Accessing a node

There are a variety of ways to connect to a aggregators and bonders for management or monitoring. Use any one of these methods to start a console session on a node.

When starting a console session, you will need to provide the node root password unless you have set up SSH public keys. To ease administration and improve security, we strongly recommend you set up public keys.

Aggregators and bonders

These methods are used to start a console session to both aggregators and bonders.

Management VPN IP

Nodes connect to the management server over a secure VPN, and this VPN can be used to connect back to the node. To find the IP address of the node’s VPN client, go to its node details page. From the bond or aggregator details page, click image0

The management VPN IP is shown in the Details panel. image1

To connect to the node, first start an SSH session to the management server. From this SSH session, you can ping or SSH to the node at its management VPN address.

Serial session

Connect a computer to the serial port and begin a console session. Refer to the device manufacturer’s documentation for the serial port settings.

Monitor and keyboard

Connect a monitor and keyboard to the appropriate ports on the device and begin a regular terminal session.

Bonders only

Bonders can be contacted by a few additional methods.

Legs

Public leg IPs can be used to connect to a bonder. For example, with a bond configured as follows:

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You could connect to the bonder at the public IP 203.0.113.1 on leg 1. However, the 10.8.0.1 IP on leg 7 is behind a NAT firewall, so it cannot be used to connect to the bonder.

Connected IPs

Public connected IPs can also be used to connect to a bonder. For example, with a bond configured as follows:

image3

You could connect to the bonder at the IP 203.0.13.245.

Tunnel private IP

You can also access the bonder directly from the aggregator it is currently assigned to. To see the IP the bonder is given on the aggregator, click the Show advanced link in the Details section of the bond details page.

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From the current aggregator, the bonder can be accessed via the IP address shown in the tunnel subnet field. This address can also be shown by running the ip command on the aggregator: ip addr show dev tun<bond ID>:

root@agg01:~# ip addr show dev tun1
11: tun1: <POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1403 qdisc htb state UNKNOWN qlen 500
    link/none
    inet 172.30.0.1 peer 172.30.0.0/32 scope global tun24

The “inet” and “peer” fields in this listing show that the IP on the local (aggregator) side of the tunnel is 172.30.0.1, and the IP on the remote (bonder) side of the tunnel is 172.30.0.0.

Troubleshooting IP

The IP address 10.207.35.254/29 is configured on bonders to ensure there is a known IP available on the device even if the bonding service fails to start. To connect to the bonder at this IP, physically connect a computer to the interface with the lowest MAC address. You can check your management server to see the MAC addresses of configured interfaces. You may have to try each port if you still can’t confirm which port has the lowest MAC address. Configure the computer with the IP address 10.207.35.250 and netmask 255.255.255.248. You should be able to connect to the bonder at the IP address 10.207.35.254.

Note

Prior to 6.6, the troubleshooting IP was always set on eth0. However on newer versions of debian eth0 may be named differently due to how predictable interface naming works. Instead the interface with the lowest MAC address is used. This forces the IP to be set on the same physical interface regardless of name.

Aggregators only

Public IP

You can connect to an aggregator over its public IP address, shown on the aggregator details page.

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