know is whether or not a particular program is currently active, whether or not it is currently running as a systemd service. Here is what happens when I pick one of the five programs from the menu (one of option b-f) so I can check the status of a service. In this case I find that the program I selected from the menu is not running as a systemd service:

===============================
--- SystemCheck ---
===============================
Environment=NODE_ENV=production ELF_SYSTEM_CHECK_PORT=30034 SETUP_LINUXBOX=/home
ActiveState=inactive
SubState=dead

And here is what it looks like if it is running:

===============================
--- SystemCheck ---
===============================
Environment=NODE_ENV=production ELF_SYSTEM_CHECK_PORT=30034 SETUP_LINUXBOX=/home
ActiveState=active
SubState=running

The overall goal is simply to try to give us all a simple way of detecting which services are running on systemd at this point in time. It is not a perfect tool, but it is much better than nothing.

The Port Check List

• .bashrc
• my.service (The service file)
• setup-environment-service
• client package.json
• server/bin/www

The Official Port List

I feel like this list is not yet complete, but this is a good start.

export PORT=30025
export SERVER_PORT=30026
export ELF_SERVER_PORT=30026
export REST_BASICS_PORT=30027
export ELF_REST_BASICS_PORT=30027
export ELF_SCREF_PORT=30030
export ELF_AWS_PROV_PORT=30032
export ELF_EC2_COPY_PORT=30033
export ELF_SYSTEM_CHECK_PORT=30034
export MIDTERM_PORT=30035
export ELF_MIDTERM_PORT=30035

Though we all should agree on these values, when submitting assignments, it would be best if you included your version of this list of export statements from your ~/.bashrc. Thank you.

NOTE: I’ve included some repitition in the list to avoid confusion due to late changes. My intention is to pair the list after the quarter is over.

Service files:

Name	Service File
SystemCheck	systemcheck.service
SystemCheckRefractor	scref.service
aws-provision	awsprov.service
EC2 Copy File	ec2-copy-file
Midterm	midterm.service

Remember, these values play a role in at least three places:

• ~/.bashrc
• server/bin/www
• client/package.json
• Also appears in your service file.

All three files should be referencing the same port for any particular project. So the .bashrc, the www/bin and client/package.json for any one project should all refer to the same port.

The Script

In your scripts directory create a file system-service-control.

#!/bin/bash

function banner {
	echo ' '
	echo ===============================
	echo --- "$1" ---
	echo ===============================
}

function show {
	banner "$1"
	sudo systemctl show -p ActiveState -p SubState -p Environment $2
}

function showSystemCheck() {
	show 'SystemCheck' systemcheck.service
}


function checkPorts() {
    sudo nmap -p 30025-30035 192.168.2.13
}

message 'System Service Control'
T
echo 'Learn about Systemd and other running services.'

while true; do
    message "Menu"    
    echo -e "$LIGHT_GREEN  a) Check Ports 30025-30040"
    echo -e "$LIGHT_GREEN  b) Only Build"
    echo -e "$LIGHT_GREEN  c) Only Delete"
    echo -e "$LIGHT_RED  x) Exit"
    echo -e "\n$NC"
    read -p "Please make a selection: " userInput
    case $userInput in
        [Aa]* ) checkPorts false; continue;;
        [Bb]* ) showSystemCheck; continue;;
        [Cc]* ) showSystemCheckRefactor; continue;;
        [XxQq]* ) break;;
        *) echo -e "\n$NC" + "Please answer with a, b, c, or x.";;
    esac
done

The output:

$ ./serviceActive

===============================
--- Micro 01 ---
===============================
Environment=NODE_ENV=production PORT=30027
ActiveState=active
SubState=running
sudo nmap -p 30025-30035 192.168.2.13
===============================
--- ElvenImagePicker (EIP) ---
===============================
Environment=NODE_ENV=production PORT=30200
ActiveState=active
SubState=running

===============================
--- Git Explorer ---sudo nmap -p 30025-30035 192.168.2.13
===============================
Environment=NODE_ENV=production PORT=30031 GEX_SERVER_PORT=30026
ActiveState=active
SubState=running

Setting Ports

Make sure you can control each of the programs that you run as a service. For instance, in my GitExplorer server I have this code in bin/www:

var port = normalizePort(process.env.GEX_SERVER_PORT || '30026');

And in the service file, I have this:

Environment=NODE_ENV=production
Environment=PORT=30031
Environment=GEX_SERVER_PORT=30026

This should launch the client on 30031 and the server on 30026.

