poimen-memory could not reach any inference pod. The egress side was
already correct: NetworkPolicy poimen/poimen-memory-llm-egress permits
port 8080 to the pods labelled llm-reasoning, llm-embeddings and
llm-reranker. This policy had no matching ingress rule, so Cilium
allowed the packet out and dropped it at the destination.
The observable was a bare timeout. The request never reached vLLM, so
the predictor log stayed empty, and /health still answered because a
probe from inside the pod does not cross the policy. That made the
failure look like a hung inference engine.
Evidence, measured on 2026-10-31 against the running predictors:
1. A probe pod in llm-serving WITH label part-of=llm-serving:
/v1/chat/completions -> 200 in 3.1s, 8 completion tokens.
2. The same probe pod WITHOUT that label: 8s timeout, all services.
3. From inside poimen-memory-bfc8k: embeddings /health -> 12s
timeout; 10.96.0.1:443 -> 8s timeout. Same-namespace traffic
still worked, which limits the fault to this policy.
4. memory logged "readiness: embedder probe timed out
elapsed_ms=10000" every 60s.
All five services already serve inference correctly. They are
reasoning (3.1s), reasoning-short (2.5s), embeddings (0.5s, real
768-dim vector), reranker (0.09s, 0.982 vs 0.00004) and qwen-cpu
(4.1s, qwen2.5:3b-instruct).
This adds the missing ingress rule. It mirrors the existing paperless
rule, which bypasses the gateway for the same reason: poimen-memory
has no service-account JWT yet.
Refs: #TBD
- Add paperless namespace to llm-serving NetworkPolicy ingress
- Point paperless-ai CUSTOM_BASE_URL to reasoning-predictor directly
- Gateway JWT auth not yet available for service accounts
- paperless-ai-agent has llm:inference role in Authentik
## Summary
Replaces hand-applied `llm-serving-default-deny` NetworkPolicy with a git-managed, namespace-scoped policy that only allows traffic from the api-gateway.
**Issue:** #13
Co-authored-by: rock <[email protected]>
rock