Files
home-network-k3s-impl/runbooks/node-disk.md
T
jakman85andClaude Opus 5 44983095e1 feat(runbooks): make the 42 alert runbook_url annotations resolve
Every platform-health alert rule carries
`runbook_url: "https://${BASE_DOMAIN}/runbooks/<name>"` — 42 annotations over 34
distinct names, across platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml,
platform/monitoring/pvc-capacity-alerts.yaml, platform/cnpg/alerts.yaml and
platform/kubevirt/alerts.yaml. There was no runbooks/ directory and no HTTPRoute
serving that path: an in-cluster probe of
https://home.keithjackson.dev/runbooks/node-down returned HTTP 404. Every alert that
reached a human handed them a dead link at the exact moment the documentation is read,
and the annotation made it look solved — the same green-surface-over-absent-mechanism
class as the import Job that reported success while storing placeholder secrets.

No alerts.yaml is touched and no runbook_url value changes. The existing URL scheme is
made to resolve instead.

WHAT LANDS
- runbooks/<34>.md — one per name, each grounded in this cluster's real topology and,
  where one exists, its real incident history: the 2026-09-07 k3s-prod-1 etcd I/O
  starvation (measured PSI 11.36 vs 0.75/1.29, the exact journal lines, the four
  mechanisms proven inert), the Longhorn reboot tax and the freeze/thaw of
  concurrent-replica-rebuild-per-node-limit, Cilium's once-resolved egress interface
  cache (Ifindex 3 against a live 1780) and the absence of OSS failover, the CNPG
  38-hour ContinuousArchiving=False with its measured 6.8 MiB/h disk-full clock and the
  2026-09-12 aggregation-scope fix, the 2026-09-06 Keycloak lockout in which all 12
  clients held literal placeholder secrets behind an entirely green cluster, the Velero
  R2 x-amz-tagging NotImplemented incompatibility and its v1.14.3-rc.2 pin, and swap
  re-enabling itself across reboots via systemd-gpt-auto-generator.
  Each page states what the alert means HERE, the first diagnostic commands, likely
  causes ordered by probability with a remediation each, and when to escalate or stop.
- Every page uses FULLY-QUALIFIED resource names and says why: three CRDs register the
  kind `Backup` here, the bare short name resolves to Longhorn's (zero objects), so
  `kubectl get backup -A` prints "No resources found" on a cluster holding 6 Velero and
  27 CNPG backups. Acting on that false negative is how a CLI quirk becomes data loss.
- Every page states that kubectl only works via
  `infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c '...'` with an explicit `--context k3s-prod`,
  because dev.sh defaults its current-context to k3s-dev.
- Pages also record which alert groups are INERT today (measured 2026-09-13: no
  Longhorn, cert-manager, Flux-controller or Hubble scrape job exists, so 13 rules
  evaluate against nothing) so nobody reads their silence as health.

SERVING — runbooks/serving/ plus clusters/base/runbooks.yaml
A two-replica nginx-unprivileged serving a ConfigMap generated from runbooks/*.md, at
the apex `/runbooks` prefix, in its own non-gating post-platform Flux tier
(dependsOn platform-config, wait:false) — the platform/homepage pattern, file for file.
- The service catalog cannot express this route: ingressRoutes[].host is pattern-bound
  to a single DNS label plus the apex, so the bare apex is unrepresentable, and there is
  no path field.
- Rejected: redirecting to the Gitea web UI. A runbook is read when the platform is
  broken, and Gitea is an app-tier workload whose own dependencies several of these
  runbooks document; Gateway API's RequestRedirect also has no "append .md" modifier,
  so it would need 34 hand-maintained ReplaceFullPath rules.
- configMapGenerator maps each file to an EXTENSIONLESS key (node-down=node-down.md),
  so /runbooks/node-down is a plain static lookup with no rewrite rule. Served as
  text/plain: the namespace has DNS-only egress, so a CDN markdown renderer could not
  load anyway.
- The tier declares NO postBuild.substituteFrom, deliberately: envsubst would run over
  the prose and silently empty every ${...} shell example (it fails open — the 2026-09-01
  emptied Cilium k8sServiceHost). The HTTPRoute omits `hostnames:` and inherits the
  https-apex listener's, so nothing needs substituting.

