We have a check to rewrite the config properly when a failover is in
progress, in order to add the current (already failed over) master as
slave, and don't include in the slave list the promoted slave itself.
However there was an issue, the variable with the right address was
computed but never used when the code was modified, and no tests are
available for this feature for two reasons:
1. The Sentinel unit test currently does not test Sentinel ability to
persist its state at all.
2. It is a very hard to trigger state since it lasts for little time in
the context of the testing framework.
However this feature should be covered in the test in some way.
The bug was found by @badboy using the clang static analyzer.
Effects of the bug on safety of Sentinel
===
This bug results in severe issues in the following case:
1. A Sentinel is elected leader.
2. During the failover, it persists a wrong config with a known-slave
entry listing the master address.
3. The Sentinel crashes and restarts, reading invalid configuration from
disk.
4. It sees that the slave now does not obey the logical configuration
(should replicate from the current master), so it sends a SLAVEOF
command to the master (since the slave master is the same) creating a
replication loop (attempt to replicate from itself) which Redis is
currently unable to detect.
5. This means that the master is no longer available because of the bug.
However the lack of availability should be only transient (at least
in my tests, but other states could be possible where the problem
is not recovered automatically) because:
6. Sentinels treat masters reporting to be slaves as failing.
7. A new failover is triggered, and a slave is promoted to master.
Bug lifetime
===
The bug is there forever. Commit 16237d78 actually tried to fix the bug
but in the wrong way (the computed variable was never used! My fault).
So this bug is there basically since the start of Sentinel.
Since the bug is hard to trigger, I remember little reports matching
this condition, but I remember at least a few. Also in automated tests
where instances were stopped and restarted multiple times automatically
I remember hitting this issue, however I was not able to reproduce nor
to determine with the information I had at the time what was causing the
issue.
The PING trigger was improved again by using two fields instead of a
single one to remember when the last ping was sent:
1. The "active" ping is the time at which we sent the last ping that
still received no reply. However we continue to ping non replying
instances even if they have an old active ping: the link may be
disconnected and reconencted in the meantime so the older pings may get
lost even if it's a TCP socket.
2. The "last" ping is the time at which we really sent the last ping
on the wire, and this is used in order to throttle the amount of pings
we send during failures (when no pong is received).
All in all the failure detector effectiveness should be identical but we
avoid to flood instances with pings during failures or when they are
slow.
It's ok to ping as soon as the ping period has elapsed since we received
the last PONG, but it's not good that we ping again if there is a
pending ping... With this change we'll send a new ping if there is one
pending only if two times the ping period elapsed since the ping which
is still pending was sent.
This is useful for debugging and logging activities: given a
sentinelRedisInstance object returns a C string representing the
instance type: master, slave, sentinel.
This new command triggers a config flush to save the in-memory config to
disk. This is useful for cases of a configuration management system or a
package manager wiping out your sentinel config while the process is
still running - and has not yet been restarted. It can also be useful
for scripting a backup and migrate or clone of a running sentinel.
Since with a previous commit Sentinels now persist their unique ID, we
no longer need to detect duplicated Sentinels and re-add them. We remove
and re-add back using different events only in the case of address
switch of the same Sentinel, without generating a new +sentinel event.
Previously Sentinels always changed unique ID across restarts, relying
on the server.runid field. This is not a good idea, and forced Sentinel
to rely on detection of duplicated Sentinels and a potentially dangerous
clean-up and re-add operation of the Sentinel instance that was
rebooted.
Now the ID is generated at the first start and persisted in the
configuration file, so that a given Sentinel will have its unique
ID forever (unless the configuration is manually deleted or there is a
filesystem corruption).
Originally, only the +slave event which occurs when a slave is
reconfigured during sentinelResetMasterAndChangeAddress triggers a flush
of the config to disk. However, newly discovered slaves don't
apparently trigger this flush but do trigger the +slave event issuance.
So if you start up a sentinel, add a master, then add a slave to the
master (as a way to reproduce it) you'll see the +slave event issued,
but the sentinel config won't be updated with the known-slave entry.
This change makes sentinel do the flush of the config if a new slave is
deteted in sentinelRefreshInstanceInfo.
To rewrite the config in the loop that adds slaves back after a master
reset, in order to handle switching to another master, is useless: it
just adds latency since there is an fsync call in the inner loop,
without providing any additional guarantee, but the contrary, since if
after the first loop iteration the server crashes we end with just a
single slave entry losing all the other informations.
It is wiser to rewrite the config at the end when the full new
state is configured.
When trying to debug sentinel connections or max connections errors it
would be very useful to have the ability to see the list of connected
clients to a running sentinel. At the same time it would be very helpful
to be able to name each sentinel connection or kill offending clients.
This commits adds the already defined CLIENT commands back to Redis
Sentinel.
