1. PROD NODE DNS = 8.8.8.8 + 1.1.1.1 (operator, 2026-09-01). Two INDEPENDENT public
upstreams, so the single-upstream SPOF that broke containerd pulls and CoreDNS
forwarding on dev cannot recur. Prod deliberately differs from dev, which is
PiHole-first because dev needs the local jackson.lan zone.
SCOPE CORRECTED IN THE COMMENTS. Three resolvers answer *.home.keithjackson.dev and
only one is configured here:
pods -> CoreDNS -> platform/coredns/coredns-custom.yaml, whose `template` plugin
answers the WHOLE zone with ${GATEWAY_VIP}. Self-contained in-cluster;
PiHole is NOT in this path. Prod is already correct (.20).
LAN -> PiHole. Not a cluster concern.
nodes -> THIS FILE.
The one thing public node DNS breaks: the k3s API SERVER is a node process carrying
oidc-issuer-url=https://keycloak.home.keithjackson.dev/realms/homelab and reaches the
issuer through the NODE resolver, so prod would get the PUBLIC record instead of the
prod Gateway VIP — breaking kubectl OIDC SSO. Dev avoids this only because its node
resolver IS PiHole. Not blocking (prod has no cluster or Keycloak yet); options are
recorded in PROD-PROVISIONING.md §4 for the operator to pick.
2. SERVICE VIPs DECIDED: UNIFI_L4_VIP 192.168.2.21, CRAFTY_L4_VIP 192.168.2.22 — the
first two addresses after GATEWAY_VIP (.20), mirroring dev's .53/.54/.55 ordering
within the .20-.30 pool. S3_BACKUP_ENDPOINT stays TBD-PROD-* : no prod backup target
exists, and dev's versitygw is across the pfSense boundary on the dev host, so it is
not DR for prod.
3. PROD BECOME VAULT committed, ansible-vault encrypted, matching the hypervisor and
proxmox_hosts pattern. Verified working: `ansible k3s_prod -m command -a 'id -un'
--become` returns root. The L0 no-plaintext-secrets check asserts every ansible
vault.yml starts with $ANSIBLE_VAULT, so this stays honest by gate.
4. TOOLCHAIN GAP FIXED: the devcontainer image does NOT ship the Galaxy collections, so
EVERY ansible play died at parse time on community.general.modprobe. ansible.cfg now
sets collections_path = collections, and the collections are installed there from the
existing collections/requirements.yml (gitignored — pinned by requirements, fetched at
setup, vendored bytes are not source).
5. DRIVE HEALTH MEASURED and recorded in §2 with the raw attribute table so the numbers
are auditable. Verdict: usable, but not for production etcd/Longhorn state — 31% of
rated life consumed, 15 grown bad blocks, 187 erase failures, and 32 unexpected power
losses on a consumer drive with NO power-loss protection, in a single failure domain.
etcd is the worst possible tenant: it fsyncs constantly and unclean power loss without
PLP is exactly how a member corrupts.
6. NON-ECC RAM: RISK ACCEPTED by the operator, recorded as a CLOSED decision, not an open
item — do not re-litigate. Rationale: 3-node k3s homelab, not enterprise; corruption on
one node is outweighed by the other two and causes node ejection. That holds for the
dominant mode (etcd raft CRC + quorum; Longhorn 3 replicas + hard anti-affinity +
rebuild). Recorded residual: corruption introduced UPSTREAM of replication replicates
faithfully to all three replicas, so quorum sees no disagreement — low probability, and
the only mitigation is different hardware. Follow-up noted: Longhorn's
snapshotDataIntegrity is left at the chart default rather than set explicitly, and it
is the mechanism that operationalises the operator's own argument.
Serves: R-DNS-01, R-DNS-03, R-ENV-02, R-ENV-03, R-SEC-01. Task: T-7.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
R-ENV-02 promises dev and prod differ ONLY by scoped cluster-vars overrides. In fact
dev LAN addresses were hardcoded into base manifests, so clusters/prod would have come
up ANNOUNCING DEV ADDRESSES (192.168.1.x) on the prod LAN (192.168.2.x).
New cluster-vars knobs (base default = dev literal, per the file's existing convention):
K3S_API_HOST platform/cilium/helmrelease.yaml (+ the values.yaml mirror)
CILIUM_LB_POOL_START platform-config/cilium/l2-ip-pool.yaml
CILIUM_LB_POOL_STOP "
UNIFI_L4_VIP apps/vms/unifi/50-service-l4.yaml
CRAFTY_L4_VIP platform/crafty/service-l4.yaml
S3_BACKUP_ENDPOINT platform/keycloak/postgres-cluster.yaml, apps/wave-0/{nextcloud,
semaphore}-db.yaml, and platform/velero/helmrelease.yaml
Also fixes GATEWAY_VIP's base default, which was still the RETIRED libvirt address
10.73.0.240, and adds the GATEWAY_VIP patch that clusters/prod was missing entirely.
clusters/base/apps-vms.yaml gains postBuild.substituteFrom (it was the one consuming
Kustomization without it, so a ${TOKEN} there would have shipped as a literal string).
