feat(pihole): two replicas on different nodes, and fix a PVC mounted where pihole never writes
Phase 2 of making LAN DNS survive a node failure. Pihole was one pod on one node; measured 2026-10-04, losing that node meant roughly 6-10 minutes with no LAN resolution (tolerationSeconds 300 + NotReady detection + a Longhorn RWO force-detach), while losing the node holding the pihole-dns L2 lease -- a DIFFERENT node -- meant tens of seconds. Two of three nodes were single points of failure with wildly different blast radii. Adds `availability.replicas` to the ServiceDefinition schema (1.10.0). Intent only; the mechanism is render.py's, documented in the renderer contract. 1 or absent renders a Deployment exactly as before -- verified byte-identical across the whole apps/ tree. >1 renders a StatefulSet (a longhorn PVC is RWO, so a multi-replica Deployment never schedules the second pod), per-replica volumeClaimTemplates, REQUIRED hostname anti-affinity, podManagementPolicy Parallel, a minAvailable:1 PodDisruptionBudget, and an SLI that follows the rendered kind (a Deployment-shaped rule against a StatefulSet absent()s forever). Pinned by ~20 new --selftest assertions rather than a conformance change. ALSO FIXES A LIVE BUG. Pihole's config PVC was mounted at the renderer default /data/config, but pihole writes to /etc/pihole. Measured: /etc/pihole (7.1M -- gravity.db, pihole.toml, query DB) was on the OVERLAY, while the 2Gi Longhorn volume held lost+found and 24K of nothing. So every restart discarded all state and re-downloaded 72k gravity domains, and backup.policy has been backing up an empty volume while reporting success. Fixed here because otherwise the new per-replica volumes would hold nothing while state stayed ephemeral -- and because persisting gravity.db is what makes a restart cheap. The /etc/pihole mount is safe on the image's own evidence: start.sh is PID 1 as uid 0 and chowns the directory recursively (no fsGroup needed), and it calls migrate_gravity which creates the database when absent. The gate caught a real regression on the first run: the wave-0 alert unit test fed pihole a Deployment-shaped series. Updated; promtool SUCCESS. Touches no sensitive paths, so this one needs no override. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
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@@ -12,6 +12,42 @@ storage:
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- name: config
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size: 2Gi
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class: longhorn # replicated config state; DR-critical (docs/04 line 118; R-STATE-02/03)
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# THE PVC WAS MOUNTED SOMEWHERE PIHOLE NEVER WRITES, AND SO HELD NOTHING AT ALL. Without an
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# explicit mountPath the renderer defaults to /data/<name>, i.e. /data/config — but PiHole keeps
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# every piece of its state in /etc/pihole. MEASURED on live prod 2026-10-04: `/etc/pihole` (7.1 M
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# — gravity.db, pihole.toml, the query DB) was on the **overlay** filesystem, i.e. the
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# container's EPHEMERAL layer, while `/dev/longhorn/pvc-849edb86...` sat mounted at
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# /data/config holding `lost+found` and 24 K of nothing. Three consequences, all live until now:
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# * every restart silently discarded PiHole's whole state, re-downloading 72 k gravity domains
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# and regenerating the admin password hash;
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# * `backup.policy: daily-offcluster` below has been faithfully backing up an EMPTY volume,
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# which is worse than no backup because it reports success;
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# * it is also why phase 1's password/adlist declaration mattered more than it first appeared —
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# that state was not merely undeclared, it was ephemeral.
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# This is the same class of bug catalog/plex.yaml's `config` entry documents ("Without this the
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# PVC sat unused and Plex wrote to the container's EPHEMERAL layer").
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#
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# /etc/pihole IS THE IMAGE'S INTENDED MOUNT POINT, and an EMPTY volume there self-initialises.
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# Verified in the running image, not assumed:
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# * `/usr/bin/start.sh` (PID 1) calls `migrate_gravity`, whose `migrate_to_database()` creates
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# the gravity database when `[ ! -e "$gravityDBfile" ]` — the same branch the postStart hook
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# below relies on, and the branch that produced the current ephemeral copy.
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# * FTL writes `pihole.toml` itself from the `FTLCONF_*` env above (that is what the
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# `### CHANGED (env)` markers in it are).
