fix(crowdsec): poll the Traefik logs instead of watching them with inotify

Both agents stopped reading on 2026-08-27 and had read nothing since:
k8s-1 at 12:15:41Z, k8s-2 at 19:14:27Z, each frozen at its line count
(35449 and 29917) while Traefik kept logging normally.

Each had hit its first kubelet log rotation after starting. The paths
under /var/log/containers are symlinks into /var/log/pods, and kubelet
rotates the target at containerLogMaxSize; the inotify tailer reopens
the path, waits for a file that is already present, and never returns.
Nothing about the result looks broken: pods Running and Ready, LAPI
answering, bouncers pulling, cumulative counters still showing large
numbers. The only symptom is that no scenario fires again, which reads
as quiet rather than blind.

So this was not a one-off. Rotation happens roughly every eight hours
here, and the agents die on the first one after every start, which
bounds local detection to a few hours at a time.

CrowdSec diagnoses this itself and names the fix, at agent startup:

  File /var/log/containers/traefik-...log is a symlink, but inotify
  polling is enabled. Crowdsec will not be able to detect rotation.
  Consider setting poll_without_inotify to true in your configuration

Upstream carries the identical case as crowdsec#2449 (k3s + Traefik),
and the chart gained this field in helm-charts#109 to fix it. It does
not conflict with the force_inotify: true the chart hardcodes: that
governs the fsnotify watch on the directory, used to discover the log
of a replacement Traefik pod, while this governs how an already
discovered file is read. Verified by rendering the chart.

The acquisition ConfigMap is checksummed into the agent pod template,
so this rolls the DaemonSet and the stalled agents restart with it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

.woodpecker/deploy-netbird-proxy.yml

@@ -10,6 +10,18 @@ when:
       # install-netbird-proxy.yml also applies the edge bouncer.
       - "ansible/roles/crowdsec-edge-bouncer/**"
       - "ansible/plays/install-netbird-proxy.yml"
+      # The variables that steer those roles, not just the roles themselves.
+      # Without these two, a change that only touches inventory never deploys
+      # and nothing says so: arming the bouncer lives in host_vars, and its
+      # LAPI key lives in group_vars, so both would sit in git looking applied
+      # while the hosts kept running the previous configuration.
+      #
+      # pve_hosts.yml is deliberately NOT listed. It is the single inventory
+      # file for the whole fleet, so listing it would redeploy the proxies for
+      # any unrelated host edit. The cost is that a change to [netbird_proxy]
+      # group membership needs a manual deployment run.
+      - "ansible/inventory/host_vars/proxy-*.yml"
+      - "ansible/inventory/group_vars/netbird_proxy/**"
       - ".woodpecker/deploy-netbird-proxy.yml"
   - event: deployment
     evaluate: 'CI_PIPELINE_DEPLOY_TARGET == "deploy-netbird-proxy"'

ansible/roles/crowdsec-edge-bouncer/defaults/main.yml

@@ -28,14 +28,23 @@ crowdsec_bouncer_sha256: f86e4b72693549d99f40a9402abefb894108f047a3fbe6e72fada25
 crowdsec_bouncer_api_url: https://crowdsec.renner.uno/
 crowdsec_bouncer_api_key: "{{ vault_crowdsec_edge_bouncer_key }}"
 
-# STARTS INERT, and that is the point.
+# Enforcing. The bouncer creates two nftables tables (ip crowdsec, ip6
+# crowdsec6) holding the decisions it pulled, touches no existing chain and
+# sets no chain policy — SSH and :443 stay open unless the source is banned.
 #
-# dry-run pulls decisions and logs what it would block without creating a
-# single nftables rule. The first bouncer to arm anywhere enforces ~24k CAPI
-# decisions at once on the only external entry path, so the false-positive
-# window has to come before the enforcement, not after it. Flip to `nftables`
-# one host at a time once the log looks right.
-crowdsec_bouncer_mode: dry-run
+# `dry-run` is the other value: it pulls and logs what it would block without
+# creating a single rule. That is what a new host should be given before it
+# enforces, and what an existing one can be dropped back to, per host through
+# inventory/host_vars, without disarming the rest.
+#
+# Worth knowing before arming anything new: the first bouncer on a path
+# enforces the whole CAPI set at once — around 15k addresses today — so the
+# false-positive window belongs before the switch, not after it. And because
+# this chain sits on the INPUT hook while these hosts run no other firewall,
+# there is no conntrack rule accepting established flows ahead of it: a banned
+# address is dropped even when it is answering our own outbound connection.
+# That is why capi_whitelists.yaml carries the proxies and netbird.renner.uno.
+crowdsec_bouncer_mode: nftables
 
 crowdsec_bouncer_update_frequency: 10s
 crowdsec_bouncer_log_level: info

kubernetes/apps/home-assistant/deployment.yaml

@@ -95,7 +95,7 @@ spec:
               memory: 32Mi
       containers:
         - name: home-assistant
-          image: ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:2026.8.3 # {"$imagepolicy": "flux-system:home-assistant"}
+          image: ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:2026.9.0 # {"$imagepolicy": "flux-system:home-assistant"}
           env:
             - name: TZ
               value: Europe/Berlin