The envsubst contract is documented there: ${VAR} substitutes and escapes as $${VAR};
$VAR and $(cmd) are left alone; ${ARR[0]} hard-errors. The three UOS_URL expansions in
the unifi cloud-init are escaped accordingly.
PROD ADDRESS PLAN (operator, 2026-08-31):
nodes .10/.11/.12 · control-plane VIP .9 (Ansible-side) · GATEWAY_VIP .20
Cilium LB pool .20-.30
CONTAINMENT INVARIANT, now documented at the pool and in the prod overlay: GATEWAY_VIP
MUST equal CILIUM_LB_POOL_START. The shared Gateway pins no address, so Cilium LB-IPAM
gives it the first free address of a matching pool block. An initial prod proposal put
.20 outside a .21-.30 pool; the Gateway would have come up on .21 while split-horizon
coredns-custom kept answering *.home.keithjackson.dev with .20 — an address nothing
announces — blackholing in-cluster OIDC hairpin traffic while reporting healthy. The
pool was widened to .20-.30. The control-plane VIP (.9) stays outside the pool so
kube-vip and LB-IPAM can never contend.
Values prod still cannot know stay INVALID `TBD-PROD-*` placeholders on purpose: base
defaults are dev values, so an omitted patch means prod silently inherits a dev address
— far worse than a loud failed apply.
DEV IS BYTE-IDENTICAL. Verified by kustomize build over 13 paths before/after, then
flux envsubst with the dev cluster-vars values applied to both sides: zero drift. The
only deltas are the intended additive keys in the overlay ConfigMap itself. No
unresolved ${TOKEN} survives. render-golden green (10 goldens); yamllint clean.
Serves: R-ENV-02. Task: T-7.1 (prerequisite). Gate: MERGE GATE: PASS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The 7 falsely-firing platform alerts (KeycloakDown, KeycloakDatabaseDown,
KubeAPIDown, KubeletDown, VPNTunnelDown, KubeVirtControlPlaneDown,
CDINoDefaultStorageClass) share ONE root cause, not per-rule label mismatches:
the Prometheus PVC is 100% full ("no space left on device" on every WAL commit).
Evidence from the live dev cluster:
- /prometheus is 4.8G/5Gi, 0 bytes free; every scrape logs "Scrape commit
failed ... write to WAL: no space left on device". Scrapes still return 200
(targets show healthy, lastScrape=now) but samples are never stored, so the
TSDB head froze at 2026-08-28 13:45 UTC while the pod clock reads ~19:33 UTC.
- Instant queries at "now" therefore return an EMPTY vector, so every
absent()/==0 platform rule trips. Evaluated at the last-good-sample time each
expr is correctly FALSE (keycloak-0/keycloak-db-1 ready=1, apiserver+kubelet
up=1 x3, tun0 series present, kubevirt control-plane expr empty, CDI default
present) — the rules are correct; the monitor was simply blind.
`retention` alone prunes only by AGE: this cluster is 3d2h old with 3d dev
retention, so time-pruning has NEVER run and 3d of block churn (~1.2Gi/day) plus
a WAL that ballooned past 1Gi overran the 5Gi disk. Fix adds a size-based
retention cap (new MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_RETENTION_SIZE knob) kept below each
env's PVC so Prometheus drops oldest blocks before the disk fills, and bumps the
dev PVC 5Gi->8Gi for real WAL/head/compaction headroom.
- platform/monitoring/kube-prometheus-stack.yaml: retentionSize: ${knob}
- clusters/base/cluster-vars.yaml: knob default 8GiB (base 10Gi PVC)
- clusters/dev/kustomization.yaml: PVC 5Gi->8Gi, retentionSize 5GiB
- clusters/prod/kustomization.yaml: retentionSize 45GiB (50Gi PVC)
- platform/monitoring/README.md: knob table + rationale
Deploy note (PM): the PVC is already 100% full, so Prometheus cannot self-prune
until it can write. The 5Gi->8Gi bump must land as a Longhorn online expansion
(operator PVC expansion / manual patch); once free space returns, retentionSize
keeps it healthy. Watchdog left untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Parameterize the in-cluster split-horizon target as GATEWAY_VIP (R-ENV-02): base
default = dev L2-announced Gateway VIP (10.73.0.240, first IP of the Cilium LB pool).
coredns-custom answers *.home.keithjackson.dev with ${GATEWAY_VIP} so the unified graph
holds across dev/prod via cluster-vars only. Prod overlay carries a TODO to set the prod
LAN VIP alongside the prod L2 pool range when hardware is built.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Flux postBuild.substituteFrom is case-sensitive; platform/ components reference
${UPPERCASE} tokens but cluster-vars keys were lowercase -> none would resolve
(literal ${...} would reach the HelmReleases). Uppercased the ConfigMap data
keys + the dev/prod overlay patch paths. Every component ref now resolves;
clusters/dev & clusters/prod build; gate green. Clears the K1 landmine before
any platform un-suspend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5