iptables: fail to start ovs/linuxbridge agents on missing sysctl knobs

[OpenStack Infra]

https://review.openstack.org/371523
Dear bug triager. This bug was created since a commit was marked with DOCIMPACT.
Your project "openstack/neutron" is set up so that we directly report the documentation bugs against it. If this needs changing, the docimpact-group option needs to be added for the project. You can ask the OpenStack infra team (#openstack-infra on freenode) for help if you need to.

commit e83a44b96a8e3cd81b7cc684ac90486b283a3507
Author: Ihar Hrachyshka <email address hidden>
Date: Thu Sep 15 21:48:10 2016 +0000

    iptables: fail to start ovs/linuxbridge agents on missing sysctl knobs

    For new kernels (3.18+), bridge module is split into two pieces: bridge
    and br_netfilter. The latter provides firewall support for bridged
    traffic, as well as the following sysctl knobs:

    * net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables
    * net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables
    * net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables

    Before kernel 3.18, any brctl command was loading the 'bridge' module
    with the knobs, so at the moment where we reached iptables setup, they
    were always available.

    With new 3.18+ kernels, brctl still loads 'bridge' module, but not
    br_netfilter. So bridge existance no longer guarantees us knobs'
    presence. If we reach _enable_netfilter_for_bridges before the new
    module is loaded, then the code will fail, triggering agent resync. It
    will also fail to enable bridge firewalling on systems where it's
    disabled by default (examples of those systems are most if not all Red
    Hat/Fedora based systems), making security groups completely
    ineffective.

    Systems that don't override default settings for those knobs would work
    fine except for this exception in the log file and agent resync. This is
    because the first attempt to add a iptables rule using 'physdev' module
    (-m physdev) will trigger the kernel module loading. In theory, we could
    silently swallow missing knobs, and still operate correctly. But on
    second thought, it's quite fragile to rely on that implicit module
    loading. In the case where we can't detect whether firewall is enabled,
    it's better to fail than hope for the best.

    An alternative to the proposed path could be trying
    to fix broken deployment, meaning we would need to load the missing
    kernel module on agent startup. It's not even clear whether we can
    assume the operation would be available to us. Even with that, adding a
    rootwrap filter to allow loading code in the kernel sounds quite scary.
    If we would follow the path, we would also hit an issue of
    distinguishing between cases of built-in kernel module vs. modular one.
    A complexity that is probably beyond what Neutron should fix.

    The patch introduces a sanity check that would fail on missing
    configuration knobs.

    DocImpact: document the new deployment requirement in operations guide
    UpgradeImpact: deployers relying on agents fixing wrong sysctl defaults
                   will need to make sure bridge firewalling is enabled.
                   Also, the kernel module providing sysctl knobs must be
                   loaded before starting the agent, otherwise it will fail
                   to start.

    Depends-On: Id6bfd9595f0772a63d1096ef83ebbb6cd630fafd
    Change-Id: I9137ea017624ac92a05f73863b77f9ee4681bbe7
    Related-Bug: #1622914

[Boden R (boden)]

As noted in the commit message, this one impacts the install/upgrade/deploy guide; so I'm moving it to openstack-manuals for the appropriate updates.

Note this is for master; there's a separate bug for the newton changes.

[Lana (loquacity)]

Adding John Davidge.

John, I'm not sure this belongs in the Install Guide. Do you have somewhere in the Networking Guide to put this?

[John Davidge (john-davidge)]

@Ihar Are you still working on this?

This could belong here[1] as a note warning deployers about the extra module.

[1] https://docs.openstack.org/networking-guide/deploy.html

[Ihar Hrachyshka (ihar-hrachyshka)]

Yeah, I will take care.

[Brian Haley (brian-haley)]

commit 183c82b59a69a308aff13829a153460207aba8b6, which was after this change, mentions checking for the iptables sysctl settings here. For that reason and since this is quite old, marking this closed.