Does SSL termination at the Load Balancer affect SNI validation for Rancher nodes?
0 reputation · 29 Jan 2025, 00:49 UTC
Rancher manages the trust chain between the management server and downstream clusters using a built-in CA or a provided Private CA. When provisioning nodes, the cattle-cluster-agent must validate the Rancher Server URL to establish a secure connection.
There is uncertainty regarding the behavior of various cloud provider Load Balancers when configured for SSL termination versus SSL pass-through. Specifically, if the Load Balancer terminates the TLS connection and forwards traffic to the Rancher manager via HTTP or a separate TLS session, it may alter the Server Name Indication (SNI) seen by the agent.
Which configuration is required to ensure that the downstream agent correctly validates the server certificate when a Load Balancer is intercepting the traffic? Does SSL termination introduce a trust mismatch that requires manual certificate injection on the worker nodes?