Network Blackholing

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 12, 2020
 

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Why does Chromium take 5 minutes when instance is not connected to the internet?

For users who would like to keep very secure networks for their Looker instance, it is possible for them to create network settings that result in network blackholing, which is the process of discarding incoming or outgoing traffic. When this happens we can have processes like Chromium wait for a timeout before completing their tasks.

We have see this primarily with Chromium tasks. When trying to perform a Chromium task, we would have about 4 minutes of unaccounted time where we are waiting for a response back from Google Analytics or ping.looker.com. After this response is timed out, Chromium performs its task as expected, but happens slowly.

The way to fix this is to immediately reject this traffic or disable it in the first place. Some ways to accomplish this are:

  1. Reach out to Looker Support to enable the license feature `disable_tracking` to stop usage pings from going out if the requests are getting stuck on ping.looker.com.
  2. Create a list of requests to reject immediately. This list is prone to change over time, so longterm may not be a good option.

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Version history
Last update:
‎07-07-2021 01:13 PM
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