OpenShift Tips

Troubleshooting

Get the status of all the operators in your cluster

The following command is the easiest way to see the status of the cluster:

oc get clusteroperators

A little addon to the previous command very useful when you are upgrading your cluster:

watch -n5 oc get clusteroperators

Get pods not running nor completed

A handy one liner to see the pods having issues (such as CrashLoopBackOff):

oc get pods -A -o wide | grep -v -E 'Completed|Running'

Get cluster and operators status

Combining the previous two tips and adding some more data:

watch -n 30 "oc get nodes; oc get pods -A -o wide | grep -v -E 'Completed|Running'; oc get clusteroperators | grep -v 'True[[:space:]]\+False[[:space:]]\+False'; oc get clusterversion; oc get machines -A; oc get machineconfigpool"

Get node logs

Display node journal:

oc adm node-logs <node>

Tail 10 lines from node journal:

oc adm node-logs --tail=10 <node>

Get kubelet journal logs only:

oc adm node-logs -u kubelet.service <node>

Grep kernel word on node journal:

oc adm node-logs --grep=kernel <node>

List /var/log contents:

oc adm node-logs --path=/ <node>

Get /var/log/audit/audit.log from node:

oc adm node-logs --path=audit/audit.log <node>

Debug node issues

OCP 4.1 is based on RHCOS and it is encouraged to not ssh into the hosts. Instead:

oc debug node/<node>
...
cat /host/etc/redhat-release
# If you want to use the node binaries you can:
# chroot /host

Run debugging tools in the RHCOS hosts

oc debug node/<node>
chroot /host
podman run -it --name rhel-tools --privileged                       \
      --ipc=host --net=host --pid=host -e HOST=/host                \
      -e NAME=rhel-tools -e IMAGE=rhel7/rhel-tools                  \
      -v /run:/run -v /var/log:/var/log                             \
      -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime -v /:/host rhel7/rhel-tools

or you can specify the image used for the debug pod as:

oc debug node/<node> --image=rhel7/rhel-tools

This will allow you to run tcpdump and other tools. Use it with caution!!!

Copy a file to a node

(Ab)using oc debug:

echo "test" >> ./myfile

oc debug node/<node> --image rhel7/rhel-tools -- \
  bash -c 'cat > host/tmp/myfile-remote' <(cat myfile )

Kudos to Juanlu

Modify kubelet log level

The kubelet configuration is provided by the systemd unit file in /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service which is created by the 01-worker-kubelet (for workers) or 01-master-kubelet machineconfig. In current OpenShift versions, that unit sets the -v parameter as per KUBELET_LOG_LEVEL environment variable, so customizing the log level is as simple as setting that variable through a drop-in for the kubelet systemd service unit, like this:

  • Connect to the node via oc debug node

    oc debug node/<node>
    ...
    chroot /host
    
  • Create a systemd drop-in that sets KUBELET_LOG_LEVEL to the desired value (4 in our example)

    cat <<EOF > /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/40-logging.conf
    [Service]
    Environment="KUBELET_LOG_LEVEL=4"
    EOF
    
  • Reload systemd and restart the service:

    systemctl daemon-reload
    systemctl restart kubelet
    

Alternatively, this drop-in could be specified via machineconfig if the log levels of all the nodes need to be changed.

Get MCP rendered ignition

curl -k -H "Accept: application/vnd.coreos.ignition+json; version=3.1.0" https://<api_ip>:22623/config/<poolname>

for example:

curl -k -H "Accept: application/vnd.coreos.ignition+json; version=3.1.0" https://<api_ip>:22623/config/master

or

curl -k -H "Accept: application/vnd.coreos.ignition+json; version=3.1.0" https://<api_ip>:22623/config/worker

Using netcat for file transfer from emergency shell

Sometimes things go so badly that we end up with node in emergency shell. With this we can copy off journal (or any other relevant file) outside of that shell so we can attach it to a bug report or examine it with other tools. First off save the journal to a file:

journalctl > journal.log

On the receving end run:

nc -l -p 1234 > journal.log

And then on the emergency console:

nc -w 3 [destination] 1234 < journal.log

You’ll end up with journal.log on the destination

Last updated on 21 Aug 2023
Published on 18 Jun 2019
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