Due to the nature of firewall settings and customizations, bifrost does not change any local firewalling on the node. Users must ensure that their firewalling for the node running bifrost is such that the nodes that are being booted can connect to the following ports:
67/UDP for DHCP requests to be serviced 69/UDP for TFTP file transfers (Initial iPXE binary) 6301/TCP for the ironic API 8080/TCP for HTTP File Downloads (iPXE, Ironic-Python-Agent)
If you encounter any additional issues, use of tcpdump
is highly recommended
while attempting to deploy a single node in order to capture and review the
traffic exchange between the two nodes.
This is due to node status checking thread in ironic, which is a locking action as it utilizes IPMI. The best course of action is to retry the operation. If this is occurring with a high frequency, tuning might be required.
Example error:
NodeLocked: Node 00000000-0000-0000-0000-046ebb96ec21 is locked by host $HOSTNAME, please retry after the current operation is completed.
When deploying a new image with the same previous name, it is necessary to
purge the contents of the TFTP master_images folder which caches the image
file for deployments. The default location for this folder is
/tftpboot/master_images
.
Additionally, a playbook has been included that can be used prior to a
re-installation to ensure fresh images are deployed. This playbook can
be found at playbooks/cleanup-deployment-images.yaml
.
Troubleshooting issues involving IPA can be time consuming. The IPA developers HIGHLY recommend that users build their own custom IPA images in order to inject things such as SSH keys, and turn on agent debugging which must be done in a custom image as there is no mechanism to enable debugging via the kernel command line at present.
Custom IPA images can be built a number of ways, the most generally useful mechanism is with diskimage-builder as the distributions typically have better hardware support than CoreOS and Tiny Core Linux. However, CoreOS and Tiny Core based images are what are used by the OpenStack CI for ironic tests.
- CoreOS::
- http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic-python-agent/tree/imagebuild/coreos/README.rst
- TinyIPA::
- https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic-python-agent/tree/imagebuild/tinyipa/README.rst
- For documentation on diskimage-builder, See::
- http://docs.openstack.org/developer/diskimage-builder/.
It should be noted that the steps for diskimage-builder installation and use to create an IPA image for Bifrost are the same as for ironic. See:
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/deploy/install-guide.html#image-requirements
This essentially boils down to the following steps:
git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack/ironic-python-agent
cd ironic-python-agent
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
#. If you don't already have docker installed, execute:sudo apt-get install docker docker.io
cd imagebuild/coreos
- Edit
oem/cloudconfig.yml
and add--debug
to the end of the ExecStart setting for the ironic-python-agent.service unit. - Execute
make
to complete the build process.
Once your build is completed, you will need to copy the images files written to the UPLOAD folder, into the /httpboot folder. If your utilizing the default file names, executing cp UPLOAD/* /httpboot/ should achieve this.
Since you have updated the image to be deployed, you will need to purge the contents of /tftpboot/master_images for the new image to be utilized for the deployment process.
Many failures due to the IPA agent can be addressed by building a custom IPA Image. See Building an IPA image for information on building your own IPA image.
By default, bifrost sets the agent journal to be logged to the system console. Due to the variation in hardware, you may need to tune the parameters passed to the deployment ramdisk. This can be done, as shown below in ironic.conf:
agent_pxe_append_params=nofb nomodeset vga=normal console=ttyS0 systemd.journald.forward_to_console=yes
Parameters will vary by your hardware type and configuration, however the
systemd.journald.forward_to_console=yes
setting is a default, and will only work for systemd based IPA images such as the CoreOS image.The example above, effectively disables all attempts by the kernel to set the video mode, defines the console as ttyS0 or the first serial port, and instructs systemd to direct logs to the console.
Once set, restart the ironic-conductor service, e.g.
service ironic-conductor restart
and attempt to redeploy the node. You will want to view the system console occurring. If possible, you may wish to useipmitool
and write the output to a log file.
If you wish to SSH into the node in order to perform any sort of post-mortem, you will need to do the following:
- Set an
sshkey="ssh-rsa AAAA....."
value on theagent_pxe_append_params
setting in/etc/ironic/ironic.conf
- You will need to short circuit the ironic conductor process. An ideal
place to do so is in
ironic/drivers/modules/agent.py
in the reboot_to_instance method. Temporarily short circuiting this step will force you to edit the MySQL database if you wish to re-deploy the node, but the node should stay online after IPA has completed deployment. ssh -l core <ip-address-of-node>
Custom built images will require a user to be burned into the image. Typically a user would use the diskimage-builder devuser element to achieve this. More detail on this can be located at:
https://github.com/openstack/diskimage-builder/tree/master/elements/devuser
Example:
export DIB_DEV_USER_USERNAME=customuser export DIB_DEV_USER_PWDLESS_SUDO=yes export DIB_DEV_USER_AUTHORIZED_KEYS=$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub disk-image-create -o /path/to/custom-ipa debian ironic-agent devuser
Bifrost requires that the user who executes bifrost have an SSH key in their user home, or that the user defines a variable to tell bifrost where to identify this file. Once this variable is defined to a valid file, the deployment playbook can be re-run.
See the manual page for the ssh-keygen
command.
A user can define a specific public key file by utilizing the
ssh_public_key_path
variable. This can be set in the
group_vars/inventory/all
file, or on the ansible-playbook
command
line utilizing the -e
command line parameter.
Example:
ansible-playbook -i inventory/bifrost_inventory.py deploy-dynamic.yaml -e ssh_public_key_path=~/path/to/public/key/id_rsa.pub
NOTE: The matching private key will need to be utilized to login to the machine deployed.
With-in the Newton cycle, the default IPA image for Bifrost was changed to TinyIPA, which is based on Tiny Core Linux. This has a greatly reduced boot time for testing, however should be expected to have less hardware support. If on a fresh install, or a re-install, you wish to change to CoreOS or any other IPA image, you will need to take the following steps:
- Remove the existing IPA image ipa.vmlinuz and ipa.initramfs.
- Edit the
playbooks/roles/bifrost-ironic-install/defaults/main.yml
file and update theipa_kernel_upstream_url
andipa_kernel_upstream_url
settings to a new URL. For CoreOS, these urls would be,https://tarballs.openstack.org/ironic-python-agent/coreos/files/coreos_production_pxe.vmlinuz
andhttps://tarballs.openstack.org/ironic-python-agent/coreos/files/coreos_production_pxe_image-oem.cpio.gz
respectively. - Execute the installation playbook, and the set files will be automatically
downloaded again. If the files are not removed prior to (re)installation,
then they will not be replaced. Alternatively, the files can just be directly
replaced on disk. The default where the kernel and ramdisk are located is in
/httboot/
.