Can't use ping command in Google Cloud Dataflow vm?

Question

I am unable to use the ping command after SSHing into my Google Cloud Dataflow worker Compute Engine instance in order to verify connectivity to a VPN tunnel. I receive the following error:

bash: ping: command not found

on any attempts to ping a server. I have enabled Private Google Access as well as disabled public IPs but I was under the impression that I would still be able to use the ping command. I've also noticed that this VM uses the Dataflow.network tag, but this makes sense as it is a Dataflow job. Is there a specific configuration required in order to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

The workers that are run as part of dataflow service are private docker images running on COS.

To run ping command you will need to do the following:-

1. SSH Into the worker

2. Run a docker ps command to get the list of containers that are running

3. Identify the container image which has the following image gcr.io/cloud-dataflow/v1beta3/....

4. Run the command docker exec -it image_id /bin/bash

Finally you can run a ping from inside the container as below

xxxxxxxx ~ $ docker exec -it yyyyyy /bin/bash

xxxxxx:/# ping google.com
PING google.com (172.217.212.113) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.217.212.113: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=0.951 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.212.113: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=0.967 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.212.113: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=0.758 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.212.113: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=0.943 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.212.113: icmp_seq=5 ttl=52 time=0.970 ms