Description of problem:

we observe frequent failures of the network-node-identity validating webhook (OVN-Kubernetes) from the API server to https://127.0.0.1:9743 with connect: connection refused and timeouts, plus etcd “apply request took too long” warnings and “leader overloaded likely from slow disk / overloaded network” messages. At least once, nodes lost the kubernetes.io/hostname label, exacerbating control plane degradation.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

How reproducible:
Multiple clusters are effected by this.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Update Openshift.

2. Reboot

3. CNI is missing or `kubernetes.io/hostname` label disappears.

Actual results:

On random nodes across 4 clusters, /etc/kubernetes/cni/net.d/ lost 00-multus.conf and multus.d/ contents.

API server logs show webhook failures to network-node-identity.openshift.io (127.0.0.1:9743) during the incident window (failing closed, 10s timeout).

etcd logs show sustained latency (“apply request took too long”, “leader overloaded likely from slow disk/overloaded network”).

In at least one incident, nodes lost kubernetes.io/hostname.

After restoring files and rebooting nodes, clusters stabilized.

Expected results:
CNO/Multus to maintain CNI configs on every node.
The OVN node-identity webhook must not block or indirectly lead to removal of CNI configs or loss of critical node labels.
Transient etcd or webhook issues should degrade gracefully without destructive side effects on node CNI state.

Additional info:

Workloads fail to create pod sandboxes; network operators degraded; DNS SERVFAIL bursts and upstream i/o timeouts from CoreDNS; cluster instability.

Requires mass node reboots and manual file restoration to recover.

Multi-cluster scope raises risk of recurrence during upgrades or transient control-plane load.

Affected Platforms:

Is it an

1. internal CI failure
2. customer issue / SD
3. internal RedHat testing failure

If it is an internal RedHat testing failure:

• Please share a kubeconfig or creds to a live cluster for the assignee to debug/troubleshoot along with reproducer steps (specially if it's a telco use case like ICNI, secondary bridges or BM+kubevirt).

If it is a CI failure:

• Did it happen in different CI lanes? If so please provide links to multiple failures with the same error instance
• Did it happen in both sdn and ovn jobs? If so please provide links to multiple failures with the same error instance
• Did it happen in other platforms (e.g. aws, azure, gcp, baremetal etc) ? If so please provide links to multiple failures with the same error instance
• When did the failure start happening? Please provide the UTC timestamp of the networking outage window from a sample failure run
• If it's a connectivity issue,
• What is the srcNode, srcIP and srcNamespace and srcPodName?
• What is the dstNode, dstIP and dstNamespace and dstPodName?
• What is the traffic path? (examples: pod2pod? pod2external?, pod2svc? pod2Node? etc)

If it is a customer / SD issue:

• Provide enough information in the bug description that Engineering doesn’t need to read the entire case history.
• Don’t presume that Engineering has access to Salesforce.
• Do presume that Engineering will access attachments through supportshell.
• Describe what each relevant attachment is intended to demonstrate (failed pods, log errors, OVS issues, etc).
• Referring to the attached must-gather, sosreport or other attachment, please provide the following details:
  • If the issue is in a customer namespace then provide a namespace inspect.
  • If it is a connectivity issue:
    • What is the srcNode, srcNamespace, srcPodName and srcPodIP?
    • What is the dstNode, dstNamespace, dstPodName and dstPodIP?
    • What is the traffic path? (examples: pod2pod? pod2external?, pod2svc? pod2Node? etc)
    • Please provide the UTC timestamp networking outage window from must-gather
    • Please provide tcpdump pcaps taken during the outage filtered based on the above provided src/dst IPs
  • If it is not a connectivity issue:
    • Describe the steps taken so far to analyze the logs from networking components (cluster-network-operator, OVNK, SDN, openvswitch, ovs-configure etc) and the actual component where the issue was seen based on the attached must-gather. Please attach snippets of relevant logs around the window when problem has happened if any.

• When showing the results from commands, include the entire command in the output.  
• For OCPBUGS in which the issue has been identified, label with “sbr-triaged”
• For OCPBUGS in which the issue has not been identified and needs Engineering help for root cause, label with “sbr-untriaged”
• Do not set the priority, that is owned by Engineering and will be set when the bug is evaluated
• Note: bugs that do not meet these minimum standards will be closed with label “SDN-Jira-template”
• For guidance on using this template please see
  OCPBUGS Template Training for Networking  components