Accessing the Overcloud¶

With the virtual infrastructure provisioned by tripleo-quickstart, the overcloud hosts are deployed on an isolated network that can only be accessed from the undercloud host. In many cases, simply logging in to the undercloud host as documented in Accessing the Undercloud is sufficient, but there are situations when you may want direct access to overcloud services from your desktop.

Note, when overcloud nodes are hosted on an OpenStack cloud instead, the ssh access user name may be ‘centos’ or the like. And you may not be able to login as the root. Node names may be also prefixed with a given heat stack name, like foo-overcloud-controller-0. The undercloud node should be given a floating IP and will be serving as a bastion host proxying ansible/ssh to overcloud nodes.

Logging in to overcloud hosts¶

The easiest way to reach the overcloud nodes is to login using the ssh config file generated during the quickstart run:

ssh -F $HOME/.quickstart/ssh.config.ansible overcloud-controller-0

It’s a good idea to look into the ssh.config.ansible file to see all the hostnames and to understand how ssh logs in to the overcloud nodes though the undercloud.

An alternative way to reach the overcloud nodes is to log in to the undercloud host and figure out the ctlplane address of the deployed node:

[stack@undercloud ~]$ source stackrc
[stack@undercloud ~]$ nova list
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------+--------+------------+-------------+------------------------+
| ID                                   | Name                    | Status | Task State | Power State | Networks               |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------+--------+------------+-------------+------------------------+
| 3d4a79d1-53ea-4f32-b496-fbdcbbb6a5a3 | overcloud-controller-0  | ACTIVE | -          | Running     | ctlplane=192.168.24.16 |
| 4f8acb6d-6394-4193-a6c6-50d8731fad7d | overcloud-novacompute-0 | ACTIVE | -          | Running     | ctlplane=192.168.24.8  |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------+--------+------------+-------------+------------------------+

The address is randomly assigned and depends on the deployment environment. In this case the compute node has the address 192.168.24.8. Logging in to any of the nodes is possible with the tripleo-admin user. This user has full sudo rights on all the overcloud nodes and the undercloud is set up to login with public key authentication:

ssh tripleo-admin@192.168.24.8

The node can be also accessed by a static hostname of overcloud-novacompute-0.ctlplane in newer versions of OpenStack.

SSH Port Forwarding¶

You can forward specific ports from your localhost to addresses on the overcloud network. For example, to access the overcloud Horizon interface, you could run:

ssh -F $HOME/.quickstart/ssh.config.ansible \
  -L 8080:overcloud.localdomain:80 undercloud

This uses the ssh -L command line option to forward port 8080 on your local host to port 80 on the overcloud.localdomain host (which is defined in /etc/hosts on the undercloud). Once you have connected to the undercloud like this, you can then point your browser at http://localhost:8080 to access Horizon.

You can add multiple -L arguments to the ssh command line to expose multiple services.

SSH Dynamic Proxy¶

You can configure ssh as a SOCKS5 proxy with the -D command line option. For example, to start a proxy on port 1080:

ssh -F $HOME/.quickstart/ssh.config.ansible \
  -D 1080 undercloud

You can now use this proxy to access any overcloud resources. With curl, that would look something like this:

$ curl --socks5-hostname localhost:1080 http://overcloud.localdomain:5000/
{"versions": {"values": [{"status": "stable", "updated": "2016-04-04T00:00:00Z",...

Access to the overclouds horizon web interface¶

With baremetal and ovb based deployments you can access horizon via the overclouds’s controller public ip address http://<controller_ip>:80

Deploying TripleO in a libvirt based environment presents an additional challenge of access the isolated ovs networks on the undercloud. By default an ssh-tunnel service has been setup on the virthost with the tripleo-quickstart for libvirt deployments. Access horizon with the following.

From the localhost:

http://<virthost>:8181

Overcloud with SSL enabled

http://<virthost>:8443

Using Firefox¶

You can configure Firefox to use a SOCKS5 proxy. You may want to create create a new profile for this so that you don’t impact your normal browsing.

Select Edit -> Preferences
Select the “Advanced” tab from the list on the left of the window
Select the “Network” tab from the list across the top of the window
Select the “Settings…” button in the “Connection” section
Select “Manual proxy configuration:” in the “Connection Settings” dialog.
Enter localhost in the “SOCKS Host” field, and enter 1080 (or whatever port you supplied to the ssh -D option) in the “Port:” field.
Select the “SOCKS5” radio button, and check the “Remote DNS” checkbox.

Now, if you enter http://overcloud.localdomain/ in your browser, you will be able to access the overcloud Horizon instance. Note that you will probably need to enter the full URL; entering an unqualified hostname into the location bar will redirect to a search engine rather than attempting to contact the website.

Using Chrome¶

It is not possible to configure a proxy connection using the Chrome UI without using an extension. You can set things up from the command line by using these instructions, which boil down to starting Chrome like this:

google-chrome --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:1080" \
  --host-resolver-rules="MAP * 0.0.0.0"

sshuttle¶

The sshuttle tool is something halfway between a VPN and a proxy server, and can be used to give your local host direct access to the overcloud network.

Note the network range used by the overcloud servers; this will be the value of undercloud_network in your configuration, which as of this writing defaults for historical reasons to 192.0.2.0/24.
Install the sshuttle package if you don’t already have it

Run sshuttle:

sshuttle \
  -e "ssh -F $HOME/.quickstart/ssh.config.ansible" \
  -r undercloud -v 192.0.2.0/24

(Where 192.0.2.0/24 should be replaced by whatever address range you noted in the first step.)

With this in place, your local host can access any address on the overcloud network. Hostname resolution will not work, but since the generated credentials files use ip addresses this should not present a problem.

CLI access with tsocks¶

If you want to use command line tools like the openstack integrated client to access overcloud API services, you can use tsocks, which uses function interposition to redirect all network access to a SOCKS proxy.

Install the tsocks package if you don’t already have it available.
Create a $HOME/.tsocks configuration file with the following content:
```
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 1080
```
Set the TSOCKS_CONF_FILE environment variable to point to this configuration file:
```
export TSOCKS_CONF_FILE=$HOME/.tsocks
```

Use the tsocks command to wrap your command invocations:

$ tsocks openstack flavor list
+----+-----------+-------+------+-----------+-------+-----------+
| ID | Name      |   RAM | Disk | Ephemeral | VCPUs | Is Public |
+----+-----------+-------+------+-----------+-------+-----------+
| 1  | m1.tiny   |   512 |    1 |         0 |     1 | True      |
| 2  | m1.small  |  2048 |   20 |         0 |     1 | True      |
| 3  | m1.medium |  4096 |   40 |         0 |     2 | True      |
| 4  | m1.large  |  8192 |   80 |         0 |     4 | True      |
| 5  | m1.xlarge | 16384 |  160 |         0 |     8 | True      |
+----+-----------+-------+------+-----------+-------+-----------+

This solution is known to work with the openstack integrated client, and known to fail with many of the legacy clients (such as the nova or keystone commands).

Accessing the Overcloud