The talos-image-cache serve container ran `busybox httpd`, but the pinned alpine/k8s image ships no `httpd` applet and no standalone httpd, so the container exited 127 and crash-looped and the Deployment never became Available. The resolver then burned its full 12-minute rollout wait before falling back to the public factory — a fixed latency tax on the first kubernetes-* test while the flake the mirror targets stayed live.
Serve the seeded image with a small range-capable server on the image's bundled python3 instead (stock `python3 -m http.server` ignores Range headers and answers 200, not 206). It needs no extra package pull, so the mirror comes up deterministically and keeps CDI's fast range import. The seed curl now also aborts and retries a stalled transfer (--speed-time/--speed-limit), and the resolver verifies a 206 range response before pointing tenants at the mirror.
Assisted-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Aleksei Sviridkin <f@lex.la>
Aleksei Sviridkin
336f873b07