Nothing reads table 48 yet. The mesh fills it so the routing rules land on a table that is already correct, and so a mistake here shows as an empty table rather than as broken pod traffic.
No address is written down twice. Each node publishes its pod0 addresses as Talos nodeAnnotations, beside the VLANConfig that assigns them; the init container reads the node list and renders from it. bird.conf holds no address at all, and the pod CIDRs are not restated either — the own-CIDR filter keys on the outgoing interface plus a maximum-length exclusion, which separates the node's pod route from cilium_host's own host address without naming a prefix.
Rendering is go-template-file, not string building: kubectl renders the two templates, a field selector drops the node itself server-side, and in-cluster config removes the token and CA plumbing. kubectl comes from the Alpine package, so there is no version literal to drift out of sync and no download to trust; it only ever reads core/v1 Nodes. jq and curl are gone.
The init container ends with bird -p, so BIRD's own parser gates startup: a node whose annotation is missing renders as <no value> and fails there rather than crashlooping the daemon or forming a mesh with a hole.
learn all rather than learn, since plain learn skips proto kernel. direct is explicit because iBGP defaults to multihop, which would make the gateway recursive. strict bind keeps the listener off mgmt0 and ingress0.
Verified against the live cluster with all three nodes annotated via --mode=try: the templates rendered the expected defines and four peer protocols, and bird -p parsed the result inside the image with exit 0 — which also confirms net.len and the include ordering. kubectl kustomize builds.
Refs #576
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-botandClaude Opus 5