Identifying PID source of DNS request (Windows XP) - windows-xp

I wish to identify the process that is making DNS requests. Looking at the query gives me a clue, but doesn't help me identify the exact process.
I can see the local port number in Wireshark, but the request is too transient to be picked up by TCPView.
Is there a logging tool which will catch DNS requests and PID?

Process Monitor from Sysinternals will give you what you want. Limit the capture to just network activity and you'll see the activity along with the PID and process name. The operation will be UDP Send and the path will read something like this: pc-host-name:port -> dns-server:domain (note ":domain" indicates port 53 for dns). The process name and pid will be on the left.
At first I was going to recommend using Netmon 3.4 (from Microsoft) as this will show the process name and pid (pid needs to be added as a column). However, this seemed to have trouble for me as most of the traffic was not tagged with with the process name/pid. I'm not sure why this was the case but it may work for you.

Related

How to Confirm PostgreSQL on Ubuntu VM is communicating with External Server for Updates

I have an Ubuntu VM installed on a client's VMware system. Recently, the client's IT informed us that his firewall has been detecting consistent potential port scans to our VM's internal IP address (coming from 87.238.57.227). He asked if this was part of a known package update process on our VM.
He sent us a firewall output where we can see several instances of the port scan, but there are also instances of our Ubuntu VM trying to communicate back to the external server on port 37258 (this is dropped by the firewall).
Based on a google lookup, the hostname of the external IP address is "feris.postgresql.org", with the ASN pointing to a European company called Redpill-Linpro. As far as I can tell, they offer IT consulting services, specializing in open source software (like PostgreSQL, which is installed on our VM). I have never heard of them before though and have no idea why our VM would be communicating with them or vice-versa. I'm also not sure if I'm interpreting the IP lookup information correctly: https://ipinfo.io/87.238.57.227
I'm looking for a way to confirm or disprove that this is just our VM pinging for a standard postgres update. If that's the case I'd like to restrict this behaviour. We would prefer to do these types of updates manually and limit the communication outside of the VM to what is strictly necessary for the functionality of our application.
Update
I sent an email to Redpill's abuse account. They responded quickly saying that the server should not be port scanning anyone and if it appears that way, something is wrong.
The server is part of a cluster of machines that serves apt.postgresql.org among other postgres download sites. I don't think we have anything like ansible or puppet installed that would automatically check for updates but I will look into that to make sure. I'm wondering if Ubuntu reaching out to update the MOTD with the number of available packages would explain why our VM is trying to reach out to the external postgres server?
The abuse rep said in any case there should only be outgoing connections from the VM, not incoming. He asked for some additional info so I will keep communicating with him and try to update this post accordingly
My communication with the client's IT dropped off so I did not get a definitive answer on this, but I'll provide some new details:
I reached out to the abuse email for Redpill-Linpro. He got back to me and confirmed the server corresponding to the detected IP address is part of a cluster that hosts postgres download sites, including apt.postgresql.org. He was surprised to learn we had detected a port scan from their server and seems eager to figure out why that is happening.
He asked if the client IT could pass along some necessary info for them to set up tracking on that server. But the client IT never got back to me. I think he was satisfied that it wasn't malicious and stopped pursuing it.
Here's one of the messages the abuse rep sent me that may be relevant:
That does look a lot like the tcp to the apt download server yes. It's
strange that your firewall reports that many incoming connections, but
they could be fallout from some connection tracking that's not
operating as intended. The timing appears to be matching up more or
less perfectly. And there should definitely not be any ping-back
connections from it.
Since you appear to be using the http version of the server (and not https) bringing the data in cleartext, they should be able to just
dump the TCP connection contents and verify exactly what it does. But
I bet they are going to see a number of http requests initiated by the
apt client that is checking for updates.

Locust, How to set source request ip

The virtual machine which run Locust has multiple network cards
Is there any way to set source request IP of Locust?
https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/configuration.html#command-line-options
It should be possible by monkey patching socket.create_connection() using the solution described here, as Locust’s HttpUser uses requests.
Requests, bind to an ip
My original answer was deleted by a mod for some unknown reason. Lets hope it doesnt happen again...

How to keep track of the number of clients that are connecting to server

I'm building a software agent that run on a server, this software agent act as a server manager i.e. starting/stoping Docker container, monitoring etc.
This server will host/serve many services, these services are programs running in Docker container, 1 program/service per container.
There may be so many servers and these servers aren't necessary be a high performance server, they ranges from a small VM to high performance computer. Right now, I assume that every service uses HTTP to serve request.
The function that I want to implement in this software agent is tracking the number of clients that are currently connecting (requesting) to server for every service (e.x. server A is processing 500 requests) or specific program is ok (e.x. program A is processing 100 requests, program B is processing 200 request).
I want to know this number because I want to do workload balancing across servers that host the same service.
The following is ideas that I have.
Implementing load balancer/reverse proxy inside this agent (I would use this load balancer https://github.com/nwoodthorpe/Load-Balancer-Golang). This may be the last choice because I think it will use pretty much resources for load balancing.
Letting service programs that are running on server tell agent whenever they start and finish processing request. I simply implement UDP socket server in agent to listen for a datagram that tell unique ID of request (actually, can be anything that help me distinguish specific request that being processed) and status whether is being processed or finish processing.
So, I would like to ask for a suggestion for above approaches, which one is better or how should I implement it? Is there any better approach to do this?

Port is open on localhost but remote host reports closed port

I am trying to setup a pptp server on Centos,
I open port 1723 (pptp port) with no issues when setting up pptp, and I do a nmap scan to confirm that it is open, however when I nmap the server remotely, it doesnt even list port 1723, by which I assume that port 1723 is not accesable
Is there something I am missing, forgetting
p.s., my first time setting up, so I am noob, please forgive any mistakes or missunderstandings and please dont down vote, I really need help and posting on serverfault apparently is of topic for this too...
UPDATE after #Calvin
Thank you for your informative response, do you know of anyway I can check where it is being blocked???
It is probably being blocked by a proxy server/firewall that the remote request has to go through. So for example, you're in one location A, wanting to connect to the other location B (which you've said is setup correctly and open to requests), though the security apparatus at location A have blocked outgoing requests to whatever port range, and likely outside your control unless you know the network administrators to check with them.
Is my first assumption.

How do online port checkers work?

For example http://www.utorrent.com/testport?port=12345
How does this work? Can the server side script attempt to open a socket?
There are many ways of accomplishing this through server-side scripting. As #Oded mentioned, most server-side handlers are capable of initiating socket connections on arbitrary ports, and most of those even have dedicated port-scanning packages/libraries (PHP has one in the PEAR repository, Python's 'socket' module makes this type of tasks a breeze, etc...)
Keep in mind that on shared host platforms, socket connections are typically disabled for security purposes.
Another way that is also very easy to accomplish is to use a command-line port-scanner such as nmap from your server-side script. i.e in PHP, you would do echo ``nmap -p $port $ip\
The server side script will try to open a connection on the specified port to the originating IP.
If there is no response (the attempt will timeout), this would be an indication that the port is not open.
The server can try, as #Oded said. But that doesn't ensure the receiver will respond.
Typically, something like this happens:
The URL request contains instructions about which port to access. The headers that your browser sends include information about where the request is originating from.
Before responding to the request, the server tries to open a port and checks if this is successful. It waits a while before timing out.
The webpage is rendered dynamically based on the results of this test.
The response is returned to you containing the results.
Sometimes steps (2) and (3) will be replaced with an AJAX callback, which allows the response to return sooner.