Help Needed: Troubleshooting Network and Communication Issues Connecting Jenkins to Intel Server

[judywatson]

Hello everyone,

I'm seeking some assistance in troubleshooting a rather vexing problem I've encountered while attempting to connect Jenkins to an Intel server. Despite numerous attempts and configurations, I'm facing persistent network and communication issues that are impeding the successful integration of Jenkins with the Intel server.

The objective is to establish a seamless connection between Jenkins and the Intel server to facilitate automated build and deployment processes. However, despite ensuring compatibility and following standard procedures, the connection seems to falter at crucial points.

I've meticulously reviewed network settings, ensured proper configurations on both ends, and even consulted various documentation sources to troubleshoot the problem. Regrettably, the issue persists, and I'm finding it challenging to pinpoint the root cause.

The nature of the problem is elusive, making it difficult to isolate whether it's a configuration mismatch, a network protocol issue, or something else entirely. I've attempted various approaches, but so far, none have yielded the desired outcome of a stable and functional connection between Jenkins and the Intel server.

Has anyone encountered similar hurdles while attempting to link Jenkins with an Intel server? If so, what steps or strategies did you employ to overcome these network and communication obstacles? Any insights, tips, or experiences shared would be immensely valuable in diagnosing and resolving this connectivity issue.

I'm eager to hear from individuals who may have navigated similar challenges or possess expertise in Jenkins and server integrations. Any advice, troubleshooting methodologies, or recommended resources that could aid in identifying and rectifying the underlying issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all in advance for your time and expertise. Your input and shared experiences will be immensely beneficial in addressing these perplexing network and communication challenges encountered while trying to connect Jenkins to an Intel server.

[dar10]

Hi @judywatson 

There could be a number of reasons that prevent a seamless connection between your Jenkins infrastructure and your Intel server. I am assuming these are both hosted on compute engine instances deployed on different VPCs in different GCP projects, correct?

A high level overview of your network architecture—ideally with a picture, but in textual form would also work—would be very helpful to restrict the potential root cause of your issue.

In the meantime, I am going to itemize some candidates:

1. Misconfigured Firewall rules
2. If you are using VPC Service Controls, Service Perimeter potentially misconfigured.
3. IAM permission issues, i.e. the service account being used by your Jenkins CI/CD pipeline is not authorized to consume the compute engine API - compute.googleapis.com

For 3 you can use the Policy troubleshooter to nail down the issue as explained well in chapter 8 of my book.

For 1,2 you can use the Network Intelligence Center and the section "Maintaining and Troubleshooting Connectivity Issues" in chapter 8 of my book as well. 

I hope this helps!

[chrisiaconetti]

Hi @judywatson,

We've experienced an issue that sounds similar to yours. We currently are running a Jenkins server hosted in a GCP compute engine instance. The server creates worker nodes on GCP in the same VPC using the Jenkins Google Compute Engine plugin. We've noticed a sporadic loss of network connectivity on the worker nodes created by the server. The server creates both Windows Server and Redhat worker nodes and we've noticed the error much more frequently on the Windows instances. The error usually manifests as a timeout when connecting to resources on the internet, or an inability for the worker node to resolve a DNS name. We've connected to these instances when an error occurs and have observed the issue persisting. For example, we've seen a pipeline job fail on a worker node because it could not obtain resources from the internet, have connected to the worker node via serial console (we often can't connect via ssh/RDP when the error is occurring), and have attempted to run `nslookup google.com` in a command prompt on the worker node and have observed that failing.

We can't reproduce the issue on demand, but it happens fairly frequently. Our server creates worker node instances based on demand and tears them down when not needed, and we observe the error happening in maybe 2% of created instances. We've similarly inspected documentation + our setup in GCP and can't spot a clear root cause for the issue.

Does your issue sound similar to this? Are your intel servers running Windows?