Root cause of the Vault OIDC 'Missing auth_url' error (and the same
symptom on every other VPS-standby app): the Ingress tls: block makes
HTTPS available but Traefik still serves plain HTTP on the same host too
- nothing was forcing the redirect. A browser landing on
http://vault.vps.huskypup.net gets a Vault UI that computes its OIDC
callback using window.location.origin (http://...), which doesn't match
the https:// entry in allowed_redirect_uris - Vault silently returns an
empty auth_url rather than an obviously-config-looking error. Confirmed
via a HAR capture of the actual failing browser request.
Adds a per-namespace Traefik Middleware (redirectScheme -> https,
permanent) referenced via router.middlewares on each Ingress. Applied
directly via kubectl first to test - ArgoCD's selfHeal immediately
reverted it since it wasn't in git yet, confirming the fix needs to ship
through the normal pipeline rather than live kubectl edits on ArgoCD-
managed VPS resources.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
User correctly flagged this: manually copying secrets between home and
the VPS defeats the entire point of having Vault. Every VPS secret this
session (MinIO creds, Cloudflare token, CNPG certs, the pg-authentik-app
password) was a one-off kubectl create secret copy-paste, because the
VPS's k3s cluster had no Vault/ESO pipeline at all - this builds one.
- infrastructure/authentik/manifests/ha-postgres-app-pushsecret.yaml:
home pushes pg-authentik-app's password into Vault at
secret/vps/pg-authentik-app (PushSecret, not just Get - this password is
CNPG-generated, not Vault-native, so it has to originate from a push).
- infrastructure/vps-eso/manifests/clustersecretstore.yaml: ESO on the
VPS (installed via helm, out-of-band like k3s/cert-manager - see the
file's own header) authenticates to home's Vault via AppRole (not
Kubernetes auth - the VPS is a separate cluster with no federation to
home's API server). Reachable via a new public
https://vault.kube.huskypup.net record - Vault was deliberately kept
off the public internet before this, explicitly confirmed with the user
before opening it. Traffic goes through the same Istio ingress gateway
already serving other public hosts, so unlike the ha-authentik-postgres
NodePort case, no PeerAuthentication/AuthorizationPolicy change was
needed - it arrives as a normal in-mesh call from the gateway's own
identity, not raw external TCP to a pod.
Found and fixed a real Vault gotcha while wiring this up: tried to
remove the AppRole's token_bound_cidrs restriction (added first, before
discovering Vault can't see the VPS's real source IP through the
gateway - it only ever sees the gateway's own pod IP) by omitting the
field from a follow-up - that does NOT clear it, the
AppRole role endpoint preserves omitted fields rather than resetting
them to default. Had to explicitly write token_bound_cidrs=. Spent a
while chasing a misleading 403 permission denied on auth/token/
lookup-self before finding this - vault token capabilities said read
was allowed (policy was fine), the actual rejection was IP-bound token
use from an unbound context.
- infrastructure/vps-standby/authentik/manifests/
pg-authentik-app-externalsecret.yaml: pulls it back down, Merge policy
(only overwrites the password key - host/dbname/username stay local,
CNPG still needs its own local -rw hostname for internal use).
- argocd-apps/vps-standby/vps-eso.yaml: new Application for the
ClusterSecretStore.
Verified end-to-end: password now matches between home and VPS's
pg-authentik-app secrets via this pipeline (not the earlier manual patch),
confirmed by comparing both live secret values after ESO's sync.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Confirmed live against the vcluster.cnpg.io admission webhook: (1)
replica.enabled is mutually exclusive with primary/self - they're two
different mechanisms (old single-source replica-cluster mode vs the
newer distributed-topology model), not composable. (2) Both replica.self
and replica.primary must reference names present in THAT cluster's own
externalClusters list - including a self-referencing entry, even though
it describes the cluster itself. Renamed VPS's 'home-backup' external
cluster to 'home' throughout (bootstrap.recovery.source too) so one name
consistently satisfies barmanObjectStore, connectionParameters, and the
primary reference; added matching self-referencing entries on both
sides.
Adds connectionParameters (real streaming, not just barmanObjectStore
WAL-archive polling) to both sides' existing externalClusters entry, plus
replica.self/primary fields declaring the distributed topology (both
currently agree home is primary). Auth reuses CNPG's own auto-generated
streaming_replica client certs, cross-copied between clusters manually
(kubectl, not git - same pattern as every other cross-cluster secret
tonight) since they're the exact credential each side's pg_hba.conf
already trusts.
Also adds the VPS-side NodePort exposing its own pg-authentik primary
back to home (home->VPS already works via the existing netbird-egress
route, no UniFi port-forward needed for that direction - only the
reverse, VPS/witness reaching into home, needed the WAN workaround).
The DNS-flip watcher (scripts/vps-dns-failover/) was designed but never
actually installed on the VPS despite being tracked as done - real gap,
found when asked whether the standby services are actually reachable.
New design: instead of dynamically flipping *.kube.huskypup.net between
home and VPS IPs, give the VPS site its own permanent, always-resolving
subdomain - vault/gitea/auth/n8n/nextcloud.vps.huskypup.net, each with
real Ingress+TLS on the VPS's own Traefik+cert-manager (both already
installed by Phase 0 bootstrap, just never wired up). No token-scoping
decision needed since there's no dynamic flipping - reuses the same
cert-manager token pattern as home.
Also scales Authentik/n8n/Nextcloud from 0 to 1 replica on the VPS so
the replicated data is actually browsable at all times, not just
present-but-unreachable. Their CNPG clusters are still read-only
replicas (spec.replica.enabled: true) - writes will error until a
deliberate manual promotion, but reads/browsing work now. Vault and
Gitea were already running continuously.
Postgres refuses to replay WAL past a checkpoint recorded with higher
max_connections/max_wal_senders/etc than the recovering instance's own
settings: 'recovery aborted because of insufficient parameter settings:
max_connections = 100 is a lower setting than on the primary server,
where its value was 200' - confirmed live on all 3 VPS clusters (they
had no postgresql.parameters block at all, defaulting to CNPG's 100).
Copied home's full postgresql.parameters block to remove any other
potential mismatch (max_wal_senders, max_worker_processes are subject
to the same check). Bumped memory requests/limits to match home too -
shared_buffers: 512MB needs headroom the previous 256Mi/1Gi didn't have.
CNPG's barmanObjectStore.serverName defaults to the externalClusters[]
entry's own .name field ('home-backup', an arbitrary label I chose) -
NOT the actual source Postgres cluster's name. Home's backup: block
(on the real pg-authentik/pg-n8n/pg-nextcloud Clusters) defaults
serverName to its own metadata.name instead. Without an explicit
override these two disagree, so recovery searches the object store
under the wrong server-name prefix and finds nothing - 'no target
backup found', confirmed live even after the ScheduledBackup fix
produced real, completed base backups.
Without hook annotations they land in ArgoCD's regular Sync phase, which
runs AFTER PreSync hooks - so the presync Job's pod couldn't be created
('serviceaccount not found', confirmed live). Weight -1 vs the Job's 0
gets them created first, within the same PreSync phase.
CNPG operator on the VPS (argocd-apps/vps-standby/cnpg-operator.yaml),
plus a CNPG 'replica cluster' for pg-authentik (infrastructure/
vps-standby/authentik/manifests/cnpg-cluster.yaml) that continuously
replays WAL shipped from home's pg-authentik via VPS MinIO's
cnpg-backups/pg-authentik bucket path - CNPG's native replica-cluster
mode, not a custom restore script like Vault needed (Vault has no
equivalent built-in continuous-replication-into-object-store feature).
The Authentik app itself runs at replicas: 0 in normal operation - the
replica DB is read-only until a deliberate manual promotion
(spec.replica.enabled: false), and a pod trying to write against a
read-only DB would just crashloop uselessly. values.yaml's authentik:
block is copied byte-identical from home's on purpose: the chart
deterministically derives its generated Secret's AUTHENTIK_SECRET_KEY
from these literal values.yaml strings, so both clusters land on the
same key without manually copying it - required since that key decrypts
things stored encrypted in the replicated DB.
