In previous posts, I leveraged the MACvlan CNI to provide the networking to forward packets between containers and the rest of my network, however I ran into several issues rooted from the fact that MACvlan traffic bypasses several parts of the host’s IP stack including conntrack and IPTables. This conflicted with how Kubernetes expects to handle routing and meant we had to bypass and modify IPTables chains to get it to work.

In the previous post (DHCP IPAM), we successfully got our containers running with macvlan + DHCP. I additionally installed MetalLB and everything seemingly worked, however when I tried to retroactively add this to my existing Kubernetes home lab cluster already running Calico, I was not able to access the Metallb service. All connections were timing out.

A quick Wireshark packet capture of the situation exposed this problem:

In the previous post, we end up abusing subnets and routing to get Calico to exist on the correct subnet, but what if we could get rid of Calico’s duplicate IPAM system and just depend on our existing DHCP server to handle reservations? In this post, we’re going to prototype a cluster that uses DHCP + layer 2 Linux bridging to avoid the complications outlined in Part 3.

The official CNI documentation describes two plugins that could be relevant.

The Problem

In my previous post series, I described how I installed my Kubernetes Home Lab using Calico and MetalLB. This worked great up until I started installing smart home software that expected to be able to do local network discovery. For example, Home Assistant and my Sonos control software both attempted to do subnet local discovery using mDNS or broadcast packets. This did not work because the pods were running on a 192.168.4.0/24 subnet, but all of my physical devices were on 192.168.2.0/24.

Next up in the series, we’re going to manually configure all of the network settings to get our flat network home lab. Our flat network should not use any packet encapsulation with all pods and services fully routable to and from the existing network.

Detailed in the previous post, I want a so-called flat network because packet encapsulation tunnels IP packets inside of other IP packets and creates a separate IP network that runs on-top of my existing network.) I wanted all nodes, pods, and services to be fully routable on my home network. Additionally, I had several Sonos speakers and other smart-home devices that I wanted to be control from my k8s cluster which required pods that ran on the same subnet as my other software.