kubernetes/apps/llama-server/deployment.yaml

@@ -75,31 +75,44 @@ spec:
             # many small per-expert matmuls that sets the pace, not bandwidth.
             - --threads
             - "4"
-            # 32k because Home Assistant's Assist agent measured 18910 tokens
-            # for a single request: ~12k of exposed-entity overview plus ~7k of
-            # base instructions and tool schemas, whose parameters enumerate
-            # every exposed name, area and floor. At 16384 the request was
-            # refused outright.
+            # 16k, and going above it corrupts inference rather than failing.
+            # At 32768 per slot this server answered a 650-token classification
+            # prompt with 1025 tokens of "!" — the KV cache producing numbers
+            # rather than language. It does not crash, it does not warn, and
+            # the OpenAI response looks well-formed, so the damage only shows
+            # in what callers get back: Paperless ran past its 300 s timeout,
+            # and Home Assistant got an empty completion and a hallucinated
+            # device list.
             #
-            # --ctx-size is the total and llama.cpp divides it across the
-            # slots, so 65536 over two slots is 32768 each.
+            # The same Vulkan/Mesa stack already fails hard at --ubatch-size
+            # 2048; this is the quiet version of that limit. Raise this only
+            # against a generation that is read, not against a server that
+            # merely starts.
             #
-            # It does not read that way without --parallel, and the reason is
-            # in `llama-server --help`: --kv-unified defaults to enabled only
-            # "if number of slots is auto". Leaving --parallel unset therefore
-            # bought a single KV buffer shared across sequences, where every
-            # slot could draw the full --ctx-size — which is why this server
-            # once reported n_ctx_slot 16384 across four slots. Naming a slot
-            # count turns that off and splits the context instead.
-            #
-            # Two slots is what is actually in use: one holds Home Assistant's
-            # prompt, one holds Paperless's. A third caller would queue rather
-            # than evict either, which is the better failure mode given a cold
-            # prefill of this prompt costs around two minutes.
             - --ctx-size
-            - "65536"
+            - "16384"
+            # One slot, so the 16384 belongs to one request at a time.
+            #
+            # Left on auto, llama.cpp opens four slots and — because auto is
+            # also what enables --kv-unified — has them share a single buffer
+            # of this size. Four Paperless requests at once wanted 6209, 6472,
+            # 4303 and 1271 tokens against those 16384, and all four died with
+            # "Context size has been exceeded".
+            #
+            # They were concurrent because a client timeout does not stop the
+            # generation behind it: each abandoned request keeps consuming the
+            # shared budget the next one needs, so one slow document is enough
+            # to start the pile-up. Queueing is the behaviour worth having
+            # here — nothing calls this server in parallel on purpose, and
+            # Paperless's celery worker runs at concurrency 1.
+            #
+            # No liveness probe change goes with this. The server recovered on
+            # its own once the batch drained, so a probe that restarted the pod
+            # would have made the incident worse; with a single slot, one that
+            # asked for a real completion would also queue behind live work and
+            # kill healthy pods during a long document.
             - --parallel
-            - "2"
+            - "1"
             # A micro-batch of 2048 or more makes this Vulkan/Mesa stack fail
             # with ErrorDeviceLost.
             - --ubatch-size

kubernetes/infrastructure/crowdsec/helmrelease.yaml

@@ -65,6 +65,21 @@ spec:
           - 45.157.177.26/32
           - 2a03:4000:4b:c1e:4474:43ff:fedf:8f85/128
           - 2a03:4000:28:f6e:a4c7:59ff:fe1e:9a29/128
+          # netbird.renner.uno — management, signal, relay and TURN.
+          #
+          # Not optional once a bouncer is armed. Its chain sits on the INPUT
+          # hook, the proxy hosts run no other firewall, and there is therefore
+          # no conntrack rule accepting established flows ahead of it. A ban on
+          # this address would drop the RETURN traffic of the proxies' own
+          # outbound control connection and take them off the mesh — with no
+          # inbound attack involved at all.
+          #
+          # Checked when this was added: none of these addresses appear in the
+          # current decision set. That is the state today, not a guarantee —
+          # these are rented addresses on a hoster whose ranges do end up on
+          # community blocklists.
+          - 162.55.50.97/32
+          - 2a01:4f8:c2c:4579::1/128
 
     # mTLS between agents and the LAPI. Do not switch back to password auth:
     # the LAPI runs without persistence, so its machine-registration DB is
@@ -202,6 +217,32 @@ spec:
         - namespace: ingress
           podName: traefik-*
           program: traefik
+          # Read by polling, not inotify. Every path under
+          # /var/log/containers is a symlink into /var/log/pods, and kubelet
+          # rotates the target once it reaches containerLogMaxSize (10Mi,
+          # roughly every eight hours for Traefik here). An inotify tailer
+          # does not survive that rotation: it reopens the path, waits for a
+          # file that is in fact already present, and never reads another
+          # line. Nothing about that state looks broken from outside — the
+          # pod stays Running and Ready, the LAPI keeps answering, and the
+          # cumulative counters keep displaying whatever they reached, so the
+          # only symptom is that no scenario ever fires again.
+          #
+          # CrowdSec detects the hazard itself and logs it at startup, with
+          # this exact remedy in the message: "is a symlink, but inotify
+          # polling is enabled. Crowdsec will not be able to detect rotation.
+          # Consider setting poll_without_inotify to true". Upstream carries
+          # the same case as crowdsec#2449 (k3s + Traefik), and the chart
+          # gained this field in helm-charts#109 specifically to fix it.
+          #
+          # Orthogonal to the force_inotify: true that the chart hardcodes
+          # into acquis.yaml and offers no way to unset. That one governs the
+          # fsnotify watch on the directory, i.e. discovering the log of a
+          # replacement Traefik pod; this one governs how an already
+          # discovered file is read. Both true is the supported combination.
+          #
+          # Costs CPU per open file per upstream docs — two files per node.
+          poll_without_inotify: true
       env:
         - name: COLLECTIONS
           value: "crowdsecurity/traefik crowdsecurity/http-cve crowdsecurity/appsec-virtual-patching crowdsecurity/appsec-generic-rules"