Skip to main content

Debugging the issue of using NFS shares for PSMDB on OpenShift


I have recently been trying to use PSMDB (Percona Server for MongoDB) as an open-source and free alternative for MongoDB Enterprise Server. I encountered an issue that the pod could not be initialized successfully with Persistent Volumes using NFS shares. I got the logs from the failed pod as follow:

------

++ id -u

++ id -g

+ install -o 1000730000 -g 0 -m 0755 -D /ps-entry.sh /data/db/ps-entry.sh

install: cannot change ownership of '/data/db/ps-entry.sh': Operation not permitted

----

I would like to share the steps how I used for debugging. The PSMD StatefulSet was deployed onto my OpenShift 3 OKD.

Check the container mount info

Go to a pod I could see the mount info as below

mongod-data → /data/db read-write

- mongod-data: Persistent volume claim name

- /data/db: container mounted directory

Check Persistent volume binding

Go to the storage, I could know which persistent volume was bound to the corresponding persistent volume claim.

Bound to volume psmdb-mongodb-data-0

Check Persistent volume

Go cluster console > storage > persistent volumes. I had

----

nfs:

 server: files.some.domain.local

 path: /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

---

Check NFS shares (host’s mounted directory)

Remote to server and check attributes of the mounted directory

---

ssh someuser@files.some.domain.local

cd /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb

ls -la

---

The info was:

drwxrwxr-x. 2 nfsnobody nfsnobody 6 Jun 22 08:25 data-0

Check the user and group of "nfsnobody".

id nfsnobody

The info was:

uid=65534(nfsnobody) gid=65534(nfsnobody) groups=65534(nfsnobody)

Also, I could also check by "/etc/passwd"

nfsnobody:x:65534:65534:Anonymous NFS User:/var/lib/nfs:/sbin/nologin

Check container's mounted directory

Create a debug pod

---

# -c: container

# -t: attach a terminal

# --: use the entrypoint

oc debug my-cluster-name-rs0-0 -c mongo-init -t -- /bin/bash

---

Check the mounted directory attributes:

drwxrwxr-x. 2 65534 65534 25 Jun 22 08:43 db

It means the attributes are kept (the same as the host’s one). Check the files inside:

-rw-------. 1 1000920000 nfsnobody 15680 Jun 22 08:48 ps-entry.sh

Also, it was the same group as the host’s one. Only the user id was changed. It made sense. However, it seemed like the file was created but not completely set the attributes (ownership and file mode).

I checked the logged-in user of the container by executing the command "id"

uid=1000990000 gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1000990000

I ran the command from the entry point of the point ("/init-entrypoint.sh") manually within the container.

install -o "$(id -u)" -g "$(id -g)" -m 0755 -D /ps-entry.sh /data/db/ps-entry.sh

Then, I got an error:

install: cannot change ownership of '/data/db/ps-entry.sh': Operation not permitted

The currently logged-in user within the container doesn’t have permission to change the owner. Yep! I could reproduce the issue.

Hmm...What is the root cause?

The user of the container doesn't belong to group "65534(nfsnobody)", so it could not change the owner of the file. However, I could not do the following actions:

- Change group of container's user to "65543". OpenShift grants a fixed group "0 (root)" for the user.

- Modify the entry point contains the script "install -o ..." since the templates are generated and managed by the PSMDB operator.

Hence, the only way was that I need to change the file attributes of NFS shares. I changed it to group "0".

sudo chown nfsnobody:0 /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

Remove the pod and deploy a new one. I got another error:

install: cannot create regular file '/data/db/ps-entry.sh': Permission denied

Strange! The current user has the same group "0" of the folder already. The NFS service doesn’t allow a user without group "nsfnobody" to create a file within a mounted directory.

I granted permission to write for everyone. :frowning::frowning:

sudo chmod o+w /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

Another error...

install: cannot change ownership of '/data/db/ps-entry.sh': Operation not permitted

Check the file attributes of "/data/db/ps-enty.sh", I had

-rw-------. 1 1000990000 65534 15680 Jun 23 13:09 ps-entry.sh

As observed, it seemed like the NFS shares always use the group "65534" for the created files even the current user has group "0".

I set the attribute `s` to let Linux assign the group of the current folder to the nested files.

sudo chmod g+s /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

It worked! Phew...

-rwxr-xr-x. 1 1000990000 root 15680 Jun 23 13:16 /data/db/ps-entry.sh

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

JSF, Primefaces - Invoking Application Code Even When Validation Failed

A use case I have a form which has requirements as follow: - There are some mandatory fields. - Validation is triggered when changing value on each field. - A button "Next" is enable only when all fields are entered. It turns to disabled if any field is empty. My first approach I defined a variable "isDisableNext" at a backend bean "Controller" for dynamically disabling/enabling the "Next" button by performing event "onValueChange", but, it had a problem: <h:form id="personForm"> <p:outputLabel value="First Name" for="firstName"/> <p:inputText id="firstName" value="#{person.firstName}" required="true"> <p:ajax event="change" listener="#{controller.onValueChange}" update="nextButton"/> </p:inputText> <p:outputLabel value="Last Name" for="lastName"/> <p:i...

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined

I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute " for " in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files. The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following: "Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel." However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel . The alternative by adding attribute " for " the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution. Fortunately, I came across a way if I cha...

4 Remarkable Notes for JSF Apps Using HTML5

In the previous post , I've already shared with you how my team consults clients by using a HTML prototype. This post is about the used technologies for reusing the provided HTML template and communicating with backend. What is the issue when using HTML elements with Primefaces components? Primefaces is a great extension for developing JSF web apps. However, it is really frustrating in case we have to make it work with an existing HTML template. Why? - Primefaces has its own theme for styling. - Primefaces changes the HTML structure. Therefore, that would be a huge effort to use the Primefaces' components to replicate the elements of the HTML template; especially it is impossible for images drawing by " canvas " tag. That requires us to find a better approach. Since Java EE 7 (introducing JSF 2.2 included), it supports to use HTML5 elements . The idea is that JSF components don't effect the style and HTML structure, so we can easily reuse the provided HTM...

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .