CNPG's new externalClusters connectionParameters were configured correctly
but streaming replication was silently failing - pg_stat_wal_receiver on
the VPS replica showed 0 rows, logs repeated 'could not connect to the
primary server: ... server closed the connection unexpectedly' every few
minutes.
Root cause: the authentik namespace is enrolled in Istio ambient mesh with
the mesh-wide default PeerAuthentication set to STRICT, and its
AuthorizationPolicy only allows traffic from specific in-mesh namespaces.
Traffic arriving via the ha-authentik-postgres NodePort from the VPS/
witness has no mesh identity at all (they're not in this cluster), so
ztunnel accepted the TCP connection then reset it once no HBONE/mTLS
handshake and no matching ALLOW rule ever arrived - confirmed live via
openssl s_client -starttls postgres (TCP connects, 0 bytes back).
Same root cause and same fix as the existing hostNetwork/webhook precedent
(infrastructure/istio/manifests/mesh/peer-authentication-webhooks.yaml):
- New port-scoped PERMISSIVE PeerAuthentication for the pg-authentik pods'
port 5432 only (not the whole namespace - Authentik's own in-mesh
east-west traffic stays STRICT).
- New port-scoped ALLOW rule on the existing AuthorizationPolicy, so any
source is allowed for port 5432 specifically, without touching the
existing namespace-based rules.
Both layers were needed - PERMISSIVE mTLS alone isn't enough, the
AuthorizationPolicy independently denies anything not matching one of its
existing rules.
Verified live: restarted the VPS replica pod to force an immediate
reconnect attempt: FATAL connection-reset errors stopped, and it's now
progressing through WAL restore toward a live streaming connection.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
allow-netbird-operator-access (AuthorizationPolicy) and the netbird-operator
PeerAuthentication both targeted namespace 'netbird-operator', which has
never existed - the actual netbird-operator pod runs in the 'netbird'
namespace. This permanently blocked istio-mesh-config from going Synced
(kubectl apply failed: namespaces "netbird-operator" not found on every
sync attempt).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The netbird-operator webhook service runs in the netbird namespace and
receives admission webhook calls from kube-apiserver using node IPs
(172.28.101.0/24). Without this, ztunnel rejects the connections with
"allow policies exist, but none allowed".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
