feat(pihole): authoritative LAN DNS for the zone on udp/53 + tcp/53 at a pinned VIP

platform/coredns/coredns-custom.yaml has always said its split-horizon is for
PODS and deferred LAN clients to "PiHole split-horizon". PiHole served no DNS:
its Service was ClusterIP with ports 80 and 4180 only. The LAN half of R-DNS-03
that docs/09 and the README's Phase 2 row both claim did not exist, so LAN
clients ran on hand-maintained per-client dnsmasq files - one went stale after
the dev decommission and cost the operator sonarr.home.keithjackson.dev. The
SOHO router that owns 192.168.2.0/24 cannot cover for it either: it strips
RFC1918 answers for public domains as rebind protection and returns NOERROR
with no answer.

EXPOSURE (apps/wave-0/pihole-dns.yaml, hand-written, placed into wave 0 by
render.py's EXTRA_UNITS - the schema has no field for a LoadBalancer Service, a
pinned lbipam VIP, a sharing key, source ranges or UDP, the same reason
apps/vms/unifi and platform/crafty hand-write theirs):
  - two Services, udp/53 and tcp/53, sharing one pinned VIP
    ${PIHOLE_DNS_VIP} = 192.168.2.23 on prod, the next free address in the
    .20-.30 pool (pool status IPsUsed 3 of 11; .20 Gateway, .21 unifi, .22
    crafty; arping from a LAN host got no reply).
  - no external-dns hostname annotation: nothing public is created, and
    platform/externaldns/ is untouched.

ANSWERS (catalog/pihole.yaml env - declarative, no reconciler): PiHole v6 takes
every FTL setting as an FTLCONF_ environment variable and treats it as
env-forced, applied ahead of pihole.toml on every cold start and read-only in
the UI. That is a real declarative entry point, which the Keycloak and CNPG
CronJob reconcilers exist precisely because their state lacks, so a reconciler
here would be ceremony. misc.dnsmasq_lines carries a wildcard
address=/<zone>/<GATEWAY_VIP> plus one longer-domain override per L4 service
(unifi, crafty-mc, pihole-dns); dnsmasq resolves overlaps by longest matching
domain, so precedence is structural and a newly onboarded Gateway-fronted
service needs no DNS change. dns.upstreams is declared too - the live pod
carried hand-set upstreams that no manifest knew about and that every restart
discarded.

externalTrafficPolicy Cluster, NOT Local, and loadBalancerSourceRanges for the
LAN restriction. Measured on prod, Cilium 1.20.1: the L2 announcer does not
filter lease candidates by which nodes hold a backend - the two Services landed
on k3s-prod-3 and k3s-prod-2 while the pod ran on k3s-prod-1 - and it keeps
renewing after the pod moves away, so with Local a reschedule leaves LAN DNS
dead indefinitely. Cluster serves the VIP from any node; the LAN restriction
moves to loadBalancerSourceRanges, which Cilium enforces in eBPF on the VIP
before load-balancing (verified by narrowing the range to exclude the test
client and back). The cost is SNAT: forwarded queries reach PiHole from the
ingress node, so PiHole's per-client rate limit is disabled in the catalog or
the whole LAN would count as one client against its 1000-per-60s default.

Proven from a LAN host (192.168.2.132) against 192.168.2.23 with the pod and
both leases on three DIFFERENT nodes: sonarr/grafana/nextcloud/keycloak/apex
-> 192.168.2.20, unifi -> .21, crafty-mc -> .22, pihole-dns -> .23, recursion
(cloudflare.com, github.com, debian.org) intact over both udp and tcp, AAAA
NODATA, NXDOMAIN outside the zone, and still answering after a forced
prod-1 -> prod-2 reschedule.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
jakman85andClaude Opus 5 committed 2026-09-14 00:57:58 -05:00
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@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ bug but the honest answer, because proofs are claims about a specific tree on a
|---|---|
| 0 Foundations | ServiceDefinition schema + renderer, Kyverno L0 gate, conformance harness, CI |
| 1 Cluster bring-up | 3-node k3s HA, embedded etcd, kube-vip VIP, Cilium, Flux, SOPS. Originally Proxmox VMs; **now 3× mini-PC bare metal** (`k3s-prod-1/2/3`, `192.168.2.10/.11/.12`, k3s v1.36.4+k3s1, Debian 13) |
| 2 Platform core | Cilium · Longhorn · cert-manager (LE-prod wildcard) · ExternalDNS · Gateway API · split-horizon CoreDNS |
| 2 Platform core | Cilium · Longhorn · cert-manager (LE-prod wildcard) · ExternalDNS · Gateway API · split-horizon DNS, **both halves**: CoreDNS for pods, and **PiHole as the authoritative LAN resolver** for `${BASE_DOMAIN}` on udp/53 + tcp/53 at a pinned VIP (`192.168.2.23` on prod). The LAN half was claimed from the start but did not exist until 2026-09-14 — PiHole's Service was ClusterIP :80/:4180, so LAN clients ran on hand-maintained per-client `dnsmasq` files |
| 3 Egress / VPN | ADR-0015 node-level OpenVPN split-tunnel + Cilium egress-gateway steering + host kill-switch |
| 4 Observability | kube-prometheus-stack · Loki · Alloy · Alertmanager. **Velero unblocked 2026-09-13** — backs up to Cloudflare R2 (OQ-BKP closed; the `velero-plugin-for-aws` tagging incompatibility needed a pinned plugin). Longhorn has **no** backup target by decision: volume data is protected by Velero + kopia to R2. image-automation authored but disabled |
| 5 IaaS | KubeVirt + CDI on real nested KVM; live-migratable RWX VM storage. The UniFi VM runs, but **UniFi OS Server is not yet installed in the guest** |