[gpfsug-discuss] Odd networking/name resolution issue

[TURNER Aaron]

Following on from Jonathan Buzzards comments, I'd also like to point out that I've never known a central DNS failure in a UK HEI for as long as I can remember, and it was certainly not my intention to suggest that as I think a central DNS issue is highly unlikely. And indeed, as I originally noted, the standard command-line tools on the nodes resolve the names as expected, so whatever is going on looks like it affects GPFS only. It may even be that the repetition of the domain names in the logs is just a function of something it is doing when logging when a node is failing to connect for some other reason entirely. It's just not something I recall having seen before and wanted to see if anyone else had seen it.
________________________________
From: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org> on behalf of Jonathan Buzzard <jonathan.buzzard at strath.ac.uk>
Sent: 09 May 2020 23:22
To: gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Odd networking/name resolution issue

On 09/05/2020 12:06, Jaime Pinto wrote:
> DNS shouldn't be relied upon on a GPFS cluster for internal
> communication/management or data.
>

The 1980's have called and want their lack of IP resolution protocols
back :-)

I would kindly disagree. If your DNS is not working then your cluster is
fubar anyway and a zillion other things will also break very rapidly.
For us at least half of the running jobs would be dead in a few minutes
as failure to contact license servers would cause the software to stop.
All authentication and account lookup is also going to fail as well.

You could distribute a hosts file but frankly outside of a storage only
cluster (as opposed to one with hundreds if not thousands of compute
nodes) that is frankly madness and will inevitably come to bite you in
the ass because they *will* get out of sync. The only hosts entry we
have is for the Salt Stack host because it tries to do things before the
DNS resolvers have been setup and consequently breaks otherwise. Which
IMHO is duff on it's behalf.

I would add I can't think of a time in the last 16 years where internal
DNS at any University I have worked at has stopped working for even one
millisecond. If DNS is that flaky at your institution then I suggest
sacking the people responsible for it's maintenance as being incompetent
twits. It is just such a vanishingly remote possibility that it's not
worth bothering about. Frankly a aircraft falling out the sky and
squishing your data centre seems more likely to me.

Finally in a world of IPv6 then anything other than DNS is a utter
madness IMHO.


JAB.

--
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG
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