jakman85andClaude Opus 5
8e017fad91
main became a protected branch on 2026-09-29, so the direct push that 37 of 39 runbooks instructed is REJECTED. The wording was merely stale before; it is now actively wrong, and it is the line an operator reads mid-incident. Every occurrence now describes the real path: push a branch, open a PR, merge once the gate is green -- that merge is the deploy. 35 files shared one identical block; flux-reconcile.md, README.md and plex-claim.md each said it their own way and were corrected individually. plex-claim.md is rewritten around the delivery loop and records that THE SERVER IS NOW CLAIMED (PlexOnlineToken present in /config), so PLEX_CLAIM is a permanent no-op and the page only applies after a /config wipe. Adds infra/plex/claim-ship.sh, which drives branch -> commit -> push -> PR -> gate -> merge -> reconcile -> pod roll -> verdict with a stopwatch. Three steps are easy to lose under time pressure and two are SILENT when skipped: --with-source (without it the Kustomization applies the previously-fetched revision), the mandatory rollout restart (only the ciphertext changes, so the pod template is byte-identical and nothing restarts itself), and the feat/ branch prefix (act_runner capacity is 1, and a prefix inside gate.yml's push trigger fires a redundant run that serialises ahead of the PR run). Drops the "~4-minute TTL" the page asserted in four places. It was uncited, and upstream pms-docker documents no expiry at all. The countdown on plex.tv/claim is the authority. Measured loop: ~2m45s. DECISIONS-LOG carries the PM handoff: both halves of the 2026-08-31 CI claim were false, the stale-.runner root cause, the four-deep Flux dependency cascade, and the correction that a skipped Gitea job reports success rather than hanging. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
168 lines
9.2 KiB
Markdown
168 lines
9.2 KiB
Markdown
# cert-issuance — A Certificate is not Ready (ACME issuance is failing)
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**Alert:** `CertificateNotReady` (warning, 1h)
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**File:** `platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml`, group `platform-health.certificates`
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**Expression:** `certmanager_certificate_ready_status{condition="False"} == 1`
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## What this means here
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cert-manager cannot issue or renew a certificate. The one that matters is `wildcard-home` in the
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`gateway` namespace — secret `wildcard-home-tls`, requesting **both** `*.${BASE_DOMAIN}` **and**
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`${BASE_DOMAIN}` from `${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER}` (`letsencrypt-prod` on prod). Every HTTPS listener on the
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shared Gateway terminates with it, so issuance failing is a slow-burning cluster-wide outage: it does
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nothing today and takes down every hostname plus in-cluster SSO when the existing certificate expires.
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The 1h `for` reflects that — a failing order is worth investigating today, not paging at 3am.
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The solver is **DNS-01 against Cloudflare**, which matters because DNS-01 has a failure mode this
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cluster has already hit:
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**The self-check, not the challenge, is the usual failure.** On 2026-08-16 the wildcard stalled with the
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challenge at `Presented=true` — the Cloudflare TXT record *was* created, so the API token worked — while
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cert-manager's propagation self-check looped **"DNS record not yet propagated"**. The record was
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publicly resolvable at 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8; the NAT'd cluster's own DNS could not see it, because
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split-horizon CoreDNS answers authoritatively for the zone and never forwards. The fix is live in
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`platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml`:
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```yaml
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dns01RecursiveNameservers: "1.1.1.1:53,8.8.8.8:53"
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dns01RecursiveNameserversOnly: true
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```
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The challenge went pending → valid and the certificate Issued. If you find those two lines missing or
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changed, that is your answer.
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### Verify the alert can even fire (measured 2026-09-13)
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**This alert is currently INERT.** `count(certmanager_clock_time_seconds)` returned **0 series** on
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prod — there is no cert-manager scrape job among Prometheus's 19 jobs, so all three certificate rules
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evaluate against nothing. Certificate health must be read from the CRs, as below. See
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`/runbooks/targets-down` for the full list of inert rule groups.
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## Running the commands in this runbook
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`kubectl` does not work on the operator workstation. The toolchain lives only in the pinned dev
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container, and the host's `k3s-oidc` context hangs on a browser prompt once its token expires —
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that hang is not the cluster being down. Every command below runs as:
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infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'
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Always pass `--context k3s-prod` explicitly. `dev.sh` merges BOTH clusters into one kubeconfig and
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picks a current-context per invocation, and **that default has already changed once** — it was k3s-dev
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until dev was decommissioned on 2026-09-13, and is k3s-prod now. A command that names its context means
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the same thing next month as it does today; one that relies on the default does not, and the failure is
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silent (it answers confidently about the other cluster). `CLUSTER=prod infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run
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kubectl ...` selects it explicitly, and every invocation prints a banner naming the cluster it is about
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to talk to — read it. Do not run two `dev.sh` invocations at once; they share one container and
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interfere.
