Files
home-network-k3s-impl/clusters
jakman85andClaude Opus 5 fd43f332d6 feat(pihole): authoritative LAN DNS for the zone on udp/53 + tcp/53 at a pinned VIP
platform/coredns/coredns-custom.yaml has always said its split-horizon is for
PODS and deferred LAN clients to "PiHole split-horizon". PiHole served no DNS:
its Service was ClusterIP with ports 80 and 4180 only. The LAN half of R-DNS-03
that docs/09 and the README's Phase 2 row both claim did not exist, so LAN
clients ran on hand-maintained per-client dnsmasq files - one went stale after
the dev decommission and cost the operator sonarr.home.keithjackson.dev. The
SOHO router that owns 192.168.2.0/24 cannot cover for it either: it strips
RFC1918 answers for public domains as rebind protection and returns NOERROR
with no answer.

EXPOSURE (apps/wave-0/pihole-dns.yaml, hand-written, placed into wave 0 by
render.py's EXTRA_UNITS - the schema has no field for a LoadBalancer Service, a
pinned lbipam VIP, a sharing key, source ranges or UDP, the same reason
apps/vms/unifi and platform/crafty hand-write theirs):
  - two Services, udp/53 and tcp/53, sharing one pinned VIP
    ${PIHOLE_DNS_VIP} = 192.168.2.23 on prod, the next free address in the
    .20-.30 pool (pool status IPsUsed 3 of 11; .20 Gateway, .21 unifi, .22
    crafty; arping from a LAN host got no reply).
  - no external-dns hostname annotation: nothing public is created, and
    platform/externaldns/ is untouched.

ANSWERS (catalog/pihole.yaml env - declarative, no reconciler): PiHole v6 takes
every FTL setting as an FTLCONF_ environment variable and treats it as
env-forced, applied ahead of pihole.toml on every cold start and read-only in
the UI. That is a real declarative entry point, which the Keycloak and CNPG
CronJob reconcilers exist precisely because their state lacks, so a reconciler
here would be ceremony. misc.dnsmasq_lines carries a wildcard
address=/<zone>/<GATEWAY_VIP> plus one longer-domain override per L4 service
(unifi, crafty-mc, pihole-dns); dnsmasq resolves overlaps by longest matching
domain, so precedence is structural and a newly onboarded Gateway-fronted
service needs no DNS change. dns.upstreams is declared too - the live pod
carried hand-set upstreams that no manifest knew about and that every restart
discarded.

externalTrafficPolicy Cluster, NOT Local, and loadBalancerSourceRanges for the
LAN restriction. Measured on prod, Cilium 1.20.1: the L2 announcer does not
filter lease candidates by which nodes hold a backend - the two Services landed
on k3s-prod-3 and k3s-prod-2 while the pod ran on k3s-prod-1 - and it keeps
renewing after the pod moves away, so with Local a reschedule leaves LAN DNS
dead indefinitely. Cluster serves the VIP from any node; the LAN restriction
moves to loadBalancerSourceRanges, which Cilium enforces in eBPF on the VIP
before load-balancing (verified by narrowing the range to exclude the test
client and back). The cost is SNAT: forwarded queries reach PiHole from the
ingress node, so PiHole's per-client rate limit is disabled in the catalog or
the whole LAN would count as one client against its 1000-per-60s default.

Proven from a LAN host (192.168.2.132) against 192.168.2.23 with the pod and
both leases on three DIFFERENT nodes: sonarr/grafana/nextcloud/keycloak/apex
-> 192.168.2.20, unifi -> .21, crafty-mc -> .22, pihole-dns -> .23, recursion
(cloudflare.com, github.com, debian.org) intact over both udp and tcp, AAAA
NODATA, NXDOMAIN outside the zone, and still answering after a forced
prod-1 -> prod-2 reschedule.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-14 00:57:58 -05:00
..

clusters/

Flux entrypoints and the environment-overlay model (R-ENV-02, R-GITOPS-01/02/03).

Governing spec: docs/05-gitops-and-delivery.md, docs/02-environments-and-provisioning.md, ADR-0004 (Flux).

Phase 0 scaffolding only. These are structurally-correct stubs. No cluster exists — nothing here reconciles until WS-INFRA delivers a cluster and bootstraps Flux (roadmap Phase 1).

Layout — base + overlay (never fork the base)

clusters/
  base/                 shared Flux objects (one authoring, both environments)
    flux-system.yaml    GitRepository — the reconciliation source (bootstrap → Gitea)
    platform.yaml       Flux Kustomization → ./platform   (reconciles first)
    apps-wave-0.yaml    Flux Kustomization → ./apps/wave-0 (dependsOn platform-config)
    apps-wave-1.yaml    Flux Kustomization → ./apps/wave-1 (dependsOn apps-wave-0)
    apps-wave-2.yaml    Flux Kustomization → ./apps/wave-N (dependsOn apps-wave-N-1)
    cluster-vars.yaml   ConfigMap of overlay knobs (BASE defaults)
    kustomization.yaml
  dev/                  ACTIVE build target — patches cluster-vars with dev values only
    kustomization.yaml
  prod/                 DESIGN-ONLY until roadmap Phase 7 — patches cluster-vars with prod values only
    kustomization.yaml

How the overlay model satisfies R-ENV-02

The base authors the reconciliation graph once. platform.yaml and the app-wave Kustomizations (apps-wave-0/1/2.yaml — the single apps.yaml was retired; apps-vms.yaml deliberately omits it, see below) declare postBuild.substituteFrom the cluster-vars ConfigMap. Platform and app manifests use ${TOKEN} placeholders for every value that legitimately differs between environments (issuer, replica counts, storage sizes, retention, node placement).

clusters/dev and clusters/prod differ ONLY by the values they patch into cluster-vars — they add no resources of their own and never copy/fork a base manifest. Promotion to prod (docs/02) is a change to the prod overlay's variables, nothing else.

