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2 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Michal
86c2a36f00 feat(labsim): a real Kubernetes cluster for rehearsing Cilium <-> VyOS BGP
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BGP is about to be added to a network that currently works, where a bad
advertisement blackholes the house. That needs somewhere to fail first.

Three Debian nodes (4 GB / 2 vCPU) on the OVS `vlan2` access ports running k3s
with flannel disabled, so Cilium is the CNI under test. Three rather than two
because ECMP is only meaningfully tested if a node can be drained and more than
one path survives.

VMs rather than k3d: the thing under test is eBGP between Cilium and VyOS across
the switch fabric, nodes peering with the router's bond0.2 leg, directly
connected. k3d would put the nodes on a container bridge -- a different L2 path,
proving something else. (It also wants Docker; this host has podman.) The
existing micro VMs are Alpine with 256 MB and 1 vCPU, which is not close to
enough.

Debian rather than the sim's Alpine base: glibc, a stock kernel that Cilium's
eBPF probes are tested against, and cloud-init that actually applies
network-config -- the Alpine base notably does not.

One trap worth recording. An earlier draft called `selected_vlans "$K8S_VLAN"`
before `ovs_up`, and since `ovs_up` re-defines the libvirt network from
SELECTED, that silently deleted the portgroups for every other VLAN. Running
VMs kept working -- their taps were already attached -- so nothing complained
until the ISP VMs needed vlan51 and vlan53 and could not be attached. It now
selects every VLAN.

The generated kubeconfig is gitignored: it carries cluster-admin credentials and
is one `git add -A` away from being committed. Regenerate with
`k8s-up.sh --kubeconfig`.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DMVzWZgiKW2wquf5z8S1yH
2026-08-19 13:15:45 +01:00
Michal
c91e44f796 feat(labsim): libvirt replica of the lab network with LACP + VyOS routing
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A throwaway copy of the production VLAN topology so routing and firewall
changes can be tested before they touch the real network. Same VLAN IDs and
roles as UniFi, deliberately different ranges (172.31.<vlan>.0/24) so nothing
here can be mistaken for production.

- OVS fabric: real 802.1Q. Access port per micro VM, host leg per VLAN (.2,
  for SSH only — NOT the VMs' default route, so inter-VLAN tests exercise the
  router rather than the host's routing table), and a trunk portgroup with
  VLAN 1 declared nativeMode='untagged'.
- Six Alpine micro VMs (256MB, copy-on-write overlays on one 176MB image),
  SSH + a hello-world HTTP page naming the VLAN.
- VyOS router installed to disk unattended over the console, with the SAME
  config shape as the VP2440s: two NICs in an LACP bond carrying the trunk,
  VLAN 1 native, bond0.<vlan> holding the .1 gateway on each.
- labsim-matrix.py: full-mesh ICMP/TCP22/TCP80 probe, ~0.2s, --watch
  highlights cells that changed since the last sweep. Guest-side probe is
  python3 (already present via cloud-init) so nothing is installed on VMs
  that have no internet.
- Prometheus + Grafana (anonymous auth, no login) with a provisioned
  dashboard: heatmap plus a state timeline showing exactly when a path
  flipped. Verified end to end: one VyOS rule took sum(labsim_reachable)
  from 90 to 84, blocking precisely kvm<->k8s across all three protocols.

Traps found building this, all now encoded in the scripts:
- virtio-net breaks 802.3ad: the guest's bonding driver reports slaves
  "MII Status: down" despite carrier=1 and never sends an LACPDU, so the bond
  sits in AD_STATE_DEFAULTED. e1000e fixes it with no other change. Matches
  the netdev thread "bonding (IEEE 802.3ad) not working with qemu/virtio".
- OVS defaults bonds to active-backup, which does not speak LACP at all —
  bond_mode=balance-tcp is required.
- LACP deadlock: OVS holds members disabled until negotiation while the
  partner needs carrier before it will send LACPDUs. lacp-fallback-ab breaks it.
- LACPDUs are untagged, so a trunk with no native VLAN has nowhere to put them.
- --boot cdrom,hd re-runs the ISO on every restart, so every commit+save went
  to a live system that evaporated. Install now switches the VM to boot hd.
- cloud-init on Alpine: users stay locked without lock_passwd:false, one
  failing runcmd aborts the rest, busybox here has no httpd applet, and
  start-stop-daemon --exec /usr/bin/python3 matches cloud-init's own python3.
- The user-data heredoc is unquoted, so backticks in a COMMENT were executed
  by the host shell and their output corrupted the YAML. build_seed now
  validates with yaml.safe_load before building the ISO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DMVzWZgiKW2wquf5z8S1yH
2026-08-13 00:42:39 +01:00