AUTH — PUBLIC, deliberately
auth-mode=none. Gating these pages behind oauth2-proxy/Keycloak would make
runbooks/keycloak-down unreadable when Keycloak is down and
runbooks/keycloak-client-secrets unreadable during the exact 2026-09-06 failure mode.
An operator who cannot log in is this route's primary reader. Content is operational
procedure only, no secrets. The rationale is recorded in an annotation on the HTTPRoute
so the route is left OUT of the Gateway ext-authz attachment when forward-auth
enforcement lands.

PROVEN — in-cluster probe through the Gateway on prod
  /runbooks/node-down        HTTP 200   8613 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/keycloak-down    HTTP 200   9378 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/cnpg-archiving   HTTP 200  11729 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/longhorn-faulted HTTP 200   9135 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/vpn-down         HTTP 200  11092 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/backup-failure   HTTP 200   9604 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
HTTPRoute Accepted by io.cilium/gateway-controller on sectionName https-apex; the
`/runbooks` prefix wins over homepage's apex `/` by Gateway API longest-path precedence.

GUARD — conformance/tests/l0-static/alert-runbooks-resolvable (R-OBS-04)
363 offline assertions. It checks BOTH halves, because the regression is silent in both
directions: an alert with a new runbook_url and no runbook links to a 404, AND a runbook
committed without its configMapGenerator entry is in git, reviewed, merged, and still
404s in the cluster. Also asserts a quality floor so a stub cannot make the link look
fixed, and that route/listener/nginx prefix agree with the annotations.
Proven to fail, then reverted: a bogus runbook_url (2 FAIL), a runbook removed from the
generator (1 FAIL), and a 31-byte stub (7 FAIL).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-12 23:49:58 -05:00

