A dual-stack ingress rollout lands and later HTTP01 certificate issuance breaks intermittently for one hostname set.
A cert-manager HTTP01 solver pod comes up and challenges still fail
The solver is healthy, yet issuance fails because address-family preference changed at the edge and the CA reaches a different path than operators test.
Scenario
What to check first
- Identify the primary failure signal in the The Solver Was Ready and the Internet Arrived on the Wrong Address Family scenario.
- Separate visible symptoms from the underlying technical dependency.
- Describe the safest recovery path and the follow-up prevention work.
Checking checklist
- Summarize the current impact and the last known change.
- Collect direct evidence from logs, runtime state, and configuration before changing anything.
- Separate immediate recovery from permanent prevention work.
Recovery and prevention
Inspect actual published family preference and CA reachability before editing issuers or restarting ingress.
Questions worth viewing together
Community-field Kubernetes problem inspired by cert-manager and ingress community cases where dual-stack exposure changed the challenge path. Challenge traffic may reach a different address family than the one operators validate locally.
Teams often blame DNS propagation when the published address-family preference is the real mismatch.
Dual-stack ingress rollouts should explicitly validate ACME challenge behavior across both address families.
Similar cases seen in the field