Standing up prod broke dev, and the mechanism is worth spelling out because
"same PIA account, well inside its connection limit" is true and still not enough.
The vaulted .ovpn pins ONE server. With both gateways using it, dev and prod
landed on the SAME server AND were handed the SAME tunnel address — both journals
read `[Server-10779-2a] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]158.173.241.112:1198`
and `ifconfig 10.72.192.7 255.255.192.0`. Each reconnect steals that address on
that server; the loser then receives nothing, trips `--ping-restart` after 60s,
reconnects and steals it back. Measured cycle: dev restarting at 22:57:05,
22:59:03, 23:01:05 UTC with prod interleaved about a minute off, each ~2 minutes
apart, indefinitely. Neither environment had reliable vpn-class egress — prod's
probes looked green only because they happened to land inside an up-window.
Fix: `vpn_egress_gateway_pia_remote` ("<host> <port>", empty = honour the .ovpn)
rewrites just the `remote` line of the deployed .ovpn, and prod's group_vars sets
it to 158.173.241.135. That is another member of the same PIA Stockholm LB pool —
`sweden.privacy.network` resolved from k3s-prod-3 to
158.173.241.{34,55,112,135,239} — and every server in the pool takes the same
credentials and the same inline CA, so only the address differs. Dev keeps the
.ovpn's .112 untouched, which is why the override is per-group rather than in the
role or a second vaulted .ovpn.
Two details that matter for whoever touches this next:
* The regex is anchored to a line STARTING with `remote` plus whitespace, so
`remote-cert-tls` and `remote-random` are not collateral damage. The task keeps
`no_log: true` — the transformation never widens what is logged.
* A PIA server address is NOT a credential, so it lives in
group_vars/vpn_egress_gateway_prod/vars.yml in the clear, next to the vault
rather than inside it. Keeping it out of the vault is what makes it reviewable.
If prod ever gets its own PIA account, this override can be deleted again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5
37a6c94168