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Talos Linux is API-centric, so it is critial to establish network connectivity to be able to manage and operate Talos nodes. Some network configuration is required to establish basic connectivity, while more advanced configuration can be applied to optimize networking for specific use-cases. There are a few key concepts to understand when configuring networking with Talos Linux:
  • Interfaces (Links): Talos allows configuring multiple network interfaces per node. Each interface can be configured with static IPs, DHCP, or other methods.
  • Addresses: IP addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6) can be assigned to interfaces. Talos supports both static and dynamic addressing.
  • Routes: Custom routes can be defined to control traffic flow within the cluster and to external networks.
  • DNS: Talos supports configuring DNS servers and search domains to ensure proper name resolution.
  • NTP: Talos allows configuring NTP servers to ensure accurate time synchronization across nodes.
  • Advanced Networking: Talos supports advanced networking features such as Wireguard for secure VPN connections, and SideroLink for out-of-band management.
  • Bridging and Bonding: Talos supports network bridging and bonding for high availability and load balancing.
There are cases when there is no need to configure networking at all:
  • By default, if no network configuration is provided, Talos will attempt to use DHCP on the primary interface to obtain an IP address and other network settings. This is often sufficient for basic connectivity in many environments.
  • In cloud environments, Talos can leverage cloud-init or similar mechanisms to automatically configure networking based on the cloud provider’s metadata service.
The hardest network configuration scenario involves setting up a Talos machine in an isolated environment without DHCP or any external network services which requires fully manual configuration of interfaces, addresses, routes, DNS, and NTP. In this case, a configuration source which doesn’t rely on network connectivity is required, such as an embedded configuration, or cloud-init user-data bundled with the Talos image. Talos Linux supports network configuration coming from multiple sources, and it is recommended to use the machine configuration as the primary source of truth for networking settings. But other configuration sources can be used to override or supplement the machine configuration as needed: kernel arguments, cloud-specific data sources, dashboard metal network settings, etc.
Note: Default Talos Linux behavior to run DHCP on any physical link is disabled automatically when any link is configured explicitly in the machine configuration. In order to keep DHCP running, it must be explicitly enabled on the desired link(s).