Nova API exposes hostId to non-admin

[Andrea Frittoli]

When querying the details of a VM with a non-admin users, the hostId is included in the list.
This gives visibility to the end user of the spread of his/her tests among physical machines, and I think it shall only be visible to system admins.

REQ: curl -i http://[ip-masked]:8774/v1.1/af1_proj/servers/1837?fresh=1322130236.74 -X GET -H "X-Auth-Project-Id: af1_proj" -H "User-Agent: python-novaclient" -H "X-Auth-Token: f92fc99f52a82d15213a945747149d8c1bd106cc"

RESP:{'date': 'Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:24:37 GMT', 'status': '200', 'content-length': '902', 'content-type': 'application/json', 'content-location': 'http://[ip-masked]:8774/v1.1/af1_proj/servers/1837?fresh=1322130236.74'} {"server": {"status": "ACTIVE", "updated": "2011-11-23T13:56:57Z", "hostId": "723fe62f46ec18b209943f2e9fca8b5fbee21ab36e146962bc901041", "user_id": "af1_mgr", "name": "af1_n07", "links": [{"href": "http://[ip-masked]:8774/v1.1/af1_proj/servers/1837", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "http://[ip-masked]:8774/af1_proj/servers/1837", "rel": "bookmark"}], "addresses": {"projects": [{"version": 4, "addr": "10.12.224.27"}]}, "tenant_id": "af1_proj", "image": {"id": "182", "links": [{"href": "http://[ip-masked]:8774/af1_proj/images/182", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "created": "2011-11-23T13:56:36Z", "uuid": "693f7ee5-360d-4d08-a71d-9f8fd8015fb7", "accessIPv4": "", "accessIPv6": "", "key_name": "af1", "progress": 100, "flavor": {"id": "100", "links": [{"href": "http://[ip-masked]:8774/af1_proj/flavors/100", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "config_drive": "", "id": 1837, "metadata": {"desc": "created from snapshot"}}}

[Brian Waldon (bcwaldon)]

This was an explicit design decision of the Openstack API. If you can explain how this might be harmful, I'd love to hear it.

[Andrea Frittoli (andrea-frittoli)]

The hostId gives visibility to the end user of the spread of his/her VMs among physical servers.
Ideally the end use shall have as less information as possible about the underling infrastructure.

What was the design behind having the hostId?
When using the EC2 interface, this information is made available to admins only.

[Brian Waldon (bcwaldon)]

So HostId is supposed to be a hash of the compute node and the tenant id. This was a forward-thinking feature we wanted to expose to allow users to spread their instances out physically. I don't see it as exposing infrastructure, but more allowing users to strategically position their instances.