OPERATOR DECISION 2026-09-06: "use the VIP as intended — a virtual address to reach
the cluster and provide fault tolerant HA. Without a change it will not work in HA."
THE DEFECT. Cilium's kube-proxy replacement dialled a SINGLE NODE. Re-confirmed live
before changing anything: all three prod cilium-agent pods carried
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=192.168.2.10 — k3s-prod-1's own address — while the kube-vip
VIP 192.168.2.9 was Running on all three nodes with a held lease. Lose prod-1 and the
CNI's control-plane path is dead on an "HA" cluster. clusters/prod's own comment said
the value must be the VIP and NOT .10, then called it "Not yet decided" — I treated
that stale comment as an open question when the evidence already settled it.
SPLIT, NOT REPOINT, because k3s_api_host had two consumers with opposite needs:
k3s_api_host unchanged — the FOUNDER's IP: the cold-bootstrap join
target and a tls-san. infra/tofu/outputs.tf GENERATES this
name, so renaming would ripple into tofu and the runbooks.
k3s_apiserver_endpoint NEW = {{ kube_vip_address }} — the HA address; what Cilium
consumes. Derived, not restated, so an environment overrides
ONE line and the VIP, the SAN and the CNI endpoint move
together. Prod needed no new override.
THE SECOND HAZARD, WHICH MY BRIEF DID NOT NAME and the agent found: pointing Cilium at
the VIP breaks a COLD bootstrap for the same reason the join would — site.yml ran
node-baseline -> k3s -> cilium, so Cilium would install against an address nothing
announced yet. That is the 2026-09-01 deadlock shape. Fixed by SEQUENCE, not value:
site.yml now imports kube-vip.yml BETWEEN k3s and cilium. It cannot go earlier
(kube-vip is a k3s auto-deploy manifest, so it needs a cluster) and it works there
because the DaemonSet is hostNetwork with KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=127.0.0.1 — needing
neither CNI nor kube-proxy. roles/kube_vip gained a read-only `wait_for` on the VIP so
a cold run stops THERE with a named cause instead of surfacing as unreachable agents.
Also fixed a pre-existing bug that only mattered once this play joined site.yml: the
role's read-only interface probe ran without `check_mode: false`, so under --check it
was skipped and the assert fired with a misleading "set kube_vip_interface explicitly".
VERIFIED BY ME, not just reported:
renders dev K3S_API_HOST=192.168.1.49 prod=192.168.2.9 (each environment's VIP)
cilium template consumes k3s_apiserver_endpoint, not k3s_api_host
cold join still `--server https://{{ k3s_api_host }}:6443` — the founder
order site.yml: node-baseline -> k3s -> kube-vip -> cilium -> verify -> flux
gate full CI gate PASS
Agent-side, additionally: in-memory render of cilium-values.yaml.j2 per host showing
k8sServiceHost=the VIP with the join still on the founder; k3s_tls_sans renders
['.10','.9','127.0.0.1','.11','.12'] so NO cert reissue and NO k3s restart is involved
— .9 already answers under full CA verification; and --check --diff of kube-vip.yml
against prod reported 6 ok / 0 changed, i.e. the role edits change nothing about the
kube-vip prod already runs.
ha-control-plane-as-code 92 -> 112 assertions, turning two escalations into machine
checks: the Cilium template must use the endpoint var; the endpoint must derive from
kube_vip_address and k3s_api_host must not; per environment K3S_API_HOST must equal
that environment's VIP and be none of its node IPs (the [parity] contract, now
machine-checked rather than a comment); site.yml must order k3s -> kube-vip -> cilium.
Every new assertion mutation-tested and bites. One honest negative recorded: reverting
only the BASE default is not caught, because both overlays patch the key — the check
reads effective per-environment values, so the base default is unguarded.
APPLY ORDER, and this is the operator's step — nothing was applied:
PROD FIRST, and it is the low-risk direction (prod is the broken one). Push and let
Flux reconcile platform/cilium: the value change rolls the cilium-agent DaemonSet
ONE NODE AT A TIME (maxUnavailable: 1 — the knob that bounded the 2026-09-01
incident), it will not proceed past an unready pod, existing datapath survives an
agent restart, and .9 is already live before the change lands.
DEV SEPARATELY, operator present. Same mechanics but live dev agents dial
192.168.1.50, and dev is mid-DNS-migration on dev-live. Do not fold it into that.
ANSIBLE: nothing to run for either live cluster; the Ansible half matters only for a
cold build. Remove the now-redundant standalone kube-vip.yml step from any runbook.
NEW NAMED GAP, unwritten: the L2 test cannot assert the running agents' live
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST, which is the drift the L0 check cannot see. Recorded in that
test's gap list.
Refs R-PLAT-01, R-NET-01, R-ENV-02.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
roles/k3s_server, roles/cilium and every node-host playbook hardcoded the dev group
names k3s_primary/k3s_secondary/k3s_servers, so the prod inventory groups could not be
selected at all. That broke the R-ENV-02 promise that prod reuses the SAME roles, and
blocked PROD-PROVISIONING.md §6 outright.
TWO KNOBS, deliberately separate — Ansible templates a play's `hosts:` BEFORE any host
context exists, so group_vars is unreadable there, while roles run WITH host context:
* which hosts a play RUNS ON — k3s_hosts, k3s_primary_hosts/k3s_secondary_hosts
(k3s.yml's split), vpn_egress_gateway_hosts; each `| default(<dev group>)`, set by -e
only. Follows node-health.yml's established `<name>_hosts | default(dev)` pattern.
* which group a ROLE means by "my primary"/"my servers" — k3s_primary_group,
k3s_servers_group in group_vars/all.yml (dev), overridden in group_vars/k3s_prod.
