Measured on k3s-dev-3, not reasoned about. Three findings, one of which had the dev gateway silently dead for ~80 minutes before this change: 1. Cilium caches (egress IP, egress ifindex) when it first resolves the CEGP's `interface: tun0` and does NOT re-resolve when tun0 changes. Every tunnel restart re-creates tun0 with a NEW ifindex, so vpn-class egress is blackholed from then on. Observed: node had tun0 at ifindex 1987 while `cilium-dbg bpf egress list` still said 1986; pod curl timed out. Forcing a re-apply moved the map to 1987 and egress recovered instantly. `egress-gateway-reconciliation- trigger-interval: 1s` does NOT cover netlink link events — dev has that same 1s setting and still did not self-heal, 20s+ after recovery. Fix: vpn-egress-resteer.sh publishes "<tun0 addr>-<ifindex>" as a node label. A node update makes the gateway re-process the policy (verified: cached ifindex 1986 -> 1987 within 10s). A node label, not an annotation on the policy, because the policy is Flux-managed GitOps and the node's labels are already this role's territory. Fired by the OpenVPN up-script on every connect, plus a 2-minute convergence timer for the boot case where the kube-API is not up yet. Proof: `systemctl stop` then `start` of the tunnel now recovers on its own (map 1989 -> 1990, PIA IP returns); before this commit the identical sequence stayed broken indefinitely. 2. The nft kill-switch CANNOT see the traffic it claims to guard. A counters-only diagnostic table on the gateway node recorded, while a vpn-class pod egressed: 0 packets in forward and 0 in postrouting for both the pod CIDR and the PIA range, against 45166 packets on the same postrouting hook for WAN traffic and 16 packets for a node-originated curl out tun0. Cilium's eBPF datapath bpf_redirect()s these skbs to the egress device without invoking netfilter. So `ip saddr @set oifname != tun0 drop` can never fire for vpn-class pods. What actually fails closed is Cilium's own drop when the cached egress interface is unusable — tcpdump during a tunnel stop AND during a restart showed 0 packets leaving either the WAN or tun0. Every rule now carries a `counter` so the claim stays falsifiable, and every comment that called this table the authoritative vpn-class backstop is corrected rather than left to mislead the next reader. Also removed the `meta mark 0x1c8 oifname != tun0 drop` rule and its variable: nothing stamps that mark (the only Cilium mark on the node is 0x200/0xf00, the L7-proxy rule to table 2004), the traffic never reaches netfilter anyway, and a live rule matching an arbitrary mark is a hazard to whatever picks it next. 3. The up-script flushed the nft source set on every connect, so a packet still sourced from the previous tunnel address matched neither the ip-rule nor the drop rule. The set is now additive (`add element` is idempotent; the down-script already retained it): an element can only ever tighten the guard. Finding 2 means that window could not have leaked POD traffic, but node-originated tunnel traffic does traverse netfilter, and additive is free. Kill-switch reloads no longer disarm the guard either: the .nft file uses `table` + `flush table`, which clears rules but leaves the named set's elements intact, so an Ansible run cannot empty the set mid-flight. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
infra/ — node provisioning and the toolchain
OpenTofu (Proxmox VE) + cloud-init + Ansible bring up the 3-node k3s/Cilium dev cluster.
Spec: ../home-network-k3s/docs/02-environments-and-provisioning.md.
| Path | What |
|---|---|
tofu/ |
The "Create" stage: 3 cloud-init'd VMs on the Proxmox box (bpg/proxmox provider) |
cloud-init/ |
First-boot baseline shipped as a Proxmox user-data snippet |
ansible/ |
The "Baseline"/"Configure" stages: k3s HA, Cilium, kube-vip, the VPN egress gateway |
devcontainer/ |
The pinned toolchain (tofu, ansible, sops, age, flux, kubectl, helm and the whole CI gate toolchain) |
cluster.sh |
RETIRED — drove the old libvirt VMs; does not work against Proxmox |
PHASE1-STATUS.md |
Current state of the cluster and how to reconnect to it |
PHASE1-SCOPE.md |
Historical Phase-1 scoping doc (libvirt era — superseded) |
Where the cluster actually lives
The dev cluster is not on this workstation. It runs on a Proxmox VE host; the nodes sit on the Proxmox LAN and are reached across a pfSense NAT:
| Nodes | k3s-dev-1/2/3 at 192.168.1.50/.51/.52 — 6 vCPU, 24 GiB, Debian 13, k3s v1.36.4 |
| kube-API | kube-vip VIP 192.168.1.49:6443, reached from the workstation via NAT 192.168.2.50:6443 |
| Node SSH | pfSense NAT 192.168.2.102:2250/2251/2252 → node :22 (Ansible only) |
| Ingress VIP | 192.168.1.53 (Cilium L2, shared Gateway); .53–.60 reserved for LB VIPs |
The earlier libvirt/KVM cluster on 10.73.0.0/24 is retired. Any doc or command referencing
virsh, qemu:///system, or 10.73.0.x for the cluster is historical.