Skip to content

2022-05-12 refresh staging clones#

We have zfs clones of volumes for staging data. We need to refresh the clone to be up to date.

I verified I can login on the VM for stagging dockers (using 10.1.0.200) from ovh3.

Using NFS Volumes#

We want to avoid having to umnount things globally in 200, so I moved to using direct nfs mounts.

I made a PR to change external volume creation. This PR also adds volume prefixes. Because of prefix added, I didn't have the urge to remove previous volumes.

Latter I did have to add the no_lock option so that product opener can add locks, otherwise it's impossible to display a product.

After deploy happens, I removed old volumes. I also checked that local volumes (html_data and podata, renamed to po_html_data and po_podata) didn't have anything to copy back (by looking at /var/lib/docker/volumes). Later, when I checked everything was fine, I then removed old volume. 

$ docker volume rm users orgs products product_images html_data podata

I unmount all the previous NFS mount at system level: 

$ sudo umount /mnt/{products,users,orgs,product_images}
and commented corresponding line in /etc/fstab: 
# volumes are now directly mounting nfs
# 10.0.0.3:/rpool/off/clones/products           /mnt/products   nfs     rw      0 0
# 10.0.0.3:/rpool/off/clones/users              /mnt/users      nfs     rw      0 0
# 10.0.0.3:/rpool/off/clones/orgs                       /mnt/orgs       nfs     rw      0 0
# 10.0.0.3:/rpool/off/clones/images/products    /mnt/product_images     nfs     rw      0 0

Refreshing clones#

To refresh clones, we have to first stop docker containers on docker staging (if needed): 

cd /home/off/off-net
docker-compose stop

On ovh3, as root, we can refresh clones, thanks to the script present there (see scripts/ovh3/maj-clones-nfs-VM-dockers.sh).

For each clone dataset, this:

  • zfs destroy the dataset clone
  • create a snapshot of the original dataset with a fixed tag depending on date
  • use zfs clone to create the clone dataset again using the tag

In my case, the sudo zfs destroy rpool/off/clones/images failed because the system was unable to umount the dataset, which is the first step of the destroy process. It says "volume busy" which is a classical error when you have a process still using a resource you want to umount. I tried to bypass it using umount -f /rpool/off/clones/images but it failed with same errors. I took some time trying to find the culprit process, but lsof +D is quite unusable due to the large amount of files. On off staging there were no more mounted clone nfs shares (cat /etc/mtab).

Finally after some internet research, I stumble upon the sudo showmount -a command that shows which NFS shares are in use, and I found that images was still reported as mounted on 10.1.0.200. I simply did a restart of NFS services (sudo systemctl restart nfs-server.service) and the information was correct again, with the umount finally working.

Restarting dockers#

After recreating clones, I had to restart the dockers.

But in fact it did not happened that easily.

The boot time for dockers was very long, and it timeout.

I though this issue had been resolved by moving VM 200 to ovh1, to shorten latency with ovh3 and thus make NFS shares more usable. But it was still there.

By pinging ovh3 form ovh1 and from the container I saw there was not the same latency. In fact thanks to ip route list I realised staging docker VM was still configured to use ovh2 as the gateway instead of ovh1…

I fixed it, see 2023-04-27 moving docker staging to OVH1 / Changing route