INCIDENT FIX. Prod's external-dns DELETED EVERY ONE OF DEV'S PUBLIC DNS RECORDS. Both
clusters ran policy: sync against the SAME Cloudflare zone with the SAME implicit
txtOwnerId (`default`), so prod believed it owned dev's records, found no matching sources,
and removed them plus their TXT registry entries. Dev recovered ~30s after prod was scaled
to 0; verified restored against Cloudflare directly (my first check went through a pfSense
override and falsely showed healthy — local resolvers are not evidence about public DNS).
THE MISS WAS MINE, and it was a failure of imagination in how I briefed every agent. I put
"never touch dev" in brief after brief and enforced it — separate kubeconfigs, verified
--limit, sha-checked dev's kubeconfig before and after. Every one of those guards held. NONE
of them covered SHARED EXTERNAL RESOURCES. Prod reconciling its OWN correctly-authored
manifests reached across a third party and destroyed dev's state. Cluster-to-cluster
isolation was verified; the dependency that mattered was cluster-to-Cloudflare.
Operator's architecture: dev -> *.dev.home.keithjackson.dev, prod ->
*.prod.home.keithjackson.dev, apex CNAME <svc>.home -> <svc>.prod.home.
PHASE 1 ONLY (this commit): prod moves to its own subdomain. DEV IS NOT MIGRATED and its
effective hostname stays home.keithjackson.dev, so dev renders byte-identically and nothing
live moves. That alone ends the collision and unblocks prod. Phase 2 (dev -> dev.home. +
apex CNAMEs) is deferred to when the operator is present: it relocates Keycloak's issuer and
12 clients' redirect URIs, forces a rolling k3s restart and kubectl SSO re-issue for every
user, and moves gitea.home. — which is BOTH the GitOps source and the current push target.
BASE_DOMAIN WAS A DEAD KNOB — it existed in cluster-vars but the status report flagged it as
referenced by nothing, because hostnames were hardcoded throughout. Now real: 141 refs.
Searched the AUTHORITATIVE reconciled set by resolving each Flux spec.path transitively via
conformance/lib/status.py — the same resolver the L0 gate uses, so "what Flux reconciles"
has one definition. 185 occurrences across 47 files in 154 reconciled files. Tokenized:
Gateway listeners, the wildcard Certificate, coredns-custom, external-dns, Keycloak
instance/realm (26 redirect URIs), oauth2-proxy, Grafana OIDC, all HTTPRoutes, Homepage's 15
links, 30 runbook_urls, unifi cloud-init, render.py's ZONE constant (which drove
--oidc-issuer-url/--cookie-domain/--whitelist-domain on every forward-auth sidecar) and 11
catalog/ ServiceDefinitions re-rendered canonically. Left alone: 43 comment/prose
occurrences and non-reconciled paths.
TWO THAT CANNOT BE TOKENIZED, flagged not forced:
- headlamp's OIDC URLs live inside a SOPS-encrypted Secret; re-encrypting rewrites the MAC
over every value and the OFFLINE harness cannot verify it (kustomize does not decrypt),
so an error would break live-dev SSO with no pre-flight proof. Prod needs its own copy
anyway — client secrets are realm-scoped.
- kube-apiserver --oidc-issuer-url is a k3s SERVER FLAG, not a manifest, so Flux can never
reach it. Done on the inventory seam instead (k3s_base_domain -> k3s_oidc_issuer_url,
overridden in group_vars/k3s_prod). Verified per host: dev keeps the default, prod gets
prod.home.
EXTERNAL-DNS OWNER, the actual incident cause: txtOwnerId is now explicit per environment —
dev renders exactly `default` (the chart default it was already using, so its existing
records stay recognised) and prod gets `prod`. The BASE default is a NON-COLLIDING SENTINEL,
deliberately not `default`, so a future environment that forgets the knob owns nothing and
can delete nothing rather than silently inheriting dev's identity.
I OVERRODE ONE AGENT DECISION against our own prior finding: it narrowed prod's
domainFilters to prod.home.keithjackson.dev as defence in depth. FINDING F-DNS1
(DECISIONS-LOG 2026-08-17) already proved a subdomain filter DROPS THE PARENT ZONE —
ExternalDNS generates the record then skips it with "no hosted zone matching record DNS
Name". Prod would have published NOTHING. Set to the ZONE (keithjackson.dev) like dev.
Isolation comes from the subdomain split plus txtOwnerId, which is what the incident
actually needed and what a domain filter cannot provide.
DEV PROVEN UNCHANGED: 11 of 12 substituting paths byte-identical; the 12th differs by
exactly one line, `+ txtOwnerId: default` — the value dev was already using implicitly.
POSITIVE CONTROLS confirm the harness is not blind: perturbing BASE_DOMAIN moves 10 of 12
hashes (the 2 that don't provably contain no hostname), perturbing the owner id moves
exactly 1. Prod's rendered output has ZERO home.keithjackson.dev references outside prod.,
and its cert renders *.prod.home.keithjackson.dev — no overlap with dev's.
L0 substitution assertions 106 -> 254; BASE_DOMAIN is no longer flagged dead. Gate PASS.
PROD REMAINS SUSPENDED (platform + 10 downstream tiers) pending review; nothing applied.
