TripleO Undercloud NTP Server

The Undercloud should provide NTP services for when external NTP services are not available.

Problem Description

NTP services are required to deploy with HA, but we rely on external services. This means that TripleO can’t be installed without Internet access or a local NTP server.

This has several drawbacks:

  • The NTP server is a potential point of failure, and it is an external dependency.

  • Isolated deployments without Internet access are not possible without additional effort (manually deploying an NTP server).

  • Infra CI is dependent on an external resource, leading to potential false negative test runs or CI failures.

Proposed Change

Overview

In order to address this problem, the Undercloud installation process should include setting up an NTP server on the local Undercloud. The use of this NTP server would be optional, but we may wish to make it a default. Having a default is better than none, since HA deployments will fail without time synchronization between the controller cluster members.

The operation of the NTP server on the Undercloud would be primarily of use in small or proof-of-concept deployments. It is expected that sufficiently large deployments will have an infrastructure NTP server already operating locally.

Alternatives

The alternative is to continue to require external NTP services, or to require manual steps to set up a local NTP server.

Security Impact

Since the NTP server is required for syncing the HA, a skewed clock on one controller (in relation to the other controllers) may make it ineligable to participate in the HA cluster. If more than one controller’s clock is skewed, the entire cluster will fail to operate. This opens up an opportunity for denial-of-service attacks against the cloud, either by causing NTP updates to fail, or using a man-in-the-middle attack where deliberately false NTP responses are returned to the controllers.

Of course, operating the NTP server on the Undercloud moves that attack vector down to the Undercloud, so sufficient security hardening should be done on the Undercloud and/or the attached networks. We may wish to bind the NTP server only to the provisioning (control plane) network.

Other End User Impact

This may make the life of the installer easier, since they don’t need to open a network connection to an NTP server or set up a local NTP server.

Performance Impact

The operation of the NTP server should have a negligible impact on Undercloud performance. It is a lightweight protocol and the daemon requires little resources.

Other Deployer Impact

We now require that a valid NTP server be configured either in the templates or on the deployment command-line. This requirement would be optional if we had a default pointing to NTP services on the Undercloud.

Developer Impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignees:

Work Items

The TripleO Undercloud installation scripts will have to be modified to include the installation and configuration of an NTP server. This will likely be done using a composable service for the Undercloud, with configuration data taken from undercloud.conf. The configuration should include a set of default NTP servers which are reachable on the public Internet for when no servers are specified in undercloud.conf.

Implement opening up iptables for NTP on the control plane network (bound to only one IP/interface [ctlplane] if possible).

Dependencies

The NTP server RPMs must be installed, and upstream NTP servers must be identified (although we might configure a default such as pool.ntp.org)

Testing

Since proper operation of the NTP services are required for successful deployment of an HA overcloud, this functionality will be tested every time a TripleO CI HA job is run.

We may also want to implement a validation that ensures that the NTP server can reach its upstream stratum 1 servers. This will ensure that the NTP server is serving up the correct time. This is optional, however, since the only dependency is that the overcloud nodes agree on the time, not that it be correct.

Documentation Impact

The setup and configuration of the NTP server should be documented. Basic NTP best practices should be communicated.

References