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home-network-k3s-impl/runbooks/README.md
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jakman85andClaude Opus 5 bce8778096 docs(runbooks): forward-auth IS enforced — correct the posture note
The serving route's comment claimed that because no Gateway ext-authz
attachment exists, every forward-auth route is 'in practice reachable
unauthenticated today'. That is wrong, and wrong in a dangerous direction
for a document an operator reads during an incident.

Enforcement here is PER-POD, not gateway-level: each of the five services
declaring auth: forward-auth (pihole, jackett, qbittorrent, radarr, sonarr)
publishes both its app port and 4180 on its Service, and its HTTPRoute
targets :4180 — the oauth2-proxy sidecar. Verified on prod. The app port
remains reachable in-cluster on purpose, which is how sonarr/radarr drive
qBittorrent's API, and Cilium default-deny governs that path.

The public-by-design decision for this route is unchanged and still correct;
what changes is that it is genuinely the exception rather than one open route
among many. Headlamp's exclusion is likewise deliberate (native OIDC with
per-user id_token forwarding and no ServiceAccount cluster rights).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-13 00:10:24 -05:00

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8.8 KiB
Markdown

# Alert runbooks — home-network-k3s prod
This is the index page served at `https://home.keithjackson.dev/runbooks/`.
Every alert rule in this platform carries an annotation of the form
runbook_url: "https://${BASE_DOMAIN}/runbooks/<name>"
46 of them, over the 35 names below. Until this directory existed, that path returned **HTTP 404** on the
live cluster: every alert that reached a human handed them a dead link at the exact moment they needed
help. These pages are what makes the link resolve.
## How to run the commands in these runbooks
`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.
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'
Always pass `--context k3s-prod`. `dev.sh` merges BOTH clusters into one kubeconfig and picks a
current-context per invocation, and **that default has already changed once** — k3s-dev until dev was
decommissioned on 2026-09-13, k3s-prod now. A command that names its context still means the same thing
next month; one that relies on the default does not, and the failure is silent. `CLUSTER=prod
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run kubectl ...` selects it explicitly, and every invocation prints a banner
naming the cluster — read it. Do not run two `dev.sh` invocations at once; they share one container.
**Use fully-qualified resource names, always.** Three CRDs on this cluster register the kind `Backup` —
`longhorn.io/v1beta2`, `postgresql.cnpg.io/v1`, `velero.io/v1` — and the bare short name resolves to
Longhorn's, which holds zero objects. `kubectl get backup -A` therefore prints **"No resources found"** on
a cluster holding 6 Velero and 27 CNPG backups (verified on prod 2026-09-13). Acting on that false
negative is how a CLI quirk becomes real data loss. Write `backups.velero.io`,
`backups.postgresql.cnpg.io`, `clusters.postgresql.cnpg.io`, `settings.longhorn.io`,
`volumes.longhorn.io`, `nodes.longhorn.io`.
`git push origin main` **is** the deploy; there is no other apply step. Durable changes go through git.
## Alerts you should not trust the silence of (measured 2026-09-13)
Prometheus scrapes 19 jobs on prod. There is **no** Longhorn, cert-manager, Flux-controller or
Hubble/Cilium job, so these rule groups currently evaluate against nothing and **cannot fire**:
| Missing scrape job | Inert alerts |
|---|---|
| Longhorn | `LonghornVolumeDegraded`, `LonghornVolumeFaulted`, `LonghornVolumeCapacityHigh`, `LonghornNodeStorageHigh` |
| cert-manager | `CertificateExpiringSoon`, `CertificateExpiryImminent`, `CertificateNotReady` |
| Flux (`gotk_*`) | `FluxReconciliationFailure`, `FluxResourceSuspended`, `ImageUpdateAutomationFailing`, `ImagePolicyStalled`, `UpdateHealthGateFailed` |
| Hubble (`hubble_drop_total`) | `HubbleDeniedFlowSpike` |
| etcd (`kubeEtcd` disabled for k3s, deliberately) | no etcd fsync alerting exists at all |
Each affected runbook says so on its own page and gives the by-hand equivalent. See `targets-down`.
## The runbooks
### Nodes
- **`node-down`** — a node's node-exporter is unscrapable; the node may be gone, or its kubelet may have
stopped posting status while the host stays up (the 2026-09-07 shape).
- **`node-io`** — disk I/O pressure/starvation. The etcd WAL shares a partition with Longhorn replicas;
this is the alert that would have called the 2026-09-07 outage and did not exist at the time.
- **`node-memory`** — memory pressure. Includes why `SwapTotal == 0` is not evidence swap is off.
- **`node-disk`** — a node filesystem filling up. `/data` is the one that matters.
- **`node-cpu`** — CPU PSI and run-queue depth, and how to tell CPU contention from I/O contention.
