Invalid Metadata Requests on Google Compute Engine

0
votes

I am running a Google Compute Engine instance. About every ten seconds, I get a request from a local link address (such as 169.254.169.254) requesting metadata from my instance. The request is on the computeMetadata path, suggesting that google is trying an [to get meta data from my instance].

Why am I receiving these requests? Do I have compute engine configured incorrectly? Right now my app returns a 404, should it do something else?

This is the full request:

010.240.059.243.48574-169.254.169.254.00080: GET /computeMetadata/v1beta1/instance/network-interfaces/0/public-endpoint-ips?alt=text&wait_for_change=true&timeout_sec=60&last_etag=NONE HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: identity
Host: metadata
Connection: close
User-Agent: Python-urllib/2.7
1
httpmetadatagoogle-compute-engine

1 Answers

1
votes

The images provided by default on GCE will automatically configure themselves based on data returned by the metadata server.

This particular request is to find IPs that are forwarded to this instance as part of Load Balancing. Basically, the script at /usr/share/google/google_daemon/manage_addresses.py will continually wait for new IP addresses to be forwarded to this instance. Once it notices a new incoming IP (as indicated by the metadata server) it will configure the instances network stack to respond to that IP.

The question in my mind is: why are you seeing these? Are you doing something interesting to capture the requests sent to that address? These should be completely transparent to any application.