Deflake test-api job, currently failing at around 7.6% (44 out of 578
workflows), by ensuring that test nomad agent use a small dedicated port
range that doesn't conflict with the kernel ephemeral range.
The failures are disproportionatly related to port allocation, where a
nomad agent fails to start when the http port is already bound to
another process. The failures are intermitent and aren't specific to any
test in particular. The following is a representative failure:
https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/hashicorp/nomad/13995/workflows/6cf6eb38-f93c-46f8-8aa0-f61e62fe7694/jobs/128169
.
Upon investigation, the issue seems to be that the api freeport library
picks a port block within 10,000-14,500, but that overlaps with the
kernel ephemeral range 32,769-60,999! So, freeport may allocate a free
port to the nomad agent, just to be used by another process before the
nomad agent starts!
This happened for example in
https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/hashicorp/nomad/14111/workflows/e1fcd7ff-f0e0-4796-8719-f57f510b1ffa/jobs/129684
. `freeport` allocated port 41662 to serf, but `google_accounts`
raced to use it to connect to the CirleCI vm metadata service.
We avoid such races by using a dedicated port range that's disjoint from
the kernel ephemeral port range.
d9495d2b66