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

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...

Coding Exercise, Episode 1

I have received the following exercise from an interviewer, he didn't give the name of the problem. Honestly, I have no idea how to solve this problem even I have tried to read it three times before. Since I used to be a person who always tells myself "I am not the one good at algorithms", but giving up something too soon which I feel that I didn't spend enough effort to overcome is not my way. Then, I have sticked on it for 24 hours. According to the given image on the problem, I tried to get more clues by searching. Thanks to Google, I found a similar problem on Hackerrank (attached link below). My target here was trying my best to just understand the problem and was trying to solve it accordingly by the Editorial on Hackerrank. Due to this circumstance, it turns me to love solving algorithms from now on (laugh). Check it out! Problem You are given a very organized square of size N (1-based index) and a list of S commands The i th command will follow t...

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

Today I Learned - Git at First Glance

Getting Started It's always fun to jump right in to the "HelloWorld" app. Just go for it! Visit: https://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1 Cheatsheet It's time for us to store our "magic tools". Visit:  https://www.git-tower.com/blog/git-cheat-sheet Which collaboration way fit your team? Git is just a tool which doesn't teach you how to work properly in a team. It depends on your projects and you need to choose your own team workflow. Visit: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows