Chapter 39. Troubleshooting OpenShift SDN

As described in the SDN documentation there are multiple layers of interfaces that are created to correctly pass the traffic from one container to another. In order to debug connectivity issues, you have to test the different layers of the stack to work out where the problem arises. This guide will help you dig down through the layers to identify the problem and how to fix it.

Part of the problem is that OpenShift Container Platform can be set up many ways, and the networking can be wrong in a few different places. So this document will work through some scenarios that, hopefully, will cover the majority of cases. If your problem is not covered, the tools and concepts that are introduced should help guide debugging efforts.

The following diagram shows all of the pieces involved with external access.

If you are on an machine outside the cluster and are trying to access a resource provided by the cluster there needs to be a process running in a pod that listens on a public IP address and "routes" that traffic inside the cluster. The OpenShift Container Platform router serves that purpose for HTTP, HTTPS (with SNI), WebSockets, or TLS (with SNI).

Assuming you can’t access an HTTP service from the outside of the cluster, let’s start by reproducing the problem on the command line of the machine where things are failing. Try:

curl -kv http://foo.example.com:8000/bar    # But replace the argument with your URL

If that works, are you reproducing the bug from the right place? It is also possible that the service has some pods that work, and some that don’t. So jump ahead to the Section 39.4, “Debugging the Router” section.

If that failed, then let’s resolve the DNS name to an IP address (assuming it isn’t already one):

dig +short foo.example.com                  # But replace the hostname with yours

If that doesn’t give back an IP address, it’s time to troubleshoot DNS, but that’s outside the scope of this guide.

Next, use ping -c address and tracepath address to check that you can reach the router host. It is possible that they will not respond to ICMP packets, in which case those tests will fail, but the router machine may be reachable. In which case, try using the telnet command to access the port for the router directly:

telnet 1.2.3.4 8000

You may get:

Trying 1.2.3.4...
Connected to 1.2.3.4.
Escape character is '^]'.

If so, there’s something listening on the port on the IP address. That’s good. Hit ctrl-] then hit the enter key and then type close to quit telnet. Move on to the Section 39.4, “Debugging the Router” section to check other things on the router.

Or you could get:

Trying 1.2.3.4...
telnet: connect to address 1.2.3.4: Connection refused

Which tells us that the router is not listening on that port. See the Section 39.4, “Debugging the Router” section for more pointers on how to configure the router.

Or if you see:

Trying 1.2.3.4...
  telnet: connect to address 1.2.3.4: Connection timed out

Which tells us that you can’t talk to anything on that IP address. Check your routing, firewalls, and that you have a router listening on that IP address. To debug the router, see the Section 39.4, “Debugging the Router” section. For IP routing and firewall issues, debugging that is beyond the purview of this guide.

Now that you have an IP address, we need to ssh to that machine and check that the router software is running on that machine and configured correctly. So let’s ssh there and get administrative OpenShift Container Platform credentials.

$ oc login -u system:admin -n default

Check that the router is running:

# oc get endpoints --namespace=default --selector=router
NAMESPACE   NAME              ENDPOINTS
default     router            10.128.0.4:80

If that command fails, then your OpenShift Container Platform configuration is broken. Fixing that is outside the scope of this document.

You should see one or more router endpoints listed, but that won’t tell you if they are running on the machine with the given external IP address, since the endpoint IP address will be one of the pod addresses that is internal to the cluster. To get the list of router host IP addresses, run:

# oc get pods --all-namespaces --selector=router --template='{{range .items}}HostIP: {{.status.hostIP}}   PodIP: {{.status.podIP}}{{end}}{{"\n"}}'
HostIP: 192.168.122.202   PodIP: 10.128.0.4

You should see the host IP that corresponds to your external address. If you do not, refer to the router documentation to configure the router pod to run on the right node (by setting the affinity correctly) or update your DNS to match the IP addresses where the routers are running.

At this point in the guide, you should be on a node, running your router pod, but you still cannot get the HTTP request to work. First we need to make sure that the router is mapping the external URL to the correct service, and if that works, we need to dig into that service to make sure that all endpoints are reachable.

Let’s list all of the routes that OpenShift Container Platform knows about:

# oc get route --all-namespaces
NAME              HOST/PORT         PATH      SERVICE        LABELS    TLS TERMINATION
route-unsecured   www.example.com   /test     service-name

If the host name and path from your URL don’t match anything in the list of returned routes, then you need to add a route. See the router documentation.

If your route is present, then you need to debug access to the endpoints. That’s the same as if you were debugging problems with a service, so continue on with the next Section 39.5, “Debugging a Service” section.

If you can’t communicate with a service from inside the cluster (either because your services can’t communicate directly, or because you are using the router and everything works until you get into the cluster) then you need to work out what endpoints are associated with a service and debug them.

First, let’s get the services:

# oc get services --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE   NAME              LABELS                                    SELECTOR                  IP(S)            PORT(S)
default     docker-registry   docker-registry=default                   docker-registry=default   172.30.243.225   5000/TCP
default     kubernetes        component=apiserver,provider=kubernetes   <none>                    172.30.0.1       443/TCP
default     router            router=router                             router=router             172.30.213.8     80/TCP

You should see your service in the list. If not, then you need to define your service.

The IP addresses listed in the service output are the Kubernetes service IP addresses that Kubernetes will map to one of the pods that backs that service. So you should be able to talk to that IP address. But, unfortunately, even if you can, it doesn’t mean all pods are reachable; and if you can’t, it doesn’t mean all pods aren’t reachable. It just tells you the status of the one that kubeproxy hooked you up to.

Let’s test the service anyway. From one of your nodes:

curl -kv http://172.30.243.225:5000/bar                  # Replace the argument with your service IP address and port

Then, let’s work out what pods are backing our service (replace docker-registry with the name of the broken service):

# oc get endpoints --selector=docker-registry
NAME              ENDPOINTS
docker-registry   10.128.2.2:5000

From this, we can see that there’s only one endpoint. So, if your service test succeeded, and the router test succeeded, then something really odd is going on. But if there’s more than one endpoint, or the service test failed, try the following for each endpoint. Once you identify what endpoints aren’t working, then proceed to the next section.

First, test each endpoint (change the URL to have the right endpoint IP, port, and path):

curl -kv http://10.128.2.2:5000/bar

If that works, great, try the next one. If it failed, make a note of it and we’ll work out why, in the next section.

If all of them failed, then it is possible that the local node is not working, jump to the Section 39.7, “Debugging Local Networking” section.

If all of them worked, then jump to the Section 39.11, “Debugging Kubernetes” section to work out why the service IP address isn’t working.

Using our list of non-working endpoints, we need to test connectivity to the node.

Other debugging options for node to node networking can be solved with the following:

Once you have ascertained that the node to node connectivity is fine, we need to look at the SDN configuration on both ends.

At this point we should have a list of one or more endpoints that you can’t communicate with, but that have node to node connectivity. For each one, we need to work out what is wrong, but first you need to understand how the SDN sets up the networking on a node for the different pods.

# ip route
default via 192.168.122.1 dev ens3
10.128.0.0/14 dev tun0  proto kernel  scope link                        # This sends all pod traffic into OVS
10.128.2.0/23 dev tun0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.128.2.1        # This is traffic going to local pods, overriding the above
169.254.0.0/16 dev ens3  scope link  metric 1002                        # This is for Zeroconf (may not be present)
172.17.0.0/16 dev docker0  proto kernel  scope link  src 172.17.42.1    # Docker's private IPs... used only by things directly configured by docker; not OpenShift
192.168.122.0/24 dev ens3  proto kernel  scope link  src 192.168.122.46 # The physical interface on the local subnet

# ovs-vsctl list-br
br0

# ovs-ofctl -O OpenFlow13 dump-ports-desc br0
OFPST_PORT_DESC reply (OF1.3) (xid=0x2):
 1(vxlan0): addr:9e:f1:7d:4d:19:4f
     config:     0
     state:      0
     speed: 0 Mbps now, 0 Mbps max
 2(tun0): addr:6a:ef:90:24:a3:11
     config:     0
     state:      0
     speed: 0 Mbps now, 0 Mbps max
 8(vethe19c6ea): addr:1e:79:f3:a0:e8:8c
     config:     0
     state:      0
     current:    10GB-FD COPPER
     speed: 10000 Mbps now, 0 Mbps max
 LOCAL(br0): addr:0a:7f:b4:33:c2:43
     config:     PORT_DOWN
     state:      LINK_DOWN
     speed: 0 Mbps now, 0 Mbps max

# ovs-ofctl -O OpenFlow13 dump-flows br0

If you are trying to access an external service from a pod, e.g.:

curl -kv github.com

Make sure that the DNS is resolving correctly:

dig +search +noall +answer github.com

That should return the IP address for the github server, but check that you got back the correct address. If you get back no address, or the address of one of your machines, then you may be matching the wildcard entry in your local DNS server.

To fix that, you either need to make sure that DNS server that has the wildcard entry is not listed as a nameserver in your /etc/resolv.conf or you need to make sure that the wildcard domain is not listed in the search list.

If the correct IP address was returned, then try the debugging advice listed above in Section 39.7, “Debugging Local Networking”. Your traffic should leave the Open vSwitch on port 2 to pass through the iptables rules, then out the route table normally.

Run: journalctl -u atomic-openshift-node.service --boot | less

Look for the Output of setup script: line. Everything starting with '+' below that are the script steps. Look through that for obvious errors.

Following the script you should see lines with Output of adding table=0. Those are the OVS rules, and there should be no errors.

Check iptables -t nat -L to make sure that the service is being NAT’d to the right port on the local machine for the kubeproxy.

As a cluster administrator, run the diagnostics tool to diagnose common network issues:

# oc adm diagnostics NetworkCheck

The diagnostics tool runs a series of checks for error conditions for the specified component. See the Diagnostics Tool section for more information.

By default, oc adm diagnostics NetworkCheck logs errors into /tmp/openshift/. This can be configured with the --network-logdir option:

# oc adm diagnostics NetworkCheck --network-logdir=<path/to/directory>