Skip to content

GRPCRoute example missing management.ProxyService rule, breaks reverse-proxy support #108

Description

@christianhuth

What's missing

charts/netbird/values.yaml documents the example for server.grpcRoute.rules as:

# - matches:
#     - method: { service: signalexchange.SignalExchange }
#     - method: { service: management.ManagementService }

and the accompanying comment describes the route as being "for gRPC routes (signal + management)".

This is missing a third gRPC service, management.ProxyService, which is required specifically for connecting a self-hosted NetBird reverse proxy to this management server. Following the documented example as-is (as I did) results in a GRPCRoute that works fine for regular NetBird clients but breaks the reverse proxy.

Symptom

With only the two documented rules in place, the reverse proxy's pod never becomes Ready, and its logs repeat:

management connection failed, retrying in ...: mapping stream: receive msg: rpc error: code = Unimplemented desc =

That empty-description Unimplemented is the Gateway controller (Envoy, in my case Cilium's Gateway implementation) rejecting a gRPC method it has no route for - the management server itself does implement management.ProxyService (verified via the netbird-management binary), it's just unreachable through a GRPCRoute that wasn't written with it in mind.

Fix

Adding a third rule for management.ProxyService, routed to the same backend, resolves it immediately:

server:
  grpcRoute:
    enabled: true
    rules:
      - matches:
          - method: { service: signalexchange.SignalExchange }
      - matches:
          - method: { service: management.ManagementService }
      - matches:
          - method: { service: management.ProxyService }

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Fields

    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions