Creating host endpoint objects

For each host endpoint that you want Calico Cloud to secure, you'll need to create a host endpoint object in etcd. Use the calicoctl create command to create a host endpoint resource (HostEndpoint).

There are two ways to specify the interface that a host endpoint should refer to. You can either specify the name of the interface or its expected IP address. In either case, you'll also need to know the name given to the Calico Cloud node running on the host that owns the interface; in most cases this will be the same as the hostname of the host.

For example, to secure the interface named eth0 with IP 10.0.0.1 on host my-host, run the command below. The name of the endpoint is an arbitrary name required for endpoint identification.

When running this command, replace the placeholders in angle brackets with appropriate values for your deployment.

calicoctl create -f - <<EOF
- apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
  kind: HostEndpoint
  metadata:
    name: <name of endpoint>
    labels:
      role: webserver
      environment: production
  spec:
    interfaceName: eth0
    node: <node name or hostname>
    profiles: [<list of profile IDs>]
    expectedIPs: ["10.0.0.1"]
EOF

note

Felix tries to detect the correct hostname for a system. It logs out the value it has determined at start-of-day in the following format: 2015-10-20 17:42:09,813 \[INFO\]\[30149/5\] calico.felix.config 285: Parameter FelixHostname (Felix compute host hostname) has value 'my-hostname' read from None The value (in this case 'my-hostname') needs to match the hostname used in etcd. Ideally, the host's system hostname should be set correctly but if that's not possible, the Felix value can be overridden with the FelixHostname configuration setting. See configuration for more details.

Where <list of profile IDs> is an optional list of security profiles to apply to the endpoint and labels contains a set of arbitrary key/value pairs that can be used in selector expressions.

note

When rendering security rules on other hosts, Calico Cloud uses the expectedIPs field to resolve label selectors to IP addresses. If the expectedIPs field is omitted then security rules that use labels will fail to match this endpoint. Or, if you knew that the IP address should be 10.0.0.1, but not the name of the interface:

calicoctl create -f - <<EOF
- apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
  kind: HostEndpoint
  metadata:
    name: <name of endpoint>
    labels:
      role: webserver
      environment: production
  spec:
    node: <node name or hostname>
    profiles: [<list of profile IDs>]
    expectedIPs: ["10.0.0.1"]
EOF

After you create host endpoint objects, Felix will start policing traffic to/from that interface. If you have no policy or profiles in place, then you should see traffic being dropped on the interface.

note

By default, Calico Cloud has a failsafe in place that allows certain traffic such as ssh. See below for more details on disabling/configuring the failsafe rules.

If you don't see traffic being dropped, check the hostname, IP address and (if used) the interface name in the configuration. If there was something wrong with the endpoint data, Felix will log a validation error at WARNING level and it will ignore the endpoint:

A grep through the Felix logs for the string "Validation failed" should allow you to locate the error.

grep "Validation failed" /var/log/calico/felix.log

An example error follows.

2016-05-31 12:16:21,651 [WARNING][8657/3] calico.felix.fetcd 1017:
    Validation failed for host endpoint HostEndpointId<eth0>, treating as
    missing: 'name' or 'expected_ipvX_addrs' must be present.;
    '{ "labels": {"foo": "bar"}, "profile_ids": ["prof1"]}'

The error can be quite long but it should log the precise cause of the rejection; in this case 'name' or 'expected\_ipvX\_addrs' must be present tells us that either the interface's name or its expected IP address must be specified.