Troubleshooting

These tips can help you troubleshoot known issues. If they don’t help, you can file an issue, or talk to us on the #ark-dr channel on the Kubernetes Slack server.

See also:

• Debug installation/setup issues
• Debug restores

General troubleshooting information

In ark version >= 0.1.0, you can use the ark bug command to open a Github issue by launching a browser window with some prepopulated values. Values included are OS, CPU architecture, kubectl client and server versions (if available) and the ark client version. This information isn’t submitted to Github until you click the Submit new issue button in the Github UI, so feel free to add, remove or update whatever information you like.

Some general commands for troubleshooting that may be helpful:

• ark backup describe <backupName> - describe the details of a backup
• ark backup logs <backupName> - fetch the logs for this specific backup. Useful for viewing failures and warnings, including resources that could not be backed up.
• ark restore describe <restoreName> - describe the details of a restore
• ark restore logs <restoreName> - fetch the logs for this specific restore. Useful for viewing failures and warnings, including resources that could not be restored.
• kubectl logs deployment/ark -n heptio-ark - fetch the logs of the Ark server pod. This provides the output of the Ark server processes.

Getting ark debug logs

You can increase the verbosity of the Ark server by editing your Ark deployment to look like this:

kubectl edit deployment/ark -n heptio-ark
...
   containers:
     - name: ark
       image: gcr.io/heptio-images/ark:latest
       command:
         - /ark
       args:
         - server
         - --log-level # Add this line
         - debug       # Add this line
...

Known issue with restoring LoadBalancer Service

Because of how Kubernetes handles Service objects of type=LoadBalancer, when you restore these objects you might encounter an issue with changed values for Service UIDs. Kubernetes automatically generates the name of the cloud resource based on the Service UID, which is different when restored, resulting in a different name for the cloud load balancer. If the DNS CNAME for your application points to the DNS name of your cloud load balancer, you’ll need to update the CNAME pointer when you perform an Ark restore.

Alternatively, you might be able to use the Service’s spec.loadBalancerIP field to keep connections valid, if your cloud provider supports this value. See the Kubernetes documentation about Services of Type LoadBalancer.

Miscellaneous issues

Ark reports custom resource not found errors when starting up.

Ark’s server will not start if the required Custom Resource Definitions are not found in Kubernetes. Apply the config/common/00-prereqs.yaml file to create these definitions, then restart Ark.

ark backup logs returns a SignatureDoesNotMatch error

Downloading artifacts from object storage utilizes temporary, signed URLs. In the case of S3-compatible providers, such as Ceph, there may be differences between their implementation and the official S3 API that cause errors.

Here are some things to verify if you receive SignatureDoesNotMatch errors:

• Make sure your S3-compatible layer is using signature version 4 (such as Ceph RADOS v12.2.7)
• For Ceph, try using a native Ceph account for credentials instead of external providers such as OpenStack Keystone