LAN addressing is a knob, not a literal (fixed 2026-08-31)

Until 2026-08-31 the base manifests hardcoded the dev LAN: the k3s API host Cilium dials, the Cilium LB IP pool range, the pinned crafty/unifi L4 VIPs and the off-cluster S3 backup endpoint. That broke R-ENV-02 outright — clusters/prod would have rendered dev addresses (192.168.1.x) onto the prod LAN (192.168.2.x). They are now the cluster-vars "LAN addressing" block (K3S_API_HOST, CILIUM_LB_POOL_START/_STOP, UNIFI_L4_VIP, CRAFTY_L4_VIP, S3_BACKUP_ENDPOINT, alongside the pre-existing GATEWAY_VIP), set explicitly by BOTH overlays.

Two rules when touching that block:

  1. Substitution coverage. A ${TOKEN} only resolves in a path whose Flux Kustomization declares postBuild.substituteFrom: cluster-vars; anywhere else the literal string ${TOKEN} ships to the cluster. apps-vms was the one path without it and now has it — which means every shell ${...} in a VM manifest's cloud-init must be escaped $${...} (see clusters/base/apps-vms.yaml for the full envsubst escape contract).
  2. GATEWAY_VIP must be inside CILIUM_LB_POOL_START..STOP, and in practice equal to START: the shared Gateway pins no address, so Cilium LB-IPAM gives it the pool's first free IP while split-horizon CoreDNS answers with ${GATEWAY_VIP}. A VIP outside the pool blackholes in-cluster hairpin traffic while the Gateway still looks healthy.

Values the operator has not decided are TBD-PROD-* placeholders, not guesses: prod inherits the DEV base defaults if an overlay op is simply omitted, so an invalid value that fails loudly is strictly safer than a plausible one that quietly comes up on the wrong network.

How Flux is pointed at an environment

flux bootstrap (run by WS-INFRA in Phase 1) targets one environment's path per cluster:

# dev cluster
flux bootstrap ... --path=clusters/dev
# prod cluster (Phase 7 only — design-only until then)
flux bootstrap ... --path=clusters/prod

Bootstrap materializes the flux-system Kustomization that renders the chosen overlay, which pulls in base/ and applies the env-scoped cluster-vars.

Reconciliation order

GitRepository (flux-system)
        │
        ▼
Kustomization: platform  (./platform, substituteFrom cluster-vars)
        │  healthy
        ▼
Kustomization: apps-wave-0  (./apps/wave-0, dependsOn platform-config, substituteFrom cluster-vars)
        │  healthy
        ▼
Kustomization: apps-wave-1  (./apps/wave-1, dependsOn apps-wave-0)
        │  healthy
        ▼
Kustomization: apps-wave-N  (./apps/wave-N, dependsOn apps-wave-N-1)

Second-order CRDs need a THIRD pass (platform-config-cdi, added 2026-09-05)

The controllers/configs split (platform → platform-config) assumes a CRD is registered by the controller install. CDI breaks that: cdi-operator.yaml registers only cdis.cdi.kubevirt.io, and cdi-operator creates storageprofiles / datavolumes / datasources only after it has reconciled the CDI CR. Since kustomize-controller server-side dry-runs every object in a pass before applying any of them, having the CDI CR and the CDI StorageProfiles in one pass was a deadlock, not a race: unknown kind → pass aborts → CR never applied → CRD never created → platform-config can never converge → every tier below it blocked. Invisible on dev (its CDI CRDs have existed for months); it cost 12h on prod's cold start.

So there is a third tier, platform-config-cdi (./platform-config-cdi, dependsOn: platform-config), and a rule:

A CR belongs in platform-config-cdi, not platform-config, when the CRD it needs is created by a controller at runtime rather than by a manifest in git.

apps-vms dependsOn it as well as platform-config, because CDI reads StorageProfile/longhorn-vm at DataVolume provisioning time — a VM disk provisioned before that profile exists is stamped RWO/Filesystem and is permanently not live-migratable.

Wave 0 dependsOn platform-config (transitively platform) so CNI/storage/TLS/DNS/gateway exist before any workload reconciles. The app tier is split into dependency-ordered WAVES (catalog/render.py --emit-waves): each apps-wave-<N> health-gates (wait:true) ONLY its own wave, so a crashloop in a later wave can no longer stall an earlier wave or block new revisions. See DESIGN-waves.md for the wave table + cutover runbook.

TODOs (later phases — do not action in Phase 0)

  • Source cutover (WS-GITOPS, Phase 6): base/flux-system.yaml currently points at the bootstrap source. After Gitea is onboarded, repoint spec.url to gitea.home.keithjackson.dev and keep an off-cluster mirror (spec docs/05 "Source-of-truth", CONTRIBUTING.md).
  • SOPS decryption (WS-SEC, Phase 1): add spec.decryption.provider: sops (age secret name only, never plaintext) to the platform/apps Kustomizations once the age key is bootstrapped (ADR-0007).
  • Split ordered Flux Kustomizations if intra-platform ordering needs to be explicit (e.g. a separate cilium/longhorn Kustomization others dependsOn).