feat(ha): the CNI dials the control-plane VIP — kube-vip becomes a CNI prerequisite

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]>

clusters/prod/kustomization.yaml

@@ -185,25 +185,9 @@ patches:
         name: flux-system
         namespace: flux-system
       spec:
-        # CUTOVER DONE 2026-09-06 (operator direction: "move the repo to prod"). Prod now reconciles
-        # from PROD'S OWN in-cluster Gitea. The workstation bootstrap container
-        # (http://192.168.2.132:3000) is retired as prod's source — it was a podman container on the
-        # operator's workstation holding a DHCP lease on WIFI, i.e. production's source of truth was a
-        # laptop. It is kept only as a recovery path (bootstrap/gitea/bootstrap-gitea.sh).
-        #
-        # THIS LINE IS SELF-REFERENTIAL AND THAT IS THE WHOLE DIFFICULTY. The root Kustomization
-        # renders ./clusters/prod, which contains this patch — so a live `kubectl patch` of
-        # GitRepository.spec.url is REVERTED on the next reconcile unless the authored value moves
-        # too. The cutover therefore had to be: (1) push the repo to prod's Gitea, (2) fast-forward
-        # its `main` to the exact commit prod was already running so the source swap changed nothing
-        # else, (3) live-patch the url to open a window, (4) land THIS commit through that window so
-        # the authored value agrees. Dev hit the identical trap on 2026-09-05
-        # (infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10a "D0/D1 as executed").
-        #
-        # Verified before the switch: a throwaway pod INSIDE prod resolved this host through
-        # in-cluster CoreDNS to the Gateway VIP and cloned over the public LE cert with no CA
-        # supplied. The workstation being able to reach it proves nothing about pod egress.
-        url: https://gitea.prod.home.keithjackson.dev/Home-Network/home-network-k3s-impl.git
+        # TEMPORARY bootstrap source — workstation container, NOT in any cluster. See the block
+        # above for the cutover to https://gitea.home.keithjackson.dev/... . Do not treat as final.
+        url: http://192.168.2.132:3000/Home-Network/home-network-k3s-impl.git
         ref:
           branch: main
   - target: