lab/migration/PPPOE-HA.md

PPPoE high availability

Proven in labsim. Deployed to production 2026-09-06 — mechanism on both routers, pppoe0 disable removed from vyos002, vyos002 out of FAULT and in BACKUP, Pulumi model merged, and a controlled failover drill passed (takeover 52s, failback 36s). vyos:verify reports both routers in sync.

What it does

One consumer ISP account, two routers. The 10 gig lease is bound to a cloned MAC (f0:9f:c2:12:9b:4f, the retired USG's) and the Vodafone line to a single credential, so neither may be live on both boxes. The WAN follows VRRP mastership — but the two halves use different control planes, and that is the whole design:

	plane	why
bond0.53 (10 gig)	VyOS config (disable)	only config can move a MAC
pppoe0 (Vodafone)	systemd unit gate	see below

Why PPPoE cannot live on the config plane

interfaces_pppoe.py treats disable and delete identically: both unlink /etc/ppp/peers/pppoe0, call PPPoEIf.remove() (withdrawing the FRR default route) and stop the unit. That path is pppd's own options file (ExecStart=/usr/sbin/pppd call %I), so the resting state destroyed exactly what the promotion path needed. ppp@pppoe0 then restart-looped against the missing file — 47 restarts observed, zero sessions at the access concentrator — and never tripped systemd's limiter, because RestartSec=5s against the default 10s/5-burst window is only two restarts per interval.

It also made op-mode connect interface pppoe0 unusable (it refuses without the peers file), and put every failover behind a priority-322 commit where one unrelated invalid node fails the whole thing.

The gate

pppoe0 is configured identically and enabled on both routers, so the peers file always exists. Dialling is gated by /etc/systemd/system/ppp@pppoe0.service.d/10-vrrp-wan-gate.conf:

ConditionPathExists=/run/vrrp-wan/may-dial
ConditionPathExists=/etc/ppp/peers/pppoe0
StartLimitIntervalSec=600
StartLimitBurst=6

/run is tmpfs, so the gate is shut at boot and neither box can dial before VRRP has decided. This is load-bearing, not a nicety: with the node enabled, interfaces_pppoe.py restarts ppp on every commit touching the pppoe subtree when the daemon is not running — so the backup actively tries to dial whenever anything commits (pulumi up, a hand commit, the boot-time config load). The gate is the only thing making that a no-op, which is why vrrp-wan-reconcile refuses to bless a box whose drop-in is missing: /etc is per-image, so a VyOS upgrade silently removes the protection, and failing closed turns that into "PPPoE never dials" rather than "both routers dial".

may-dial is a lease, not a flag. ConditionPathExists is evaluated at start only — it can prevent a dial, never revoke one. vrrp-wan-reconcile renews it every 30s; vrrp-wan-guard runs every 5s and only ever revokes, on either "I do not hold the VIP" or "the lease is stale".

Measured in labsim

Clean failover (force-fault)	pppoe0 moves in 20-26s, reproducible
10 gig down → PPPoE	route falls to pppoe0; LAN back online in 5s
Stale lease	guard hangs up within ~5s
Missing peers file	NRestarts=0 — no loop
Flap holdoff vs live session	session survives a forged 900s holdoff
Invariant	never more than one router dialled, in any run

On the last row, precisely: the AC did report two simdsl sessions during the session-control=disable run — one live, one orphaned from the router that had just been destroyed, which that policy does not clean up. Only one live router was ever dialled. The count is a proxy for the real invariant and only a valid one while the AC enforces single-session, so it is reported as a WARN rather than silenced: an orphaned session still occupies the single slot at a real ISP, and that is exactly what made deny take 141–148s.

Two failure modes found by running it, not by reading it

The flap damper tore down a healthy WAN. ppp_dial() checked the hold-off and returned before renewing may-dial. That file is a lease the guard expires after LEASE_TTL, so tripping the damper stopped the renewal and the guard hung up pppoe0 on the master ~80s later:

DIAL FLAP: >=6 attempts in 600s -- holding off 900s
GUARD: lease stale (81s > 75s) -- hanging up pppoe0

A damper meant to suppress repeated dials was destroying an established session instead. An active session now renews the lease and returns before every other check; everything below only decides whether to start a new session. T12 is the regression test.

A missing peers file is silent. /etc/ppp/peers/pppoe0 is both pppd's options file and the gate's second condition, and it is only written by a commit that touches the pppoe subtree. Without it systemd logs skipped because of an unmet condition check exactly once and then nothing — a router that cannot dial at all looks identical to a healthy backup. ppp_dial() now says so on every tick, and distinguishes the two causes: configured-but-not-rendered (re-commit the subtree) versus no pppoe0 in the config at all.

The second cause is the one to watch in production: a commit that was never saved reverts on reboot and takes pppoe0 with it. That is exactly how the sim secondary lost its WAN and spent hours looking like an ISP problem. After any hand commit to the pppoe subtree, save — or the next reboot produces a standby that can never take over.

Deploying — steps 1–9 done 2026-09-06

1. sudo /config/vyos-known-good save on both.
2. migration/vrrp-wan-install --vip 192.168.1.1 --host vyos@10.0.1.253 then the same for .252. Then --check on both. No config change yet — verify nothing dials.
3. Confirm /config/wan-secrets is present and identical on both.
4. vyos002 first (the non-master), on its own commit — interfaces pppoe is priority 322 and one bad node fails everything: delete interfaces pppoe pppoe0 disable, commit-confirm 10.
5. Verify vyos002 did not dial — check on the wire, not from state: sudo tcpdump -i bond0.51 -nn pppoed should show no PADI. Then confirm; save.
6. vyos001: nothing to change; it already has pppoe0 enabled.
7. Confirm vif 53 disable is in both config.boots. vyos001's lacked it; fixed with migration/vif53-pin-boot-disable — see below.
8. Done 2026-09-06 (kubernetes-deployment@45033dd, on main). Both overrides merged, transition-scripts applied to both boxes by hand rather than left as drift, and vyos:verify is clean: 533 / 512 nodes, zero drift. The staging file migration/pulumi-override-pppoe-gated.json is kept as the record of why the ordering mattered. It was staged, unapplied, on purpose: another agent runs pulumi up on that repo, so merging it is a production change made by someone else at a time you do not choose. Removing pppoe0 disable from vyos002 before the gate exists there lets it dial on the next commit and take the single Vodafone session off vyos001. Run npm run vyos:export && npm run vyos:render first so the model follows whichever router actually holds the WAN.
9. Add the drop-in re-install to the VyOS image-upgrade runbook. Done — migration/VYOS-IMAGE-UPGRADE.md. An upgrade replaces /etc and so removes the gate; the reconciler fails closed, giving "PPPoE never dials" rather than "both routers dial".

Step 4 is the one that matters most and is worth stopping on. vyos002 has been in FAULT on all six groups for over three days — verified again while writing this, alongside vyos001 holding 192.168.1.1 on bond0.1 and pppoe0 up on 83.106.5.72. Until vyos002 reaches BACKUP there is no standby at all: if vyos001 died today nothing would pick up the gateway VIPs. The existing vrrp-health-check-wan-present override predicted exactly this in its own reason text — "with the primary genuinely dead the secondary stays FAULT and nothing holds the gateway. The fix for that is WAN-follows-master, which is a separate change." This is that change.

Proven in production — controlled drill, 2026-09-06

migration/wan-drill force-faulted vyos001 and timed a real failover:

TAKEOVER OK: vyos002 held the VIP and reached the internet in 52s
FAILBACK OK: 36s

vyos002 took the VIPs at t+18s and had both WANs by t+52s. Failback put vyos001 back with a WAN in 36s. Total interruption ≈ 88s across two deliberate transitions.

The cloned-MAC lease transfers. This was the largest untested item in the whole design — whether the 10 gig ISP would re-issue 87.192.101.48 to f0:9f:c2:12:9b:4f arriving on a different switch port. It did, same address, within the takeover window. That risk is now closed.

Vodafone did not refuse the re-dial, so its session-control behaves like replace rather than the hostile deny. GRACE=300 was sized against the sim's 148s deny case and is therefore comfortable — but it should stay where it is, because one drill on one evening does not establish the ISP's policy under all conditions.

Vodafone hands out a different IPv4 on every dial: 83.106.5.72 → 90.251.153.180 (vyos002) → 90.251.142.103 (vyos001, after failback). Nothing may be pinned to the PPPoE address. Checked: the HE IPv6 tunnel is pinned to 87.192.101.48, which is the 10 gig (bond0.53) and stable across failover, so tun0 survived untouched and IPv6 stayed up at 15.5ms. Anything added later that hardcodes a WAN IP must use the 10 gig one, not pppoe0's.

Production takeover (52s) is about twice the sim's replace figure (26s), which is the expected direction: the VP2440s commit under kea, BGP and conntrack while the sim routers are idle.

config.boot pins vif 53 disable on both — fixed 2026-09-06

The convention is that both config.boots hold vif 53 disable, so a reboot in any order comes up unable to claim the cloned MAC and the reconciler enables it on whichever box holds the VIP. vyos001's did not; its config.boot predated this work.

There is no clean way to express "boot disabled, run enabled" in VyOS: save writes the RUNNING config, not the candidate. Setting the node, saving and discarding was tested in labsim and config.boot came back without disable, the WAN untouched. So the node must genuinely be disabled, saved, and re-enabled. migration/vif53-pin-boot-disable does exactly that, is idempotent, and no-ops on a box that already has it.

Cost, measured on vyos001: a 32s window (10s in the sim — production commits under kea/BGP/conntrack are slower), bond0.53 re-leased 87.192.101.48 5s after re-enable, and vyos-failover restored the primary route about a minute later:

09:32:23  ip route del 0.0.0.0/0 ... dev bond0.53
09:32:32  Check fail for route 0.0.0.0/0 interface "bond0.53"
09:33:23  ip route add 0.0.0.0/0 via 87.192.96.1 dev bond0.53 metric 1 proto failover

The house rode pppoe0 for that minute rather than losing the internet, which is the T5 path working. Note the shape of that recovery before reading a fresh ip route show as a regression: for ~60s after the bounce the default really is on pppoe0, because vyos-failover only re-adds the bond0.53 route once its probes pass again.

A race worth knowing about. The first sim run collided with vrrp-wan-reconcile's own commit — "Configuration system temporarily locked due to another commit in progress" — and the save landed while the re-enable did not, leaving the master with its 10 gig down. The script now takes the reconciler's /run/vrrp-wan.lock (which the reconciler skips a tick rather than block on), with 9>&- so the config session's unionfs child cannot inherit it. Even the bad run ended correctly — the reconciler logged "MASTER with bond0.53 disabled -> enabling" and repaired it in 4s — so a half-completed run is survivable by design. The script no longer leans on that, and verifies the re-enable rather than reporting a success it did not achieve.

Rollback, from either box: set interfaces pppoe pppoe0 disable on both and rm /run/vrrp-wan/may-dial. That restores today's behaviour exactly.

What the sim cannot prove

• Vodafone's session-control. The matrix now brackets it properly. Destroying the master and timing the survivor's session:

  policy	takeover
  replace (accel-ppp default)	26s / 26s
  deny (hostile)	148s / 141s
  disable	21s / 20s

  deny is the sizing case: the AC refuses the survivor until its own dead-peer timer frees the dead session, and the poller caught two dial attempts being rejected before one succeeded. GRACE is set from that — see migration/vrrp-wan.conf. This still cannot tell you which policy Vodafone runs, and account rate-limiting or lockout on repeated dials has no sim analogue at all; the flap damper (6 dials / 600s → 15 min hold-off) exists for that.

  Treat the 148s as a floor rather than a worst case. These are idle 2-vCPU VMs, and the AC shares an OVS bridge with the routers, so virsh destroy removes the port and accel-ppp sees the peer physically vanish. A real BRAS reached over DSL does not learn that our router died — it waits out its own timers, which are longer and not ours to know.

  Worth knowing how close this came to being missed: until 2026-09-06 the matrix set the policy with vbash -c 'source script-template; configure; ...; commit', which never starts a config session. commit failed to stderr, the helper discarded it, and all three iterations ran against the default while printing the mode they were supposedly testing. It reported deny at 25s. The real figure is 148s.

• Whether Vodafone honours our LCP Terminate / PADT on a graceful stop.

• The cloned-MAC lease. Answered 2026-09-06: the drill moved it and the ISP re-issued 87.192.101.48 to f0:9f:c2:12:9b:4f on vyos002's port within the takeover window. See "Proven in production" above.

• Whether VyOS can dial Vodafone at all. Answered 2026-09-06: both routers dialled successfully during the drill. MTU/MSS under sustained load is still unmeasured, and Vodafone hands out a different IPv4 every dial.

• Timing under load. The sim routers are idle 2-vCPU VMs; commit latency on the VP2440s under kea + BGP + conntrack will be worse, and commit latency is the dominant term in the bond0.53 half of a failover.

How the model handles the asymmetry — resolved

An earlier draft of this file said an override "must assert vif 53 disable on both routers". That advice was wrong and has been removed; do not reintroduce it. vif 53 disable is runtime state owned by vrrp-wan-reconcile, keyed on who holds the management VIP, so pinning it in the model would fight the reconciler on every apply and would briefly disable the live master's 10 gig each time.

What is actually done, and why it is safe:

• Runtime (Pulumi): follow reality. Run npm run vyos:export && npm run vyos:render immediately before any pulumi up touching vyos. Whichever router currently holds the WAN keeps it; the apply is a no-op on that node. There is deliberately no override for vif 53 disable.
• Boot (config.boot): hardcode safe. Both routers pin vif 53 disable, so a reboot in any order comes up unable to claim the cloned MAC and the reconciler enables it on whoever holds the VIP. See the section above.
• Install time (PXE, nothing to follow). migration/vyos-mode-delta.py emits vif 53 disable for a box with no WAN, and deliberately does not emit pppoe pppoe0 disable.

Verified 2026-09-06: vyos:verify reports both routers in sync, 533 and 512 nodes, zero drift.