Fedora+podman desktop+podman+kind+contour -- Networking breaks in local kind cluster when contour is installed

[sadawson]

I appreciate this probably is not a Podman Desktop issue but hopefully there is some other podman desktop user here who can give me some tips.

I'm trying to learn more about kubernetes and wanted to have a place to use it locally. I found podamn desktop in the Fedora software center, installed the flatpak, insatlled the kind extension and tried to create a cluster with the contour ingress contoller. When I create the cluster and select to have an ingress controller created the networking in the cluster stops working.

Steps to replicate the issue I have are pretty simple.
(1) Install Fedora Workstation
(2) Install podman desktop from the software center
(3) Add the kind extension.
(4) Create a kind kubernetes cluster with the option to add an ingress controller checked.

This is what I see inside the logs from contour pod:

contour | time="2026-03-27T09:13:08Z" level=info msg="maxprocs: Leaving GOMAXPROCS=16: CPU quota undefined"
time="2026-03-27T09:13:08Z" level=info msg="args: [serve --incluster --xds-address=0.0.0.0 --xds-port=8001 --contour-cafile=/certs/ca.crt --contour-cert-file=/certs/tls.crt --contour-key-file=/certs/tls.key --config-path=/config/contour.yaml]"
contour | time="2026-03-27T09:13:08Z" level=fatal msg="unable to initialize Server dependencies required to start Contour" error="unable to set up controller manager: failed to determine if *v1.Secret is namespaced: failed to get restmapping: failed to get server groups: Get \"[https://10.96.0.1:443/api](https://10.96.0.1/api)\": dial tcp 10.96.0.1:443: connect: connection refused"

If I don't include the contour ingress then the networking works fine:

$ kubectl run -it before-contour --image=fedora --restart=Never --command -- curl -k https://10.96.0.1/
{
  "kind": "Status",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "metadata": {},
  "status": "Failure",
  "message": "forbidden: User \"system:anonymous\" cannot get path \"/\"",
  "reason": "Forbidden",
  "details": {},
  "code": 403
}

As soon as I apply the contour yaml to setup the ingress contoller the networking stops working:

$ kubectl run -it after-contour --image=fedora --restart=Never --command -- curl -k https://10.96.0.1/
curl: (7) Failed to connect to 10.96.0.1 port 443 after 0 ms: Could not connect to server
pod default/after-contour terminated (Error)

I asked in the contour slack since the problem started only after installing the contour software. I thought it might be something they could help with. https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C8XRH2R4J/p1774603745513609
Another contour users pointed out the setup of podman+kind+contour was working on their Ubuntu system.

Appreciate there is a lot of software in the mix here. Fedora, Podman Desktop, Podman, kind, contour. I really am stuck with where to report this and try get help. Any one have any tips?

[sadawson]

I have managed to get this working. I had overlooked this documentation. https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/rootless/
I needed to load a few kernel modules to get this working. Once I had the required kernel modules loaded it worked.