jakman85andClaude Opus 5
a3f4ddb971
Brings the two alerts for the silent egress-gateway failure: VPNEgressSteeringStale
(critical) and VPNEgressUplinkLabelMissing (warning), plus the kube-state-metrics
allowlist entry that makes them non-inert.
WHY THE BRANCH SAT IN THE BACKLOG: it could not pass the merge gate. Three
whole-repo checks failed on it, and each one was a real gap rather than a nuisance:
* alert-runbooks-resolvable — both alerts link to /runbooks/vpn-egress-stale,
which did not exist. An alert firing now would hand the operator a 404.
* alert-rules-unit-tested — alerts.yaml is already a covered file, so new rules
in it must be tested or a "tested" file quietly grows untested rules.
* alert-metrics-have-scrape-targets — see the guard bug below.
WHAT THE ALERTS CATCH. egress-class=vpn pods leave through one gateway node's tun0;
Cilium resolves it to an ifindex and caches it. An OpenVPN reconnect destroys and
re-creates tun0 with a NEW ifindex, and the node label
homelab.keithjackson.dev/egress-uplink=<addr>-<ifindex> is what forces Cilium to
re-resolve. If the label does not follow the tunnel, the cache points at a destroyed
interface and every vpn-class pod is silently dropped — while tun0 stays up and
VPNTunnelDown says nothing. That ran ~80 minutes undetected on the dev gateway.
Verified this is live on prod, not inert: k3s-prod-3 carries egress-gateway=true and
egress-uplink=10.150.192.86-139, and vpn-egress-steering has been in place 14 days.
The label was exported on 0 series before this change, so the allowlist entry is
what switches the alerts on.
runbooks/vpn-egress-stale.md — written and wired into the configMapGenerator, with
the four required operator sections. It leads with proving egress from a pod the
policy selects, because the symptom is "outbound traffic silently disappears", and
it says plainly not to "fix" this by deleting the policy: that does not restore
egress, it sends vpn-class traffic out of the real ISP connection, which is the leak
the class exists to prevent.
platform/monitoring/tests/vpn-egress.test.yaml — four promtool fixtures. 1 and 2 are
the SAME tunnel reconnect with and without the label following it, which isolates the
mechanism the rule actually keys on: a label VALUE change is not a changing sample,
it retires one series and starts another. 3 is the inert case (gateway node, no uplink
label) where the critical rule CANNOT fire, which is why the warning exists.
Two fixes the branch needed that were defects in the checks themselves:
1. alert-metrics-have-scrape-targets asserted the KSM allowlist matched
`nodes=[...egress-gateway]` with a literal closing bracket — i.e. that the list
contained EXACTLY that one label. Adding a second label correctly (egress-uplink,
which these alerts need) therefore FAILED the check while the property it guards
was perfectly satisfied. Loosened to `[,\]]`: in the list, not the whole list. A
guard that breaks when you correctly extend the thing it guards teaches people to
edit the guard, which is how it stops guarding.
2. UNTESTED_ALERTS listed VPNTunnelDown, and the check flagged it as stale because
"asserted on" is a bare word match over the test file — my header COMMENT
mentioning VPNTunnelDown was enough to count as coverage. Rather than delete the
register entry and claim coverage that did not exist, the fixtures now assert
VPNTunnelDown QUIET in all four cases. That required making them faithful: they
had no node_network_receive_bytes_total{device="tun0"} at all, so VPNTunnelDown
would have been firing throughout unnoticed, because promtool only checks the
alertnames you name. A healthy tun0 passes traffic, and that silence IS the claim
these rules exist for.
NOTE FOR LATER, not fixed here: that word-match means any alert named in prose counts
as tested. Tightening it to `alertname:` positions could reveal other prose-only
"coverage", and the register is shrink-only, so the cascade wants doing deliberately
rather than at 01:00 unattended.
Conflicts resolved: kept HEAD's Velero custom-resource-state block and took only the
branch's one-line allowlist change (14 lines down to 1); inserted the branch's
2026-09-12 DECISIONS-LOG entry in date order rather than appending it out of sequence.
Gated: offline l0,l1 --include-scope whole-repo — 24 cases, 0 failures, 0 skips,
0 unwired. The new unit tests pass under the pinned promtool 3.14.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
home-network-k3s-impl
Implementation of the home k3s + Longhorn platform. This repo holds the reconciled artifacts
(Flux config, Kustomize overlays, KubeVirt/Helm manifests, ServiceDefinitions, Kyverno policies,
Chainsaw conformance tests, CI). It is driven by — and subordinate to — the read-only
specification at ../home-network-k3s.
Rules (from the spec — non-negotiable)
- The spec is read-only. Never modify anything under
../home-network-k3s. Implement against it; escalate spec problems, don't edit them (specAGENTS.md§11, R-TEST-06). - Done = a green, reproducible, requirement-tagged conformance test — never "merged," never a
manual demo (spec
docs/14,agents/definition-of-done.md). - No work on
main. Every change is a feature branch merged intomain(specCONTRIBUTING.md). - No plaintext secrets — SOPS-encrypted only (spec
docs/07). - Phase discipline — only build what the active roadmap phase authorizes (spec
roadmap/phases.md).
Layout
infra/ node provisioning: OpenTofu (Proxmox VE) + cloud-init + Ansible, and the
pinned dev container that carries the whole toolchain
bootstrap/ one-time cluster bootstrap: Flux install, SOPS/age key, host Gitea
platform/ platform CONTROLLERS (Flux HelmReleases / operator bases): kyverno, cilium,
longhorn, external-snapshotter, cert-manager, externaldns, gateway, coredns,
vpn-egress, monitoring, cnpg, keycloak, oauth2-proxy, kubevirt
platform-config/ platform CONFIGS — the custom resources of the CRDs installed above
(ClusterIssuers, Gateway, Kyverno policies, KubeVirt/CDI CRs, Keycloak CRs).
Split out because CRs and the CRDs they use cannot apply in one pass.
apps/ application tier, reconciled as dependency-ordered WAVES:
wave-0/ wave-1/ wave-2/ rendered container apps (see DESIGN-waves.md)
vms/ KubeVirt VirtualMachines (non-gating tier)
catalog/ ServiceDefinition entries (the onboarding surface) + render.py
schemas/ ServiceDefinition JSON Schema + renderer contract
clusters/ Flux entrypoints + dev/ and prod/ overlays
conformance/ Chainsaw behavior/conformance suite + harness + coverage report
ci/ the gate as scripts (lint · schema · Kyverno L0 · L1 render · decision)
.gitea/ Gitea Actions CI running that gate on an in-cluster runner
Status
Roadmap phases 0–6 are delivered, and Phase 7 (Production Readiness) is OPEN and in
progress. clusters/prod is no longer a design-only overlay: prod is the live cluster, serving the
apex home.keithjackson.dev. The dev cluster was decommissioned on 2026-09-12 (full migration:
dev out, prod onto the apex — see the DECISIONS-LOG), so phases 0–6 are now exercised on prod
hardware rather than on Proxmox VMs.
Phase 7 exit criteria — prod runs the same config via the prod overlay; DR proven; monitoring + alerts live:
| criterion | state |
|---|---|
| prod runs the prod overlay | met — 3× mini-PC bare metal, one Flux tree, prod overlay only |
| monitoring + alerts live | met 2026-09-13 — see the note below; this was not true before that date |
| DR proven | R-STATE-03 PROVEN on prod 2026-09-14 — off-cluster restore from Cloudflare R2. R-STATE-02 (node-loss) is still dev-only |
DR restore is proven on prod. R-STATE-03 reads proven in --status as of 2026-09-14 —
the first requirement in this repo to reach that state. Both of its verifiers are recorded:
dr-restore (L3, run 20260914T021505Z-24b8111, sentinel DR_RESTORED_FROM_OFF_CLUSTER_BACKUP_OK)
and placeholder-guard-coupling (L0). The L3 drill seeds a canary on the replicated longhorn
class, backs the namespace and volume data up off-cluster, destroys every in-cluster copy
(namespace, PVC and PV), restores into a clean namespace, and asserts the restored PVC binds a
different PersistentVolume — so an in-cluster survival cannot pass as a restore.
What remains for Phase 7: R-STATE-02 (node-loss) is still proven only on the decommissioned
dev cluster. That drill takes a real node down on a live cluster, so it is a deliberate, scheduled
exercise rather than something to run in passing.
Read --coverage-only and --status as two different questions; the earlier PROVEN: 0 was not a
bug but the honest answer, because proofs are claims about a specific tree on a specific cluster.
| Phase | Delivered |
|---|---|
| 0 Foundations | ServiceDefinition schema + renderer, Kyverno L0 gate, conformance harness, CI |
| 1 Cluster bring-up | 3-node k3s HA, embedded etcd, kube-vip VIP, Cilium, Flux, SOPS. Originally Proxmox VMs; now 3× mini-PC bare metal (k3s-prod-1/2/3, 192.168.2.10/.11/.12, k3s v1.36.4+k3s1, Debian 13) |
| 2 Platform core | Cilium · Longhorn · cert-manager (LE-prod wildcard) · ExternalDNS · Gateway API · split-horizon DNS, both halves: CoreDNS for pods, and PiHole as the authoritative LAN resolver for ${BASE_DOMAIN} on udp/53 + tcp/53 at a pinned VIP (192.168.2.23 on prod). The LAN half was claimed from the start but did not exist until 2026-09-14 — PiHole's Service was ClusterIP :80/:4180, so LAN clients ran on hand-maintained per-client dnsmasq files |
| 3 Egress / VPN | ADR-0015 node-level OpenVPN split-tunnel + Cilium egress-gateway steering + host kill-switch |
| 4 Observability | kube-prometheus-stack · Loki · Alloy · Alertmanager. Velero unblocked 2026-09-13 — backs up to Cloudflare R2 (OQ-BKP closed; the velero-plugin-for-aws tagging incompatibility needed a pinned plugin). Longhorn has no backup target by decision: volume data is protected by Velero + kopia to R2. image-automation authored but disabled |
| 5 IaaS | KubeVirt + CDI on real nested KVM; live-migratable RWX VM storage. The UniFi VM runs, but UniFi OS Server is not yet installed in the guest |
| 6 Identity + CI | Keycloak (Operator + CNPG) · oauth2-proxy forward-auth · Grafana OIDC · kubectl OIDC SSO with group→RBAC · in-cluster Gitea Actions merge gate |
| 7 Production readiness | IN PROGRESS (DR restore proven 2026-09-14; node-loss outstanding). Prod live on bare metal serving the apex; dev decommissioned; CNPG HA 3 instances with primaries spread one per node; NFS bulk media + legacy Nextcloud mounted; VPN egress on prod. Alerting made real 2026-09-13 (Longhorn, cert-manager, Flux and twelve app SLIs had all been unable to fire). Open: node-loss (R-STATE-02) re-proven on prod. |
Conformance: 51 / 51 requirements covered (100%), 0 gaps, 0 safety-critical gaps (closed
2026-09-13; R-C2-01/R-C2-02 were the last two). Regenerate with
./conformance/run.sh --coverage-only; the full report is
conformance/_artifacts/coverage/coverage.md.
Coverage is not proof. A requirement is covered when an executable test exists for it, and
PROVEN only when a recorded run of that test is in conformance/runs/ledger.jsonl at the current
SHA on the cluster it claims. Read both numbers: --coverage-only for the first, --status for the
second.
The running narrative — decisions, root causes, incidents, follow-ups — is
DECISIONS-LOG.md. It, not this table, is the authoritative record.
Working on this repo
Everything the gate needs is baked into the pinned dev container — do not install the toolchain on the host:
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh build # once
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run make -C ci gate # the same gate CI runs
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh # interactive shell (sops, flux, kubectl, tofu, ansible)
The container mounts the repo at /work, your age keyring, and the sibling spec repo read-only
so the spec-immutability check can actually run. See
infra/devcontainer/README.md.
A green run prints MERGE GATE: PASS. The L2/L3 conformance layers stay SKIPPED unless
CLUSTER_AVAILABLE=true — the static gate never pretends to have run them.