Serves: R-ENV-02, R-DNS-01, R-DNS-02, R-DNS-03, R-TLS-01.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Close the un-gated-UI security finding for forward-auth apps (R-IDP-02) by
rendering the Option-B per-app oauth2-proxy reverse-proxy sidecar that crafty
proves working. catalog/render.py now emits, for any forward-auth app with an
exposed UI: the oauth2-proxy sidecar (upstream http://127.0.0.1:<uiport>,
:4180, --allowed-group per auth.group), an authproxy :4180 Service port, an
HTTPRoute backendRef -> :4180, and a gateway-ingress CiliumNetworkPolicy that
allows the Gateway to reach ONLY :4180 (fail-closed: the bare UI is never
served un-authenticated). oidc/native/none apps render byte-identical.
This is the CANARY: only pihole's golden carries the sidecar and is verified
fail-closed in-cluster first. jackett/qbittorrent/radarr/sonarr are deferred to
the rollout commit (temporarily listed in ci/render-golden.sh) so their UIs
keep serving exactly as today until their clients+secrets land.
- keycloak: confidential pihole client (realm-import + realm-clients mirror),
provisioned live via kcadm (groups membership mapper, bare names).
- secret: SOPS/age pihole-oauth2-proxy-credentials (client-id/secret/cookie),
wired into apps/wave-0 via the renderer's new sidecar-creds wave rule.
- L1 render goldens regenerated for the sidecar (forward-auth fixtures).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
The container-workload and egress-class L1 fixtures use auth.mode=forward-auth, so the renderer now
emits the keycloak backend egress allow for them too. Regenerate the committed goldens to match the
canonical render. MERGE GATE: PASS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Migrate image.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2 -> /v1 for ImageRepository,
ImagePolicy, and ImageUpdateAutomation ahead of the Flux v2.7+ upgrade
(cluster-upgrade-plan §3.2). Flux v2.4 (current) already serves /v1, so
migrating the manifests now is a safe no-op at runtime.
- catalog/render.py: r_image_automation emits v1 for ImageRepository/ImagePolicy
- platform/image-automation/{image-update-automation,per-service/pihole.example}
- conformance L3 hands-off-update chainsaw applies v1 CRs
- conformance L1 goldens re-rendered to match (apiVersion-only diff)
No spec-field changes required: all spec fields used (image, interval,
imageRepositoryRef, filterTags.pattern/extract, policy.semver.range,
sourceRef, git.*, update.strategy/path) are unchanged in v1; the v1
messageTemplate already uses .Changed (not the removed .Updated).
apps/ golden unaffected (canonical render uses --no-image-automation).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Root cause the media stack surfaced: the default-deny baseline is DNS-only egress (correct for
R-NET-01 east-west), but the egress CLASS (internet/vpn) had no policy ALLOWING north-south
egress — so qbittorrent/sonarr/radarr couldn't reach the internet at all (VPN downloaders
broken). Add an additive per-app CiliumNetworkPolicy '<app>-allow-internet-egress' with
toEntities:[world] (non-cluster); the egress-class steering + kill-switch (ADR-0015) govern the
PATH (internet=WAN, vpn=tun0). East-west stays denied except declared dependencies; R-NET-01
baseline unchanged. Re-rendered all apps + regenerated L1 goldens. Also fixed jackett + plex
image tags (bad pins -> :latest; Renovate/update policy pins later).
Exposed apps got a default-deny NetworkPolicy with ingress: [] (deny all), so the
Cilium Gateway (Envoy, reserved identity `ingress`) could not reach the backend — an
Accepted HTTPRoute was still unreachable. render.py now emits an ADDITIVE, least-
privilege CiliumNetworkPolicy for any ServiceDefinition that renders an HTTPRoute:
ingress:
- fromEntities: [ingress] # the shared Cilium Gateway/Envoy proxy identity
toPorts: [<exposed service port(s)> TCP]
Verified against the live cluster (Cilium 1.16.5): with default-deny in place, Hubble
shows the Gateway proxy reaching pihole as source identity `(ingress)` and the flow
`Policy denied DROPPED` on :80 — so `fromEntities: [ingress]` is exactly the source the
Gateway uses, scoped to the service targetPort. Default-deny stays intact (ingress: []
unchanged); the allow only opens the north-south path (docs/09), east-west stays denied.
- render.py: add r_gateway_ingress_policy(); emit it after dependency policies; selftest
asserts the allow is additive (default-deny ingress stays []), least-privilege (only the
exposed port, only the ingress identity), and absent for non-exposed services.
- L1 goldens updated for the two exposed fixtures (container-workload, egress-class);
default-deny-baseline golden unchanged (no exposure). --selftest + run.sh --layer l1 green.
- apps/pihole.yaml re-rendered (--no-image-automation) to carry the allow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
The renderer's PaaS path (kind: container) had no verifying conformance test — the
R-PLAT-02 token appears only in renderer comments, so a change touching catalog/
surfaced it as an uncovered touched-requirement (blocking the merge gate). Adds the
container render analog of vm-lifecycle (R-PLAT-03): asserts a kind: container
ServiceDefinition renders a Deployment (running the declared image) + a Service,
with the egress-class/auth-mode labels admission requires. Offline render-check.sh,
wrapped by a chainsaw Test for in-cluster runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5