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7.2 KiB
Markdown

# node-disk — A node filesystem is filling up
**Alert:** `NodeDiskFillingUp` (warning, 15m)
**File:** `platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml`, group `platform-health.nodes`
**Expression:** `node_filesystem_avail_bytes{fstype!~"tmpfs|overlay|squashfs"} / node_filesystem_size_bytes{...} < 0.10`
## What this means here
Less than 10% free on a real filesystem on a node, for 15 minutes. Read the `mountpoint` label
first, because on these nodes it tells you which of two very different problems you have.
**`/data` is the one that matters.** Both the embedded **etcd WAL** (`/data/k3s`) and **every
Longhorn replica** (`/data/longhorn`) live on that single partition —
`node_baseline_etcd_source: shared-data-partition`, not a dedicated device, and the exit condition
for splitting them is still open (`infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md` §2). If `/data` fills:
- etcd cannot write its WAL. A control-plane member with a full WAL partition does not degrade
gracefully; it stops, and this is a 3-member cluster.
- Longhorn stops being able to hold replicas and volumes go degraded, which triggers rebuilds, which
need *more* space.
So `/data` at 10% free is not a warning, it is the last comfortable moment to act.
**`/` filling up** is usually logs, container images or a stuck journal. Lower stakes, but there is
history: in the dev era the host root filled to ~99% because VM disks sat under a snapper-snapshotted
subvolume, and the hypervisor **paused the k3s VMs on I/O error**. Recovery was deleting 11 snapper
timeline snapshots plus `virsh destroy` on the paused VMs (which were holding rsync-unlinked inodes):
99% → 30%.
Longhorn's own guard rails are already tight and are why this alert usually fires before anything
breaks: `storageReservedPercentageForDefaultDisk: 20`,
`storageMinimalAvailablePercentage: 25`, `storageOverProvisioningPercentage: 200`.
## Running the commands in this runbook
`kubectl` does not work on the operator workstation. The toolchain lives only in the pinned dev
container, and the host's `k3s-oidc` context hangs on a browser prompt once its token expires —
that hang is not the cluster being down. Every command below runs as:
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'
Always pass `--context k3s-prod` explicitly. `dev.sh` merges both clusters into one kubeconfig and
defaults its current-context to k3s-**dev**, so a command without `--context` silently answers
about the wrong cluster. (`CLUSTER=prod infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run kubectl ...` is equivalent.)
Do not run two `dev.sh` invocations at once — they share one container and interfere.
USE FULLY-QUALIFIED RESOURCE NAMES, ALWAYS. Three CRDs on this cluster register the kind `Backup`:
`longhorn.io/v1beta2`, `postgresql.cnpg.io/v1` and `velero.io/v1`. The bare short name resolves to
Longhorn's, which holds zero objects — so `kubectl get backup -A` prints **"No resources found"** on
a cluster holding 6 Velero backups and 27 CNPG backups. Verified on prod 2026-09-13. Reading that as
"the backups are gone" and acting on it turns a false negative into real data loss. Write
`backups.velero.io`, `backups.postgresql.cnpg.io`, `clusters.postgresql.cnpg.io`,
`settings.longhorn.io`, `volumes.longhorn.io`, `nodes.longhorn.io`.
Mutating kubectl (`apply`, `patch`, `annotate`, `rollout`) and `flux reconcile` are blocked for
agents here: every durable change goes through git (`git push origin main` **is** the deploy).
Where this runbook gives a mutating command it is for an operator, and it says so.
## First commands
Which filesystem, on which node:
```
ssh k3s-prod-1 'df -h -x tmpfs -x overlay; echo; du -xh --max-depth=1 /data 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -10; echo; du -xh --max-depth=1 / 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -10'
```
What Longhorn thinks it has:
```
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n longhorn-system get nodes.longhorn.io -o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,SCHED:.spec.allowScheduling; echo; \
kubectl --context k3s-prod -n longhorn-system get volumes.longhorn.io -o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,SIZE:.spec.size,ACTUAL:.status.actualSize,ROBUST:.status.robustness'
```
Journal and image bloat on `/`:
```
ssh k3s-prod-1 'sudo journalctl --disk-usage; sudo crictl images | wc -l; sudo du -sh /var/lib/rancher/k3s/agent/containerd 2>/dev/null'
```
## Likely causes, most likely first
### 1. Longhorn replicas grew, or replicas landed here after a rebuild
Hard node anti-affinity (`replicaSoftAntiAffinity: false`) means one replica per node per volume, but
`replicaAutoBalance: best-effort` moves them. Prod sits around 269 GiB scheduled against an 829 GiB
ceiling, so this is rarely tight — but a rebuild storm plus snapshots can spike it.
Remediation: check for orphaned replicas and stale snapshots in the Longhorn UI. Note
`orphanAutoDeletion: true` in `platform/longhorn/helmrelease.yaml` **has been silently inert since
Longhorn 1.12** — it was renamed `orphanResourceAutoDeletion` (a list) and the chart drops unknown
`defaultSettings` keys with no error. So orphan cleanup is manual. Verify the key's current state in
the file before you trust it.
### 2. A CNPG database is not recycling WAL
The single most dangerous cause, because it is unbounded. With `archive_mode=on` and a failing
`archive_command`, Postgres **refuses to recycle** unarchived WAL segments and `pg_wal` grows forever
— on prod's `keycloak-db` that was measured at ~6.8 MiB/h, 17 segments / ~268 MiB, about 29 days to
fill a 5 GiB PVC. `pg_wal` shares the data PVC (no `walStorage:` is configured on any Cluster).
Check `/runbooks/cnpg-archiving` **before** you free any space, and **never delete WAL by hand** —
that destroys the database.
### 3. Journal / container images on `/`
`journalctl --vacuum-size=200M` and pruning unused images are safe. Do not prune images for
workloads that may need to restart while the registry is unreachable.
### 4. A Velero or CDI staging write
Velero's kopia uploads and CDI's scratch space both stage locally. `longhorn-scratch`
(single-replica) exists precisely because the 3-replica default failed the UniFi 60Gi import on
insufficient storage.
### 5. The disk is smaller than the platform now needs
`docs/plans/longhorn-ssd-tiering.md` holds the planned hot tier (~51 GB: Prometheus, CNPG, Loki,
Gitea). Working set measured ~79 GB against ~323 GB free on SSD, so the "won't fit" blocker was a
measurement artifact. This is operator planning work, not an incident fix.
## When to escalate or stop
- **If the mountpoint is `/data` and free space is under 5%, treat it as an imminent control-plane
outage** and get the operator. etcd and Longhorn are both on it.
- **Never delete anything under `/data/longhorn` or a Postgres `pg_wal` directory by hand.** Both are
irreversible. Free space elsewhere, or fix the cause.
- **Do not `kubectl drain`** the node to move load off it — this cluster does not drain.
- If the cause is a CNPG archive failure, this runbook is the wrong one: go to
`/runbooks/cnpg-archiving`, which is the actual fix.
---
Source of truth: `runbooks/node-disk.md`. Index: `/runbooks/`
Records: `DECISIONS-LOG.md` "Disk/drive incident + k3s relocated to NVMe (2026-08-22)";
`platform/cnpg/alerts.yaml` header (the WAL disk-full clock).