### Storage
- **`longhorn-degraded`** — a volume has lost redundancy. Normal after any reboot, and the rebuild is the
expensive part. Freeze/thaw commands here.
- **`longhorn-faulted`** — no usable replica. Data at risk; stop before anything destructive.
- **`longhorn-capacity`** — a volume or a node's Longhorn disk near capacity.
- **`pvc-capacity`** — PVC filling up / almost full / predicted to fill. These rules work.
- **`monitoring-capacity`** — Prometheus or Loki running out of disk; don't let the monitor blind itself.
### GitOps and updates
- **`flux-reconcile`** — a Flux resource stuck at Ready=False. Which tier decides the blast radius.
- **`flux-suspended`** — reconciliation turned off and forgotten. Drift becomes silent.
- **`update-rollback`** — a HelmRelease failed its health gate and is rolling back.
- **`image-automation`** — the git write-back engine is failing (feature is disabled here).
- **`image-policy-stalled`** — an ImagePolicy/ImageRepository cannot resolve a tag.
### Certificates
- **`cert-issuance`** — ACME issuance failing. The DNS-01 self-check is the usual cause.
- **`cert-expiry`** — a certificate is expiring. Almost always a late symptom of `cert-issuance`.
### Networking
- **`vpn-down`** — the egress VPN tunnel. Includes the silent egress-gateway staleness that this alert
cannot see, and what the kill-switch actually does.
- **`denied-flows`** — policy-denied flow spike. The Cilium hairpin/identity regression class.
### Backups and DR
- **`backup-failure`** — a Velero backup failed. The R2 object-tagging incompatibility is documented here.
- **`backup-partial`** — a Velero backup completed with partial failures, and which skips are deliberate.
- **`backup-missed`** — no successful Velero backup in 24h.
- **`cnpg-archiving`** — WAL archiving stuck / no recoverability point. **An availability incident, not
just a backup one.**
- **`cnpg-backup-missed`** — no recent CNPG base backup. Velero does not cover these databases.
- **`cnpg-wal-growth`** — `pg_wal` not being recycled. Never delete WAL by hand.
- **`cnpg-exporter`** — the CNPG SQL exporter erroring: a blind spot that looks exactly like health.
- **`cnpg-primary-spread`** — two or more CNPG primaries on one node. Blast radius, not an outage,
and the rebalance costs ~9s of writes per database — one cluster at a time.
### Identity
- **`keycloak-down`** — the IdP is down. Blast radius, and the break-glass path that still works.
- **`keycloak-db`** — Keycloak's CloudNativePG database is unavailable.
- **`keycloak-client-secrets`** — the client/URL reconciler failing or silent. The 2026-09-06 lockout that
every green signal missed.
### Virtualisation
- **`kubevirt-control-plane`** — VM lifecycle operations will fail; running VMs keep running.
- **`kubevirt-launch-failed`** — a VMI reached the Failed phase. The three k3s-specific launch traps.
- **`kubevirt-crashloop`** — a virt-launcher pod restarting repeatedly.
- **`cdi-import-stuck`** — a DataVolume import not progressing. Check node I/O before restarting it.
## Editing a runbook
Each page is `runbooks/<name>.md` in the `home-network-k3s-impl` repo. Edit it, push to `main`, and Flux
re-renders the ConfigMap and rolls the two-replica server; kustomize's content hash on the generated
ConfigMap name is what triggers the roll.
Adding a **new** alert with a `runbook_url` requires the matching `runbooks/<name>.md` **and** its
`<name>=<name>.md` entry in `runbooks/kustomization.yaml`. Both are enforced by
`conformance/tests/l0-static/alert-runbooks-resolvable`, which runs unconditionally in the merge gate —
"the file exists in git" and "the URL resolves in the cluster" are different claims, and it checks both.
Every page must carry the four operator sections (*What this means here*, *First commands*, *Likely
causes, most likely first*, *When to escalate or stop*), mention `dev.sh`, and pass `--context k3s-prod`.
The check enforces that too, because a stub that makes the link resolve while helping nobody is worse than
the 404 it replaced — it looks fixed.
## Why this route has no login
Deliberately public. The UIs that declare forward-auth (pihole, jackett, qbittorrent, radarr, sonarr)
really are closed: enforcement is per-pod, each one's HTTPRoute targeting its oauth2-proxy sidecar on
:4180 rather than the app port. If
these pages did too, `keycloak-down` would be unreadable exactly when Keycloak is down,
`keycloak-db` unreadable when its database is down, and `keycloak-client-secrets` unreadable during the
precise failure that broke all 12 OIDC clients on 2026-09-06 behind an entirely green cluster. An
operator who cannot log in is this route's primary reader. The content is operational procedure — metric
names, thresholds, kubectl invocations, topology — and no secrets. See
`runbooks/serving/httproute.yaml` for the full reasoning, including how forward-auth is actually
enforced here and the instruction to leave this route **out** of any Gateway-level ext-authz attachment
if one is ever introduced.
The running narrative of real incidents on this cluster is `DECISIONS-LOG.md`.