Re: [PATCH 0/2] namespaces: log namespaces per task

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2014-05-06 at 03:27 +0000, Serge Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting James Bottomley (James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com):
> > >> Right, but when the contaner has an audit namespace, that namespace
> > >has
> > >> a name,
> > >
> > >What ns has a name?
> > 
> > The netns for instance.
> 
> And what is its name?

As I think you know ip netns list will show you all of them.  The way
they're applied is via mapped files in /var/run/netns/ which hold the
names.

>   The only name I know that we could log in an
> audit message is the /proc/self/ns/net inode number (which does not
> suffice)

OK, so I think this is the confusion: You're thinking the container
itself doesn't know what name the namespace has been given by the
system, all it knows is the inode number corresponding to a file which
it may or may not be able to see, right?  I'm thinking that the system
that set up the container gave those files names and usually they're the
same name for all the namespaces.  The point is that the orchestration
system (whatever set up the container) will be responsible for the
migration.  It will be the thing that has a unique handle for the
container.  The handle is usually ascii representable, either a human
readable name or some uuid/guid.  It's that handle that we should be
using to prefix the audit message, so when you set up an audit
namespace, it gets supplied with a prefix string corresponding to the
well known name for the container.  This is the string we'd preserve
across migration as part of the audit namespace state ... so the audit
messages all correlate to the container wherever it's migrated to; no
need to do complex tracking of changes to serial numbers.

> > >  The audit ns can be tied to 50 pid namespaces, and
> > >we
> > >want to log which pidns is responsible for something.
> > >
> > >If you mean the pidns has a name, that's the problem...  it does not,
> > >it
> > >only has a inode # which may later be re-use.
> > 
> > I still think there's a miscommunication somewhere: I believe you just need a stable id to tie the audit to, so why not just give the audit namespace a name like net?  The id would then be durable across migrations.
> 
> Maybe this is where we're confusing each other - I'm not talking
> about giving the audit ns a name.  I'm talking about being able to
> identify the other namespaces inside an audit message.  In a way
> that (a) is unique across bare metals' entire uptime, and (b)
> can be tracked across migrations.

OK, so that is different from what I'm thinking.  I'm thinking unique
name for migrateable entity, you want a unique name for each component
of the migrateable entity?  My instinct still tells me the orchestration
system is going to have a unique identifier for each different sub
container.

However, I have to point out that a serial number isn't what you want
either if you really mean bare metal.  We do a lot of deployments where
the containers run in a hypervisor, there the serial numbers won't be
unique per box (only per vm) and we'll have to do vm correlation
separately.  whereas a scheme which allows the orchestration system to
supply the names would still be unique in that situation.

James