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USE FULLY-QUALIFIED RESOURCE NAMES, ALWAYS. Three CRDs on this cluster register the kind `Backup`:
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`longhorn.io/v1beta2`, `postgresql.cnpg.io/v1` and `velero.io/v1`. The bare short name resolves to
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Longhorn's, which holds zero objects — so `kubectl get backup -A` prints **"No resources found"** on
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a cluster holding 6 Velero backups and 27 CNPG backups. Verified on prod 2026-09-13. Reading that as
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"the backups are gone" and acting on it turns a false negative into real data loss. Write
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`backups.velero.io`, `backups.postgresql.cnpg.io`, `clusters.postgresql.cnpg.io`,
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`settings.longhorn.io`, `volumes.longhorn.io`, `nodes.longhorn.io`.
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Mutating kubectl (`apply`, `patch`, `annotate`, `rollout`) and `flux reconcile` are blocked for
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agents here: every durable change goes through git. **`main` is a protected branch — a direct push
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is rejected.** A change lands by pushing a branch, opening a PR, and merging it once the gate is
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green; that merge is the deploy. Where this runbook gives a mutating command it is for an operator,
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and it says so.
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## First commands
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Walk the chain top-down — Certificate → CertificateRequest → Order → Challenge. The failure is almost
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always visible at one specific level:
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```
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infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
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'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificates.cert-manager.io -A \
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-o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message,NOTAFTER:.status.notAfter'
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```
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```
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infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
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'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificaterequests.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
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kubectl --context k3s-prod get orders.acme.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
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kubectl --context k3s-prod get challenges.acme.cert-manager.io -A -o wide'
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```
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The controller log, which carries the actual ACME error text:
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```
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infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
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'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n cert-manager logs deploy/cert-manager --tail=150 2>&1 | grep -iE "error|propagat|challenge|order|rate" | tail -30'
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```
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Is the TXT record really there? **Ask the authority, never a resolver** — 1.1.1.1 has served a deleted
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TXT record here for minutes and produced a false failure diagnosis:
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```
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dig +short @betty.ns.cloudflare.com _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT
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dig +short @1.1.1.1 _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT
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```
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Is the resolver override still configured?
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```
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grep -n "dns01Recursive" platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml
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```
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The issuer and its credential:
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```
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infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
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'kubectl --context k3s-prod get clusterissuers.cert-manager.io \
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-o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message'
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```
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## Likely causes, most likely first
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### 1. The DNS-01 propagation self-check cannot resolve the TXT record
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The recorded failure. Signature: Challenge `Presented=true`, status looping on *"DNS record not yet
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propagated"*, and `dig @betty.ns.cloudflare.com` **does** return the TXT. Cause: cert-manager is asking
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the cluster's own resolver, which is split-horizon CoreDNS answering authoritatively for the zone and
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never forwarding. Remediation: the two `dns01Recursive*` values above, in git.
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### 2. The Cloudflare API token is wrong, expired, or scoped too narrowly
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Signature: Challenge never reaches `Presented=true`, and the log carries a Cloudflare 403/6003. The
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token lives in a SOPS-encrypted Secret. Note the standing rule from the OIDC incident: **non-secret
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environment-specific values must never live inside an encrypted Secret** — `${BASE_DOMAIN}`
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substitution cannot reach inside one, and that is precisely how prod's OIDC clients once ended up
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pointed at dev's Keycloak. Keep hostnames out; keep only the token in.
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### 3. `EXTERNALDNS_DOMAIN_FILTER` / zone confusion
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Recorded as finding F-DNS1: the filter **must be the ZONE** (`keithjackson.dev`), not the subdomain.
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A zone mismatch means the TXT record is created in the wrong place or not at all.
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### 4. Two clusters racing the same `_acme-challenge` record
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`infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md` §10: after the 2026-09-04 incident `platform-config` would have requested a
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`*.home.keithjackson.dev` wildcard from letsencrypt-prod for a certificate dev already held; both
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clusters would then have raced each other's `_acme-challenge` TXT records on one Cloudflare zone and
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**neither would reliably solve DNS-01**. Only the tier being suspended prevented it. If any second
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cluster exists, establish which one owns the zone first.
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### 5. Let's Encrypt rate limit
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`too many certificates already issued` in the log. One wildcard is well inside the limits, so this means
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something has been retrying in a loop. Stop the loop and wait out the window.
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### 6. A new Certificate for a hostname that does not resolve
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A newly added service whose DNS is not yet published cannot solve DNS-01. Check ExternalDNS first.
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## When to escalate or stop
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- **Escalate if `wildcard-home` has been not-Ready for more than a day**, and check
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`/runbooks/cert-expiry` for how much runway the existing certificate has. Under 3 days of runway is an
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operator page.
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- **Never switch `${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER}` to letsencrypt-staging** to get a green certificate. Staging
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issues fine and then breaks every in-cluster OIDC client with `x509: certificate signed by unknown
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authority` — that is the bug that forced LE-prod in the first place.
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- **Do not delete the existing `wildcard-home-tls` Secret** while issuance is broken. A stale but valid
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certificate is far better than none.
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- **Do not create certificates by hand.** cert-manager owns them; the durable change is in git.
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- Rotating the Cloudflare token is an operator action (SOPS, DR path).
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---
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Source of truth: `runbooks/cert-issuance.md`. Index: `/runbooks/`
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Records: `DECISIONS-LOG.md` "Fix 5 — cert-manager DNS-01 self-check via public resolvers"
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(commit ~`59dd3d9`) and the LE-staging → LE-prod switch; `infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md` §10.
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