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# * NO `podSecurityContext.fsGroup` is needed and adding one would be inert: `start.sh` line 5
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# is `chown -R pihole:pihole /etc/pihole/ /var/log/pihole/` and PID 1 runs as **uid 0**, so
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# the image fixes ownership of a fresh root-owned volume before anything else starts. Same
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# arrangement as plex's image managing its own /config ownership.
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# * the image's own default for `files.macvendor` was moved OUT of this directory (to
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# `/macvendor.db`), which is what a maintainer does to a path they expect to be a volume.
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#
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# WHY IT IS FIXED IN THIS BRANCH rather than left for its own: `availability.replicas: 2` renders
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# per-replica volumeClaimTemplates, and with the wrong mountPath those would be two 2 Gi Longhorn
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# volumes (times three Longhorn replicas each) holding nothing but `lost+found` while all state
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# stayed ephemeral — paying the cost of persistence and getting none of it. It also REMOVES this
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# change's main operational risk: with gravity.db persisted, a pod restart is cheap, instead of
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# every restart re-downloading 72 k domains inside a wave that has a 5 m timeout.
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mountPath: /etc/pihole
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dependencies: [] # default-deny: reaches only DNS; it PROVIDES DNS (docs/03; R-NET-01/02)
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# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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# LAN SPLIT-HORIZON DNS — the half of R-DNS-03 that platform/coredns/coredns-custom.yaml defers to.
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@@ -114,6 +150,39 @@ env:
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secretKeyRef:
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name: pihole-bootstrap
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key: webui-password
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availability:
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# TWO REPLICAS, ON DIFFERENT NODES. LAN DNS is a critical network service and it was ONE pod on
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# ONE node. Measured 2026-10-04, that cost more than "until it reschedules":
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# * the node running the pod dies -> ~40s to mark it NotReady, then `tolerationSeconds: 300`
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# before the pod is even evicted, then reschedule, then Longhorn must force-detach the RWO
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# volume from a dead node and reattach it. Roughly 6-10 MINUTES with no LAN resolution.
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# * the node holding the `pihole-dns-*` L2 lease dies -> Cilium re-elects an announcer, tens of
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# seconds. (These were DIFFERENT nodes: lease on k3s-prod-2, pod on k3s-prod-1. Two of three
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# nodes were single points of failure for LAN DNS, with wildly different blast radii.)
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# The Services already tolerate this: `externalTrafficPolicy: Cluster` on the DNS LoadBalancers
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# (apps/wave-0/pihole-dns.yaml) means the L2 lease holder forwards to ANY ready backend, so a
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# second replica is picked up with no change there.
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#
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# WHAT THIS DOES NOT FIX, and it is the bigger risk: LAN DNS still depends on the CLUSTER. etcd
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# quorum loss, a Cilium regression, a Longhorn problem or a bad reconcile takes DNS down
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# everywhere regardless of replica count. The only thing that removes that dependency is a
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# resolver outside the cluster carrying the same `address=` lines. Considered and not chosen
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# (operator decision, 2026-10-04); see decisions/2026-10-04-pihole-multi-replica.md.
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#
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# THE PREREQUISITE WAS DONE FIRST, and this field would have been actively harmful without it. A
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# replica gets a FRESH volume, and until 2026-10-04 PiHole's admin password and adlists lived only
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# on the PVC — so replica 1 would have come up SERVING DNS AND BLOCKING NOTHING, with a different
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# password, and answers would have varied by which pod replied. Both are now declared (the
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# password as a SOPS Secret -> FTLCONF_webserver_api_password; the adlists reconciled into
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# gravity.db by the postStart hook below), which is what makes a fresh replica identical to its
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# sibling. See decisions/2026-10-04-pihole-declare-state.md.
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#
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# WHY 2 AND NOT 3. Two tolerates the loss of any single node, which is the stated goal, and leaves
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# a spare node for the evicted replica to land on under the HARD anti-affinity the renderer emits.
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# Three would pin one replica per node with no spare, so a single node failure would leave a
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# replica permanently Pending and — `apps-wave-0` being `wait: true` — stall the app tier for as
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# long as the node was down. Two is the count that degrades gracefully here.
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replicas: 2
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ingressRoutes:
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- host: pihole.${BASE_DOMAIN}
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port: 80 # admin web UI, protected at the Gateway by forward-auth (docs/09)
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