Follows the k3s_api_host convention already in this repo. No per-run flag.
DEV IS UNCHANGED — the key evidence. --list-hosts/--list-tasks/--syntax-check captured
for all 9 playbooks at HEAD and after: sorted host lists IDENTICAL for all 9, same
primary/secondary split, same 6-play site.yml. (Raw --list-hosts PRINT ORDER varies run
to run; proven to be Ansible's own set ordering by running UNMODIFIED HEAD cilium.yml
four times -> 3,1,2 / 1,3,2 / 1,2,3 / 1,2,3. Hence sorted comparison.) --list-tasks
differs in exactly two files, only by added TAGS annotations and one new assert; no task
reordered, renamed or removed. Var resolution verified per environment with -c local:
dev -> k3s_primary/192.168.1.50/sans .50,.49,127.0.0.1,.51,.52; prod ->
k3s_prod_primary/192.168.2.10/vip .9/sans .10,.9,127.0.0.1,.11,.12.
BREAKS THE SMARTMONTOOLS CIRCULAR DEPENDENCY. node_baseline tasks are now tagged
packages/system/disks, so the package install can run alone:
ansible-playbook playbooks/node-baseline.yml -e k3s_hosts=k3s_prod --tags packages
Skipping is the guard — no disks-tagged task is selected, so the
BLOCKED-pending-disk-decision paths are never templated, let alone passed to mkfs.
Belt-and-braces, a new disks-tagged assert fires first in a FULL run and names §2
explicitly instead of failing obscurely at mkfs. `tags: never` was deliberately NOT used
(it would change the default run).
FOOTGUN FOUND AND FIXED: roles/cilium, cluster_verify and flux_bootstrap all hardcoded
.cache/dev.kubeconfig — the exact file infra/devcontainer/dev.sh exports as $KUBECONFIG.
Once prod became targetable, a prod cilium/verify run would have SILENTLY OVERWRITTEN it,
leaving the operator's kubectl quietly answering from PROD. Now cluster_kubeconfig_name
(dev.kubeconfig -> prod.kubeconfig). Dev path byte-identical.
KNOWN, DOCUMENTED, NOT FIXED HERE: flux-bootstrap.yml retargets but roles/flux_bootstrap
shells out to bootstrap/flux/bootstrap.sh with a hardcoded --path=clusters/dev — a
bootstrap/ subtree change, not a target-group change (§6, cross-referenced to §7).
vpn.egress.gateway.yml is parameterised but prod has no egress group yet and would need
its own vaulted PIA credentials. --check against prod is still impossible until the prod
vault exists — even the packages-only run needs it.
Nothing was run against the dev cluster: --list-hosts/--list-tasks/--syntax-check, plus
debug/assert with -c local, only.
Serves: R-ENV-01, R-ENV-02, R-ENV-03. Task: T-7.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Controller now reaches the kube-API directly through the pfSense NAT
(192.168.2.50:6443 -> kube-vip VIP 192.168.1.49:6443), validating TLS
against the VIP via tls-server-name. Removes the dev.sh SSH-tunnel
scaffolding and updates the ansible source-of-truth so a rebuild
regenerates a direct-access kubeconfig.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Add an HA control-plane API VIP for the k3s cluster with kube-vip, and add
the VIP + all node IPs to the kube-apiserver serving-cert SANs so TLS via the
VIP validates. Prepares the stable failover endpoint the operator fronts with
a pfSense port-forward to 192.168.1.49:6443.
roles/kube_vip + playbooks/kube-vip.yml:
- Templates a single manifest (RBAC + DaemonSet kube-vip-ds) into each server's
k3s auto-deploy dir (/var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/manifests) so it is
reproducible and independent of Flux; k3s auto-applies it.
- Control-plane ONLY (cp_enable=true, svc_enable=false): Cilium keeps ownership
of Service LoadBalancing (L2 pool .53-.60) — no ARP conflict.
- Runs on control-plane nodes (nodeSelector node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane),
hostNetwork, NET_ADMIN/NET_RAW, image pinned ghcr.io/kube-vip/kube-vip:v0.8.9.
- vip_interface auto-detected per node (the iface holding 192.168.1.5x = eth0).
- Leader election (plndr-cp-lock) with 15/10/2s lease timings.
- This cluster runs without kube-proxy (Cilium replacement), so a hostNetwork
pod cannot reach the kubernetes ClusterIP; kube-vip is pointed at the
node-local apiserver (KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=127.0.0.1:6443) so leader
election works.
roles/k3s_server tls-san:
- New k3s_tls_sans (VIP + all three node IPs + 127.0.0.1, deduped); install
args now emit one --tls-san per entry.
- Persist the SAN list to /etc/rancher/k3s/config.yaml (read by a running k3s)
and Restart k3s handler so an existing cluster regenerates its serving cert.
- k3s.yml secondaries run serial:1 so a SAN change rolls one node at a time,
keeping etcd quorum (kube-vip keeps the API reachable during each restart).
Verified live: DS 3/3 ready, VIP answers on 192.168.1.49:6443, all 3 certs and
an s_client against the VIP carry 192.168.1.49 + .50/.51/.52 + 127.0.0.1, all
nodes Ready throughout the rolling restart.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
- inventory routes SSH via 192.168.2.102:2250/2251/2252; new k3s_node_ip carries
each node's real 192.168.1.x for --node-ip / k3s_api_host / Cilium parity
- dev.sh bind-mounts ~/.config/home-k3s/ansible-vault-pass (ro) so vaulted
playbooks can run in the pinned container (ansible.cfg vault_password_file)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5