Port Scanning

Install nmap:

	sudo apt install nmap

Scan for open ports on a specific machine:

sudo nmap -p- 192.168.2.13

Scan for the ports that we use that might be open:

sudo nmap -p 30000-30050 192.168.2.13

Or:

sudo nmap -p 30025-30035 192.168.2.13

For instance:

$ sudo nmap -p 30025-30035 192.168.2.13

Starting Nmap 7.01 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-05-21 10:21 PDT
Nmap scan report for 192.168.2.13
Host is up (0.000021s latency).
PORT      STATE  SERVICE
30025/tcp closed unknown
30026/tcp open   unknown
30027/tcp open   unknown
30028/tcp closed unknown
30029/tcp closed unknown
30030/tcp closed unknown
30031/tcp open   unknown
30032/tcp closed unknown
30033/tcp closed unknown
30034/tcp closed unknown
30035/tcp closed unknown

Get Your IP

Using NMAP to retrieve services on your local PC is easier if you can automatically get the local IP. Then you will not have to first get the IP, and only then call nmap. The lazier, and hence better, solution is to have a single way to get both the IP and the output from nmap. Below is an outline of such a technique.

This Stack Overflow solution is perhaps reasonably robust, though there might be trouble if you have a single interface with two IP addresses. Our script expects this small app to return a single IP address, but in some cases it might return two. So far I have not found a machine that has two IP addresses for a single interface, so I don’t know what will happen in that case or how to work around it. Here is the SO code, only slightly modified:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var os = require('os');
var ifaces = os.networkInterfaces();

// Based on something found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8440736/253576
Object.keys(ifaces).forEach(function (ifname) {
  'use strict';
  var alias = 0;
  ifaces[ifname].forEach(function (iface) {
    if ('IPv4' !== iface.family || iface.internal !== false) {
      // skip over internal (i.e. 127.0.0.1) and non-ipv4 addresses
      return;
    }

    if (alias >= 1) {
      // this single interface has multiple ipv4 addresses
      console.log(ifname + ':' + alias, iface.address);
    } else {
      // this interface has only one ipv4 adress
      console.log(iface.address);
    }
    ++alias;
  });
});

Save the above JavaScript in a file in your scripts directory called get-ip.js. Then in your system-service-control script, do this:

LOCAL_IP=$(./get-ip.js)

Now you can do this in your script:

function checkPorts() {
    sudo nmap -p 30025-30235 ${LOCAL_IP}
}

NOTE: As an FYI you need not act on: This might work in bash as a way to get your IP, but I haven’t quite finished it:

ip addr | grep -o "inet\s[[:digit:]]*.[[:digit:]]*.[[:digit:]]*.[[:digit:]]*.[[:digit:]]*\sbrd"

Turn it in

Write a similar script that will track the services you are running. Save it as system-service-control in your scripts directory. This script lets you check the status of ports and individual programs. Use it to help you make sure all your services can be configured through their service files to run on a particular port.

Suppose you have five services programs that can be run as systemd services. Then your script should have seven menu options:

• Check the Ports
• Use the Show function to check Programs 1 - 5 to see if the are active
• A way to exit the program

For instance, here is how to check one of the five programs that could be running as systemd service:

function show {
    banner "$1"
	  sudo systemctl show -p ActiveState -p SubState -p Environment $2
}

function showSystemCheck() {
	show 'SystemCheck' systemcheck.service
}

The show function uses the name of a service file and the systemctl utility to check the status of the program that uses, in this instance, systemcheck.service. If you have a menu item that allows you to call showSystemCheck then you are at least one seventh of the way through.

If the requirement were to check on three programs, rather than five, then menu might look like this:

===============================
--- Menu ---
===============================
  a) Check Ports 30025-30225
  b) SystemCheck
  c) SystemCheckRefactor
  d) AWS Provision
  x) Exit

You have the option to check the ports, to check three programs, and to exit. If I added code to check two more programs, I would be done:

===============================
--- Menu ---
===============================
  a) Check Ports 30025-30225
  b) SystemCheck
  c) SystemCheckRefactor
  d) AWS Provision
  e) Midterm
  f) EC2-Copy-File
  x) Exit

hints

Get a list of common ports:

less /etc/services

less /usr/share/nmap/nmap-services

sudo apt-get install nmap