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Network ingress traffic from 192.168.0.0/16 always SNAT'd in Kubernetes clusters with canal network provider

Article Number: 000020231

Environment

An RKE or RKE2 cluster, using the canal network provider

Situation

Network ingress traffic to a Kubernetes cluster with the canal network provider, from IP addresses in the range 192.168.0.0/16, is always SNAT'd, even in instances where this is not desired.

For example on NodePort services configured with externalTrafficPolicy: Local the source IP should be preserved without SNAT, per the Kubernetes documentation. With this issue the source IP is SNAT'd even in instances of NodePort services configured with externalTrafficPolicy: Local.

Cause

When a cluster is provisioned with the canal network provider selected, Flannel is used for networking and Calico for network policy enforcement. IP address management is therefore managed by Flannel.

The calico-node container in the canal pod is still configured with an (un-used) IP pool, which defaults to 192.168.0.0/16. By default Calico programs iptables rules in the cali-nat-outgoing chain of the nat table on cluster nodes to perform SNAT on traffic from this IP pool. The purpose of these rules is to masquerade egress traffic from pods where Calico is used for networking (and not just network policy). As a result in a canal network provider cluster, where the calico-node container is present for network policy enforcement, these rules are programmed and any ingress traffic from the range 192.168.0.0/16 will match and be SNAT'd.

Resolution

A permanent solution to prevent programming of the problematic cali-nat-outgoing iptables rules and is tracked in Rancher Issue #20500.

In order to workaround the issue in existing clusters, the Calico ippool configuration can be edited to disable outgoing nat, which removes programming of the cali-nat-outgoing iptables rules. To implement this workaround run kubectl against the affected to edit the default-ipv4-ippool object: kubectl edit ippools default-ipv4-ippool. Edit the line natOutgoing: true to set natOutgoing: false and save the change. Calico will detect the configuration update and remove the cali-nat-outgoing iptables rules.